ASHEVILLE — After an Aug. 15 Design Review Committee meeting, a plan to convert 35 apartments in the historic Grove Arcades into a hotel has moved forward. The developer’s attorney said no physical changes will be made to the building as part of the process. The city, which had deemed the application incomplete in July, said it is waiting for revisions from the developer to consider comments before moving forward with the process.
Construction attorney Jesse Swords said the applicants plan to preserve the building and do not propose any design changes. Grove Arcade LLC, the company that manages the building’s maintenance and leases, filed the application with the city in May. The company is co-owned by Chicago-based real estate investment firm Northpond Partners and Asheville-based Dewey Property Advisors.
“Nobody wants to change the Grove Arcade. It is a centerpiece of our downtown,” Swords said during the meeting.
E.W. Grove, the drug manufacturer turned commercial and residential developer, financed the construction of the building, which he designed as “the most elegant building in America.” The Grove Arcade, with its “eclectic Tudor Revival elements,” was the first enclosed shopping mall on the National Register of Historic Places. Before its renovation and restoration in the late 1990s, the building served as the headquarters of the National Weather Records Center — a federal organization now known as the National Climatic Data Center. Although Grove died in 1927, the arcade, completed in 1929, bears his name.
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Asheville Watchdog first reported on the plans to remodel the building in April. A back-and-forth between the city and the lease managers, reported by Citizen Times, suggests the city was initially hesitant to move forward with the project. The biggest concern was the ownership of the building.
The city took ownership of the building in 1997 and subsequently established the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the maintenance and restoration of the historic building. The nonprofit organization has a 99-year lease with an optional extension for an additional 99 years and has held lease rights to the building since 1997.
Although the city still owns the building, the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation has subleased the leases to Grove Arcade LLC. Because the lease grants development rights to both the Grove Arcade Foundation and its subtenants, Swords wrote to the city’s legal department in May arguing for the project to proceed, even though the city had “questioned” whether it needed to grant Grove Arcade LLC permission to proceed with the project.
Because the Design Review Committee primarily provides design-based comments on alterations, demolitions and new construction, there were few comments from committee members during the meeting on the proposal, which does not include any design changes. The proposal was approved unanimously.
Committee member Michael McDonough described the approval as a kind of “trap” because although the committee approved a new hotel, it did not really criticize it because there were no design changes to the historic building.
However, during a public hearing, Rowhouse Architects founder Jeff Dalton pointed out that he worked on the project during its renovation in the late 1990s, when the “original plan was to turn it into a hotel.”
After city staff’s review comments were sent to the developer in July, city spokeswoman Kim Miller said on Aug. 22 that city staff is still waiting for the submission of revised materials to address those comments.
Before the August review, Miller told the Citizen Times on July 19 that the application was deemed “incomplete” because “staff is working to extract additional information from the application to conduct the required review.”
The conversion plan would not immediately “throw everyone out”
For many years, apartments at Grove Arcade have been rented out as long-term inner-city living. The building offers both one- and two-bedroom apartments, according to the Grove Arcade website. The hotel proposal calls for 35 of the 42 apartments to be converted into hotel rooms as part of the project.
During the meeting, Swords said some of the apartments were currently occupied and the applicants did not plan to “throw everyone out and immediately take over the use as a hotel”.
“It will depend in part on who moves out and when, when the leases expire – things like that,” Swords said.
For new hotel guests, Swords said a loading zone would be set up in the car park beneath the Grove Arcade.
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Will Hofmann is the growth and development reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected]. Consider supporting this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Tim.it.
