News-Record.com

If you're interested in doing a little urban exploring to a little-known place that's close to the center of the city, this weekend is your chance.

The former club house of the Casa Seville Apartments, which may be the only structures in Greensboro designed in Spanish Colonial Revival style, will be the site Friday night, Saturday and Sunday of the 4th annual Candlelight Show, an art exhibit presented annually by artist Anne-Karine Thorsen.

She uses the old club house, with its 18-foot high ceilings and giant fireplace, as her studio. Art books decorate the mezzanine, which includes two rooms.

The aparments and studio are listed as being on Bessemer Court, just off Cridland Drive between West Bessemer and Wendover avenues. But be warned: Bessemer Court, which has an official street sign, ends after a few feet in the backyard of a house that faces Bessemer.

Visitors must go about 20 feet north of the Bessemer Court sign and turn onto an unnamed alley. It goes up an incline behind the five Casa Seville duplexes. The club house is the tall stucco structure at the end.

Thorsen, a Norwegian native, specializes in canine art - portraits of family pets. She'll have a few of her own works displayed, but she says the show really honors Frank Rowland of Winston-Salem and six local artists.

Rowland is well-known in the art world for his landscapes, streetscapes, still lifes and abstract pieces.

Thorsen reads with amazement the places Rowland has had solo or group exhibits: Paris, Tokyo, artsy Carmel, Calif., New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Frankfort in Germany, Madrid, Malibu and many others. Several dozen corporations have Rowland pieces in their collections, including Disney Studios, Encyclopedia Brittanica, AT&T and Playboy.

Rowland worked in Chicago and other places for years, but recently moved to Winston-Salem to be near family. Now in his 70s, he's still making art with the passion of much younger man, Thorsen says.

"It's like each day in the first he has ever painted or the last day he's ever going to paint,'' Thorsen says.

He'll have about 50 works in the candlelight show. The other artists with works to be displayed are all from Greensboro: Connie Logan, Denise Land, Nancy Bullock, Judy Meyler and Helen Farson.

The event is so named because the first year, 2001, a snowstorm knocked out electricity in the area.

Candlepower allowed the show to go on. Everyone commented what a Christmasy atmosphere the candles and the roaring fire in fireplace made. So, Thorsen has used candles in lieu of electricity each year since then.

Her studio looks like one a visitor would expect to find Monet or Manet at work. It just fits the discription of an artist studio. Several other artists used the place as a studio before Thorsen rented it.

One wonders why the builders of Casa Seville in the late 1920s added such an elaborate club house to serve what were originally seven duplexes, two of which have been removed.

Thorsen said she heard the apartments were meant as quarters for Vick Chemical managment when the company - now part of Procter & Gamble - had a plant at the corner of Wendover and Cridland.

But old-timers in Fisher Park who go back to the late 1920s and early 1930s say the apartments existed before the plant arrived.A check of old files at the Greensboro Public Library indicate the Vick Plant was opened in 1938 in a building at 325 Wendover previously occupied by the Breneman Co., which made window shades.

The houses could have been built by Brenenman or by Cone Mills, which had a plant along Wendover at one time. Or an independent contractor could have constructed for workers at the plants that existed along Wendover between Cridland and Virginia Street.

The old-timers also say Casa Seville apartments have always been inexpensive to rent. It was not the kind of places management types would rent.

But people with loftier occupations have rented - and still rent - units. They like idea of living in apartments like no other in the city.

Whatever the reason the apartments were built, their unusual Spanish architecture make them a hidden gem in Greensboro, much like the hard-to-find Lyndon Street Row Houses in the southeast corner of downtown. Built in about 1905, they may be the only row houses in North Carolina.

If an architect was involved in the design of the Casa Seville, the best guess would be Harry Barton, who loved the various styles of Mediterrean architecture. His former home on Kemp Road West is an example. So was the old Guilford County Home for the poor that stood on Burlington Road.

The Candlight Show is open to the public free from 5 to 10 p.m. The show will also be held Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.