Picture the spectacular Queen Anne hotel this 14-story tower replaced. The name belongs to two hotels that have occupied this site; the one you see now is a 14‑story building erected in 1924 by Edwin W. Grove. It replaced a spectacular Queen Anne hotel that once rose 125 feet above this hill — a building whose name itself recalled Confederate batteries of artillery placed here in earlier years.
Before that, the original Battery Park Hotel was built in 1886 by Colonel Frank Coxe and designed by Philadelphia architect Edward Hazlehurst (1853–1915) in a showy Queen Anne mode. Coxe’s hotel was the first in the South with an electric elevator and one of the first with electric lighting. When the railroad reached Asheville in 1880, the mountain town began to welcome some twenty passenger trains a day from the nation’s largest cities, and visitors sought the clean mountain air that helped ailments such as tuberculosis.
Fine hotels followed, and Coxe’s was considered the finest, in part because its perch on Asheville’s tallest hill offered magnificent views. Picture the vanished 125-foot Queen Anne tower that once crowned this hill with the finest view in Asheville.