Several Asheville Landmarks Turn 100 in 2026, Reflecting City's 1920s Boom

Asheville built its architectural identity during a remarkable decade of growth, and 2026 marks the centennial of some of that era's most enduring contributions to the city's skyline. In 1926, several buildings rose from construction sites across downtown and took root as local landmarks, reflecting an economic and cultural boom that transformed the mountain city into something recognizable to anyone walking its streets today. Two structures in particular tell that story with unusual clarity: the Flatiron Building and the second Pack Memorial Library.

The Flatiron Building: From Spectacle to Boutique Hotel

Long before it housed a Michelin-recognized restaurant or welcomed overnight guests, the Flatiron Building announced itself to Asheville with a stunt no one who witnessed it could forget. A century ago, thousands of people gathered on the streets below to watch Harry H. Gardiner, known widely as "The Human Fly," scale the newly completed building without a rope. The harrowing spectacle drew a crowd that likely rivaled any civic event the young boom-era city had seen, and it underscored just how much this wedge-shaped newcomer had captured the public imagination.

The building that inspired that crowd is a tan brick Beaux-Arts structure designed by New York architect Albert C. Wirth and modeled directly after the famous Manhattan Flatiron. The local version is considered North Carolina's best example of the wedge-shaped style that had gained popularity in larger American cities, and its distinctive triangular footprint has made it one of the most photographed corners in downtown Asheville ever since.

Over its first century, the building proved remarkably adaptable. It served as office space and hosted artists' studios. Retailers occupied its storefronts. Most notably, it became home to WWNC, Asheville's first radio station, giving the building a claim not just to architectural distinction but to the city's communications history as well.

The most recent chapter began in spring 2024, when the Flatiron was converted into a boutique hotel. The ground level now houses Luminosa, which holds a Michelin Green Star designation, bringing a level of culinary recognition to the corner of Battery Park Avenue and Wall Street that few could have anticipated when Wirth's design first broke ground in the 1920s. The building has cycled through nearly every version of downtown Asheville's commercial life, and its conversion into a hotel feels less like a departure from that history than a continuation of it.

The Second Pack Memorial Library: Renaissance Revival on Haywood Street

A few blocks away, another 1926 structure has accumulated its own layered history, this one rooted in books before it found its current life in art. Pack Memorial Library, as Asheville residents have known it across multiple generations, has seen many chapters. The original Pack building gave way to a second structure: a Renaissance Revival design by New York architect Edward Lippincott Tilton, the building described in archival imagery from Buncombe County Special Collections as a white Georgian marble structure that "still stands strong today."

Tilton's design brought a formal, classical gravity to its site, befitting an institution meant to anchor civic and intellectual life in a growing city. The library served that purpose for decades before the institution eventually outgrew the space and relocated to its current home on Haywood Street in 1978. That move freed the Tilton building for a new purpose, and it has since been incorporated into the Asheville Art Museum, where its bones continue to serve the public in a different register: visual culture rather than the written word, though the connection between the two is not difficult to trace.

The building's preservation within the museum complex reflects a broader pattern visible across Asheville's 1920s architectural legacy. Rather than demolishing structures that no longer serve their original function, the city has found ways to absorb them into contemporary use, allowing the physical evidence of that boom decade to remain part of daily life.

A Decade That Shaped the Skyline

The Flatiron and the Pack Memorial Library are the best-documented examples of Asheville's 1926 construction surge, but they were not the only projects rising during those years. Reporting from the period suggests that more projects were just getting started, indicating that the centennial landscape extends beyond these two landmarks. The full picture of what Asheville built during its 1920s boom, and how much of it survives in recognizable form, remains an open question worth pursuing as the centennial year unfolds.

What is clear is that the decade left a mark that proved more durable than the economic conditions that produced it. Asheville's boom eventually gave way to financial difficulty, but the buildings remained. A century later, the Flatiron still commands its corner, and the Tilton building still rises in marble above its block. The architects who designed them, both working out of New York, gave Asheville structures that could carry weight far beyond their original commissions, and the city has spent a hundred years proving them right.