[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by Matthew

I grew-up in suburban Asheville (Arden, N.C.,). The "28704" as we called it, when I was a teen. I was near the airport. If you drove I-26 from Asheville to Hendersonville, you drove through it. Fun story: For many years, the locals in Hendersonville would shoot the birds on the Justice statue you see on the Courthouse dome. So, the statue has multiple bullet holes. Also, interesting to note, all of the justice statues on courthouses designed by that architect aren't blindfolded. Asheville was a fun place to grow-up and I watched it transform into what you see today. I even have a few photographs of that transformation, somewhere. However, Asheville always seemed to be last to get everything and it seemed as if everything was focused on tourists. Even making things we enjoyed for free as kids, pay-for attractions for tourists. If plans were presented to revitalize an area, it wasn't how to make it more attractive for locals... it was how can we attract tourists there and how we can extract the most money from them. When something exciting was proposed for the city, it was usually for retirees moving to the area and tourists and there was an effort to stop it. Locals became NIMBYs. They even passed a moratorium on building new hotels a few years back (I'm sure it's lifted now?), which are the modern buildings you see. I moved to metro Atlanta and my sister moved to Knoxville and we both love the cities we moved to. Seeing photographs of Asheville does have me missing it. My parents are still there, so I do visit frequently.

There was one particular attorney who liked to sit in his office window and use the statue for target practice. Also, when they took the statue down to make a copy of it for the new courthouse over on Grove Street, they found that some aspects of the statue were distorted so as to appear normal from someone looking up at it from the ground. For instance, the statue atop the dome had nipples that were two inches long and had to be ground down so as not to scandalize anyone walking by the copy in the new courthouse lobby.