Asheville, the most exciting small city (Rolling Stone)
Does anyone remember the early 1990s in Asheville, a time when Bill Clinton was president, Jim Hunt the governor of North Carolina, and there wasn’t a parking or traffic problem at all?
Asheville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mountain Xpress wouldn’t come into being until 1994, the year before Gannett Co. bought out the Asheville Citizen-Times. Fine cuisine? Mark Rosenstein had just begun that tradition in Asheville with The Market Place. You could enjoy coffee and a live mic at Beanstreets, savor some of the best vegetarian dishes at the Laughing Seed (an ingenious name for a restaurant), buy beads and bangles on Wall Street, hang out at the eclectic Malaprop’s Bookstore, come to a burgeoning outdoor festival oddly called Bele Chere, and enjoy gourmet sweets at the Chocolate Fetish. It was all just the beginning.
Within a few short years, Asheville had gained its “new age” identity, while North Carolina had lost its image as a progressive Southern state. When conservatives swept most state and national offices, the Mountain Xpress had grown to 80-or-so-page
Article source: http://mountainx.com/opinion/how-asheville-became-and-continues-to-be-the-most-exciting-small-city/ If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com
