The Blue Ridge Mountain arts capital of the American South — where Asheville sits at 2,134 feet in a bowl formed by the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers surrounded on every side by the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Biltmore Estate (George Vanderbilt's 8,000-acre château completed 1895 — 178,926 square feet, still the largest privately owned house in the United States, with 35 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms and an estate winery producing 75,000 cases annually) towers over the south end of the city, the River Arts District (a 1.3 km former industrial riverfront now containing 200+ working artists' studios that visitors can enter and watch artists at work — the largest working studio district in the Southeast) lines the French Broad River, the downtown Lexington Avenue corridor has the highest concentration of independent restaurants per capita of any city in North Carolina, and Asheville has more craft breweries per capita than any other city in the Eastern United States
Asheville (95,000 city; 500,000 metro) is the largest city in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the cultural capital of Western North Carolina — a mountain city at an elevation of 2,134 feet that developed its distinctive arts-and-architecture character during the Great Depression, when isolation insulated it from economic development that would have replaced its downtown's Art Deco and Beaux-Arts buildings. Asheville's 1930s building stock is now one of the most intact Art Deco downtowns in the American South.
Asheville's development as a resort town began in the 1880s when the railroad reached the isolated mountain valley, making the Blue Ridge climate accessible to wealthy Easterners for the first time. George Vanderbilt began purchasing land in 1888 and completed the Biltmore Estate in 1895 — a feat requiring 1,000 workers, the services of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (his last major commission), and architect Richard Morris Hunt. The Great Depression froze Asheville's development — the city spent 50 years repaying its 1920s-era municipal debt rather than demolishing and rebuilding…