A white squirrel +24 more pix from Asheville, Hendersonville, Winston-Salem, Raleigh

[Cirrus]

I was in North Carolina a couple weeks ago, with stops in Asheville, Hendersonville, and Winston-Salem. Enjoy this short thread with a few photos of each!

Asheville:

Imagine you're deep in the hills of Appalachia, seemingly the middle of nowhere, when you come around a random highway curve to the surprise of modern towers poking out of a hidden valley. Yeah, Asheville is pretty great.






Really solid urbanism. Charlotte & Raleigh should be so lucky.
















Hendersonville:

If Asheville's a small city, nearby Hendersonville is more of a big town. But it's a nice one, with a good walkable main street and a stately courthouse.








I'm a big fan of the storefront converted into nice public restrooms. A+




Now about that promised white squirrel: Thanks to a quirk of evolutionary genetics, western North Carolina has a substantial population of white squirrels. They're not albinos like I occasionally see in DC, but simply a white color variation on the common grey squirrel of the eastern US. And where I might see an albino in DC once every 5 years, Hendersonvillians see these white ones weekly at least.

Keep your eyes open and you'll spot one.




Winston-Salem:

I very regularly travel to Winston-Salem, exactly every five years. I didn't take many photos this time, but here y'are.










Bye! Thanks for looking!

[202_Cyclist]

Nice photos, thank you for posting. I bet the Smoky Mountains have some great hiking. I want to do a road trip the villes sometime-- Charlottesville, Asheville, and Knoxville.

[Wigs]

Thanks for the NC thread
Was hoping for more photos!

[Murphy de la Sucre]

Super awesome! nc is not showing up all the time

[Murphy de la Sucre]

yea, a few gritty towers in the middle of nowhere in the forest, is kinda spooky

[ColDayMan]

All are gems.

[Cirrus]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Was hoping for more photos!

Ask and ye shall receive:

• North Carolina 2019: ASHEVILLE (aka the best city in NC), with bonus BILTMORE GARDENS, Dec 2019
• North Carolina 2019: DUCK & ROANOKE ISLAND LOST COLONY, Oct 2019
• North Carolina 2019: WINSTON-SALEM, Aug 2019 (Remember how I said I was there every five years?)
• North Carolina 2019: DURHAM, Aug 2019
• Charlotte, NC: Downtown and Transit, July 2010

Annnnnnd I was in Raleigh last summer. Didn't take enough photos for a thread, but actually this here thread is a good place for them, soooo

BONUS RALEIGH:

When I go to Raleigh, usually I get there via Amtrak. They have a nice new medium-sized station:








Fayetteville Street is the main street, but this is as close as I've gotten to it in 20 years:




Downtown bus hub!






That's pretty much all I got, lol.

[xzmattzx]

Nice pictures!

There's a colony of white squirrels in Exeter, Ontario, as well.

I like that last picture of the bend in the road in the mountains.

[hauntedheadnc]

I wish I missed Asheville, but I really don't... I miss certain things about it, like the terrain, the climate, and the architecture, but I don't miss the city itself because everything that was so good about it has hollowed out and gone away. The spirit is gone and these days, Asheville is basically just an unusually large cluster of AirBnB rentals and hotels more than a real city. It's a movie set for the tourists to play out their Appalachian fantasies as they enjoy Asheville: The Experience™. Asheville the city doesn't really exist anymore.

Meanwhile, down in Hendersonville, that photo you took of the public restrooms? That's next door to one of the most efficient models of social services provision I've ever seen. That's the Safelight organization in the background. They started out as a domestic violence shelter for women before expanding to taking male victims and then transgender victims when no one else in the area would. Then they started the family justice center in Henderson County, then the child advocacy center. They opened a thrift store and a restaurant to help teach job skills to their residents, and they took over the building next door in order to offer therapy and mental health services on site. They also own an apartment complex elsewhere in town for transitional housing. Basically, if you're an adult victim of domestic violence, a child victim of abuse, you need help navigating the legal system or access to an attorney, you need job training or access to mental health resources, they're there for you. It's one-stop shopping for people going through the worst, most stressful times of their lives. Every county in the country needs something like Safelight.

And the squirrels... The white squirrels interbreed with regular squirrels, so sometimes you end up with a white squirrel with a grey stripe down its back. I attended Blue Ridge Community College in Hendersonville about twenty-five years ago and their campus was crawling with squirrels like that.

[EastSideHBG]

Wonderful!

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc

I wish I missed Asheville, but I really don't... I miss certain things about it, like the terrain, the climate, and the architecture, but I don't miss the city itself because everything that was so good about it has hollowed out and gone away. The spirit is gone and these days, Asheville is basically just an unusually large cluster of AirBnB rentals and hotels more than a real city. It's a movie set for the tourists to play out their Appalachian fantasies as they enjoy Asheville: The Experience™. Asheville the city doesn't really exist anymore.

C'est la vie in places going touristy. I don't care much, would rather take it as an opportunity for further development.

As for the rest of your post... I'm not sure to entirely get it. They don't seem to work quite the same way as they do over here.
I think these social care services rely on welfare almost exclusively where I am, which is not necessarily good because it turns them away from other resources, which is a bit lazy and silly. Or merely ideological.
It sounds like you're talking about helpful people anyway. I guess they get public subsidies over there too, though.

[DCMetroRaleigh]

Beautiful pics!

[Matthew]

The next time you're in Winston-Salem, schedule a tour of Union Station. You would love that! Reserving a spot on a tour is required, but they have tours almost every week. They used the original blueprints to accurately restore everything, including recreating the original light fixtures! Various railroad hobby groups love to hold events/meetings there. It looks exactly like it did in 1926, except for the enclosed bridge over the tracks. Norfolk-Southern says no to rebuilding that and its grand arches over the tracks. They are currently restoring the Streamline Moderne airport, which should be finished by the time of your next visit and does appear to have planned visitor areas for architecture/aviation tourists. Most Winston-Salem visitors seem to spend much of their time in the downtown Innovation District, around Bailey Power Plant? It's unusual to not see photographs of the Coal Pit outdoor music space or the renovated power plant with tall buildings in the background. I'm actually surprised more people don't photograph the Colonial and Early American architecture. The Art Deco Raymond Loewy Building was sold and will be converted from office space to apartments, as soon as the tenants move-out. The local housing authority is taking their time moving-out. New England-based High Tide Capital will renovate that one: https://www.hightidecapital.com/projects

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.

[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.

[geomorph]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

I would like to see more of this building!