Life in the Hood, shot houses, shotguns, insurance burns, sidewalk princesses and bookies in the basement

Operating a B&B in MONTFORD in the early '80s.

It wasn't until the new neighbor showed up on our front porch and announced that he was starting a fledging bookie operation in the basement of his place across the street and that he intended to run a quiet operation and hoped we would not be upset on days when folks came by to place a bet, that we realized we weren't living in Kansas, Toto.

Living in Montford in 1982 required a keen ability to adapt to life in an area that was just blocks from City Hall but might as well have been located in a parallel universe. The city had pretty much forgotten Montford since the 1960's and presently had not yet jogged its own memory of the 600 or so homes that made up Asheville's first residential neighborhood. Once the I-240 connector was finished in the mid '70s Montford was destined to be physically separated from the Asheville psyche for almost two decades.

The makeup of the neighborhood population in the '80s was predominately black, 60% or so. A number of older white families who had lived in Montford since the early 1900's, when Montford was predominately an all white neighborhood, still lived in family homes. A small but growing group of urban pioneers drawn by the beauty of the mountains and the lure of neglected but architecturally significant homes and mansions that could be bought for well under 50 thousand dollars were starting to have an impact in Montford. Some homes were had for as little as a few thousand dollars on the courthouse steps.

A number were lost to a rash of mysterious fires that broke out around the neighborhood, mostly in the winter. Some fires were caused by the many homeless people that were drawn to the dilapidated, unoccupied structures looking for warmth. Most were purposely set to destroy property that was no longer worth renovating. With owners not wanting to bear the cost of demolishing them, some once fine old homes met their demise as "insurance burns".

By the mid '80s Montford was dotted with dozens of empty lots being overgrown but still showing remnants of landscaping from an earlier, happier time. At that point it was virtually impossible to give a building lot away in Montford much less sell one. But by the late '90s most of these empty lots had new houses on them. These homes had to meet the Historic Resources Commission architectural guidelines, This meant that they could not look like modern intrusions. Consequently they were expensive to build and selling for close to half a million dollars on average. Easily 10 times as much as any previous house had ever sold for in Montford until the early '80s when the stately 1915 foursquare on Flint Street that was to became the first B&B in Montford and a few years later the stone mansion on Montford Ave. that was to become The Lion & The Rose B&B sold for around 60 thousand dollars each.

Living in Montford in the early '80s entailed co-existing with a melange of alternative businesses operating in the district, some legal many not. Shot houses and drug dealers flourished cheek by jowl with small inns and corner stores. Shot houses being private homes that were operating as erstaz bars selling shots of booze for two to four bits. Mostly to working class residents, addicts and the many sidewalk princesses that frequently plied their trade along the streets of Montford when Asheville's finest chased them away from lower Lexington Ave. These business folk, unlike the B&B owners, had chosen not to involve themselves in the bureaucratic intricacies of business licences, inspections and the like. In general everyone operated in a perpetual state of studiously ignoring each other since we not competing for clients.

This live and let live attitude prevailed for a few years until the drug dealing and gambling started turning openly raucous, ugly and was obviously fast becoming a threat to the legitimate businesses in the neighborhood. Although we had a generally open-minded clientele at the Inn, guest comments were indicating that something had to be done. A week long search for the offices of MEG(metropolitan enforcement group), the undercover drug division of the Asheville PD, whose location was meant to be unknown to the public, led us to an office in a commercial building downtown just off of I-240.

We knocked. Getting over the initial surprise of finding us in the doorway of their supposedly secret location and after hearing our plea for help the officers made a commitment to undertake a long term plan to better police the newly designated state and federal Historic District. Starting with undercover operations taking place around Montford and eventually, with prodding from other residents, a police substation was opened in the neighborhood.

Part of this plan involved the APD asking if they might place an officer with a camera on the Inn's front porch to record license plate numbers of the locals who stopped to place bets with our bookie neighbor across the street. As much as we were inclined to help and after much consideration, alas we said no. We decided that having an officer with a camera mixing with guests on the front porch while recording illegal activities across the street might not be the best approach to growing our business.

Nevertheless, we knew that a tipping point had been reached when one Sunday morning two black sedans pulled up in front of the bookie operation across the street and two bullet proof vest wearing DEA agents jumped out of each car, popped the trunks and in a very business like manner started chambering shells into a couple of 12 ga. shotguns. We had a front row seat on the porch of our B&B as they proceeded to storm into the building and a few moments later bundled three suspects into the two cars.

Although it took a few more years for prostitution and drugs to be swept from Montford's streets, it was the beginning of the end for most of the illegal activity in Montford. It took a while longer for the parade of pickup trucks to stop cruising the neighborhood on Friday paydays with their newly flush drivers looking to swap their hard earned cash for a wide variety of services being provided by the local working girls.

Also around this time the city was beginning to realize that it had a potential goldmine in the hundreds of under taxed historic district properties just blocks from a slowly awakening historic downtown. All they had to do was upgrade the neighborhood infrastructure, a legal activity that caused the property owners in Montford almost as much trouble as drugs and prostitution.

Asheville's version of the "big dig" started in various places about the neighborhood. Flint Street was typical with a wide and ever growing deeper ditch running down the middle of the street. The excavation was needed to place the storm drain catch basins in the deepest part then the sewer lines next. This required each house on the street to be disconnected from the old sewer line and reconnected to the new. During this connection period the mantra of the workmen in the ditch was..."please nobody flush". New water lines were run above the sewer lines for obvious sanitation purposes should a leak occur and then connected to each house with much less suspense than the previous sewer connections.

It was during this part of the digging, when mounds of dirt were piled up and running from one end of Flint Street to the other, that we discovered that the mountains of dirt held treasures from the neighborhood's 1890's to early 1900's past in the form of a single leather high top shoe in amazingly good condition and a few intact glass ink wells and a good bit of broken pottery.

Eventually the work was finished but not until a second dig to lay new natural gas lines caused another, albeit shorter disruption. Soon after we had newly paved streets and brand new concrete sidewalks that, although quite nice, had unfortunately replaced most of the original brick sidewalks. These fine old hand laid walkways had been constructed with local kiln fired bricks decorated with their distinctive bullseye and diamond designs and bordered by solid granite curbing, some of which can still be found in parts of Montford.

Another result of all this modernization was the inevitable increase in property taxes. Over the next two decades it was not unusual for properties similar to the Flint Street Inns to find their 1982 tax bill of $300 to have swollen to $6500 by 2003. Unfortunately this resulted in many older black and white families, long time residents of Montford, finding that they had to sell their homes because they could no longer afford the taxes. Unintended consequences of gentrification and ever rising property values that the city could not find in it's heart to mitigate by freezing taxes, early on, for older long time residents.

Still, Montford today is a lot like Montford of 30 years ago and not all that different in character from the original little 1893 community when it was incorporated as a 300 acre autonomous village just north of downtown 115 years ago. Almost all the original homes have survived into the 21st century. No mean feat in this era of tear-downs and bigger is better. If you walk the streets of Montford today you will find yourself thinking how lucky the city is to have preserved this vibrant slice of it's history.

First published MountainXpress 2008