Joynes Funeral Home

UTC Jul 15, 2018 Last week’s column visited 1930s Eagle Street, Asheville’s African-American business hub, and compared it to today. This week, the comparison is to a time in between — 1959, before integration, highways and urban renewal displaced the former way of life. East End homes          Looking at “East End, 1972,” a photograph in Andrea Clark’s book, “East End Asheville Photographs circa 1968,” Willie Mae Brown, civic leader and long-time East End resident, observed, “We see here the backsides of the homes that were visible on Velvet Street, and we look above them and we see the old Foundry Building and the Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church.” “We also look at the substandard conditions of some of the houses,” Brown told Karen VanEman in a 2008 interview for Pack Memorial Library, “and we look at how they were situated.” Houses also nested on the Spruce Street slope. Velvet Street, before redevelopment in 1979, had connected Eagle Street, where city employee parking now terraces the hill, to Beaumont Street between the Public Works Building and the new eco-friendly, smart technology apartments at 55 South Market St. “Breathe in the mountain air,” the apartment sales video advises, “and forget your troubles every single day … You know where you want to be … Own it.” In March 2015, when the 55 Market St. project was approved, Rev. Dr. John Grant, pastor of Mount Zion and founder of Eagle Market Streets Development Corporation, renovators of buildings for community use, lamented the gentrifying trend. “This is another instance where peopl...