Tag Archives: City Building

Bele Chere 2008

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Asheville's City Building wears a Bele Chere banner

The City Building, all decked out for Bele Chere.

It’s that time again–Asheville’s biggest party of the year, and one of the biggest outdoor festivals in the Southeast: Bele Chere. Asheville’s been throwing this shindig for 30 years, believe it or not, and folks are still packing the place to wander the streets, eat strange foods, and gawk at others.

I remember the first Bele Chere three decades ago, and if memory serves, it took place a little later in the year–maybe September? Haywood Street was closed to traffic and there were a few booths near Pack Memorial Library (it had recently moved from its original location on Pack Square), and one stage featuring a bluegrass band. We wandered around for a few minutes, but there was nothing much to see or do. What I really remember? On the way downtown, we stopped at Wendy’s (there was only one then, on Patton Ave.) and tried their new chili for the first time.

Fast forward 30 years, and Bele Chere has become a massive free-for-all of street vendors, artists, crafters, hucksters, informational pitchers, meat-on-sticks, deep-fried-candy-bars, sponsors, fight-to-legalize-hempsters, mendhi painters, locals, tourists, sunburns, late-summer-downpours, brewers, local restaurants, funnel cakes, sunburns, panting dogs, crying children, men-in-dresses, aging hippies, blaring music, armadas of port-a-johns, kiddy rides, semi-naked teen girls, dancing, drumming, grooving, tattoos, piercings, pay-to-park, blocked streets, sell-your-mama-for-a-seat-in-the-shade kind of festival. And those are just the highlights!

For some, it’s a wide-open-anything-goes kind of weekend in late July. For others, it’s a huge hassle that renders downtown Asheville impassable for three days. The city always declares each Bele Chere more successful than the previous one, and supposedly it attracts about 350,000 people to town each summer. There are a lot of local businesses that shut down for the duration, preferring to lose potential cash flow rather than face the hoardes and their endless search for bathrooms because 1) they’re too desperate to wait  or 2) they’re not desperate enough to use the portable facilities that have been festering in the sun all day.

Bele Chere signpost at College St. & Lexington Ave.

I work downtown, right in the heart of Bele Chere, and though I still enjoy parts of it, it’s definitely lost some of its luster for me after all these years. Getting to work on the opening Friday is an exercise in futility. For example: yesterday, I had to back halfway down a city street and take a weird route through an alley and a parking lot, then rely on a (surly) volunteer to hold up a yellow caution tape barrier and direct me through a crowd of vendors and on-lookers to access my building. Leaving required the same process in reverse, but at least I could drive the normal direction and not worry as much about backing over anyone (or their handwoven hemp-and-crystal dog collar booth).

Patton Avenue view

Oh, well. If you’re an Ashevillain, you know you’re here to stay. And whether you love it or hate, it looks like Bele Chere is here to stay, too.

A Little Batty

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Asheville’s City Building rises out of City-County Plaza like a frilly pink cake, or maybe a sassy lady dressed in frilly pink, rising out of a cake? In any case, the building is one of Asheville’s most interesting architectural offerings, and was designed and constructed in the early 1900′s by Douglas Ellington.

If I have my facts straight (and as a native, I always assume I do, which is a dangerous assumption!), Ellington also drew up plans for the Buncombe County Courthouse located next door to the City Building. If his design had come to fruition, Asheville would have boasted a pair of groovy, frilly Ellingtons in which to conduct city/county business and to attract even more tourists. It was not to be, however, and the courthouse remains a sober, gray, and very respectable rectangle standing stalwart next to its perky party hat of a neighbor. Sort of like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit standing close to–but not quite touching–Auntie Mame.

I don’t know who said it first, but I wish it had been me: “The Courthouse looks like the box the City Building came in.” 

There are lots of interesting details about both buildings, but here’s my favorite: at night, in the summer (i.e. right now), the lights on roof of the City Building give off a pink-tinted glow that attracts every bug and flying beastie in the vicinity. I don’t know if the lights are actually pink, or if they just look pink because they’re bouncing off the building’s pink-tiled top, but the whole building is bathed in a peachy baby aspirin hue that you can almost taste. And with that mix of powerfully pink wattage comes moths-gone-mad, and that means…bats. Whirling and swirling and diving and thriving; bats gather around the City Building as if it boasted an all-you-can-eat Sonar buffet: sweep, snap, and swallow.*

Last summer, I spent some time in Austin, TX, which boasts the largest urban bat colony in North America (http://www.austincityguide.com/content/congress-bridge-bats-austin.asp). Although I enjoyed watching them pour out from under the Congress Street Bridge, I still felt that Asheville’s bats–dining in the ambience of the Ellington pink light district**–have the edge when it comes to style, if not numbers.

* I haven’t actually gone bat-watching in a while, so forgive me if times have changed and the City Building is no longer the hot (pink) spot for bats…

**Several breast cancer awareness programs use the term “pink light district,” and no offense is meant to their important work!