Grove Park Inn

The Grove Park Inn is a vast hotel built of rough-cut granite boulders on the slope of Sunset Mountain north of downtown. E.W. Grove, who made a fortune on patent medicines, commissioned it in 1913 and the building was put up in less than a year using stones quarried from the mountain itself. The lobby is the showpiece: a 120-foot-long room with two stone fireplaces large enough to walk into.

Even non-guests are welcome to wander the public spaces, have a drink on the Sunset Terrace at dusk, or visit the National Gingerbread House Competition that fills the lobby every December. The subterranean spa, completed in 2001 and built into the side of the mountain, is one of the best in the southern Appalachians.

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A story
F. Scott Fitzgerald spent two summers at the inn in 1935 and 1936 while his wife Zelda was being treated at a nearby psychiatric hospital. He drank, wrote little, and was eventually banned from drinking gin by the management. Eight presidents have stayed here, and during the Cold War the inn served as a covert relocation site for the U.S. Supreme Court.