Asheville: living high in the west.

• Position: Special Advertising Section: Regional Focus - A discussion of the development of the city of Asheville, North Carolina - Advertisement

Twenty years ago, the federal General Services Administration made public its plans to spend $8 million to renovate the massive downtown Asheville complex where it stored national weather information. But some local folks had a better idea. It was an idea that would look to the past even while charting a new future.

The complex in question was Grove Arcade, a 269,000-square-foot structure built in 1929, when it became one of the nation's first enclosed shopping malls, with offices on its top floor. From the time it opened until 1942, it was a center of commercial and civic life in Asheville. But with the coming of World War II, the federal government took over the building, saying it needed the office space. Seventy-four shops and 127 offices were evicted with less than a month's notice.

After the war, the government kept it, eventually establishing Grove Arcade as the headquarters of the National Climatic Data Center. From time to time, local folks called for the return of the historic building to the city, but no one mounted a sustained effort. But the renovation announcement galvanized people in Asheville, says Larry McDevitt, 60, who was mayor from 1983 through 1985. They wanted to find a way to put Grove Arcade back in Asheville's hands.

Local officials contacted every politician they could think of, McDevitt says, ultimately winning the ear of U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Finally, in 1992, the GSA decided to move the data center once a new headquarters was built. That took three years. and it was two more years before the City of Asheville got title to the building.

Once Asheville had the arcade, it signed a 198-year lease with the nonprofit Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation to redevelop it. The foundation, with funding from Raleigh-based Progress Energy, among others, has spent the past five years doing renovations.

In September, the city and the foundation threw a huge party to celebrate the opening of the new Grove Arcade. It has 52 spaces for stores on the bottom floor, including a frozen custard shop, a deli, a gem store, crafts shops and restaurants. Upstairs, there are offices and apartments. "It's taken years, with literally hundreds of people involved, to get this reopened as a public facility, with a public market," says McDevitt, a lawyer with the Van Winkle Buck Wall Starnes law firm.

An Asheville native, McDevitt points to the long battle to restore the Grove Arcade as just one of the ways the city has reinvigorated itself over the past 20 years. "Asheville was pretty well dead back in the early 1980s," he says. Now, it's thriving, with a...