My wife has an excellent rule of thumb: a travel destination isn’t a tourist trap until it has a fudge shop (even worse if it’s spelled “Shoppe").
Well, according to the sign I just saw while strolling down Battery Park Ave., downtown Asheville is getting a Kilwin’s, a national chain-store fudge shoppe. Does this mean Asheville has embraced the darkside and has become a full-blown tourist trap?
I think the shark was jumped in early 2004. Personally, I prefer to think of downtown as being well into it’s “Joanie Loves Chachi” phase. I’ll leave it to you to decide who the Fonz is in this equation.
Her rule isn’t a bad one, by the way. It borders on brilliant, actually.
Read your history, guys… Asheville’s been a tourist town since the 1870s at least and I guarantee you that during all that time SOMEWHERE in Asheville you could get fudge.
Read your history, guys… Asheville’s been a tourist town since the 1870s at least and I guarantee you that during all that time SOMEWHERE in Asheville you could get fudge.
‘Nuff said, eh?
I like walnuts in mine, please.
Ralph, can you not perceive the grim spectre that is “Ye Olde Timme Fudge Shoppe”? This is serious stuff here. I think City Council should hire a consulting firm from Detroit or Omaha to get right to the heart of this.
Ralph, it’s not the fudge, per se, it’s what the shoppe represents.
I love a sticky, nut-filled, over-priced, chain-store confection made from partially hydrogenated oil as much as the next fella.
That said, the sad fact is we’re killing the goose that laid the golden (cream filled) egg. It was precisely downtown’s lack of fudge shoppes that made Asheville different and special. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it hasn’t risen to the top of national ‘best places’ polls on the backs of fudge and t-shirt shops.
johnson city is the blank canvas that asheville was 20 years ago ... they have begun downtown revitalization as the “blue plum village” and are adding one cool spot after another. in fact, the whole tri-cities area is going to absorb the funk as it’s squeezed out of asheville and wnc ...
(and largely becaue of ETSU---about 3 times the size of UNCA, i think---the area has a much more diverse population ... )
johnson city is the blank canvas that asheville was 20 years ago ...
Johnson City is actually almost as close to my home as Asheville is, but I rarely go over there. I’m not sure why, because the times I’ve been there, I’ve found it to be a really nice place with very friendly, no-attitude type people. I guess it’s more of a sort of loyalty as well as familiarity with the Asheville area that keeps me going in that direction when there’s some reason to “go to town.”
People have tried and tried to make Johnson City a happening place, but it never works. I don’t know why. It has cheap housing, a nice downtown, the mountains, etc… Maybe what it needs is a video store.
People have tried and tried to make Johnson City a happening place, but it never works.
i guess it depends on what you mean by “happening” ... if a video store would make it happen, i think most would prefer it didn’t ... happen, that is.
what we don’t want is the asheville, oh-so-trendiness to develop t/here. johnson city is still friendly, still “down home” (pun intended ... check out the acoustic listening room downhome.com, which is a very popular place for artists passing through to perform before intimate audiences), still affordable and still with a unique southern charm that asheville lost sometime in the last 20 years ...
