The Preservationists Saving Asheville's Arts-and-Crafts Legacy
The mountain city holds one of the country's finest collections of early-twentieth-century architecture. A movement is fighting to keep it intact.
Asheville's architectural riches are easy to take for granted, which is exactly what worries the people trying to save them.
A city of its era
The mountain city preserves one of the finest concentrations of early-twentieth-century architecture in the country, from Arts-and-Crafts bungalows to grand civic buildings frozen in the moment its first boom ended.
That intactness is a treasure and a vulnerability, threatened by development pressure and the simple economics of maintenance.
The fight to keep it
Preservationists work to protect the building stock through advocacy, restoration and adaptive reuse, arguing that the city's character is inseparable from its architecture.
The stakes are high. Asheville's appeal rests substantially on its sense of place, and that sense of place is built, quite literally, from the structures the preservationists are fighting to save.
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