Asheville Mall Rises From a Field of Red Clay
If you stand on South Tunnel Road today, it’s hard to picture what that land looked like before asphalt and neon. In the late 1960s, it was mostly grass and clay, the kind of red dirt that stains shoes for days.
R.L. Coleman & Company wanted to build something no one in Asheville had ever seen before: a fully enclosed regional mall, the city’s first major shopping complex. The idea stirred instant trouble.
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