Every building tells a story. Some, such as the Radical Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, tell multiple stories, not all of them true.
One tale starts in the 1920s with Fred Kent, who ran Biltmore Wheathearts, a successful breakfast cereal company that operated out of a five-story brick structure on the French Broad River in Asheville. As time passed, the building served numerous businesses, including a wholesale grocer and a coffee trader. Then it fell into disrepair and was designated a nuclear fallout shelter in the 1950s. Boarded up and tagged with graffiti, it remained abandoned as artists and craftspeople in the 1990s and 2000s started occupying nearby industrial buildings and pioneering what is now called the River Arts District (RAD). That’s all fact-based.
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