It's judgement day for a storied block of downtown.

by Jack Neely

Last week, the County Commission reviewed the latest site proposal for the prodigal Justice Center. Impressively planned by Barber & McMurry, it's now aimed at the 500 block of Gay Street. Those still in shock over worse proposals are ready to jump at this one, just to protect dearer sites and to get the damn thing out of the headlines. It's not a bad solution.

Most of the buildings threatened are pretty shabby-looking. Most are vacant. A couple of them are Victorian, one decrepit, one brightened by a restoration effort sometime in the last decade or so. The plainest building that's threatened is the only occupied one: Gus' Restaurant, a lunchtime diner popular among folks who like to smoke lots and lots of cigarettes with their meals. Today, Gus' has downtown Knoxville's single most impressive gallery of autographed star pictures: Robert Goulet, Lyle Lovett, Crytal Gayle...mostly folks whose shows the proprietor has catered.

If you've noticed the mirror-image mortar-and-pestle logos emblazoned up on the concrete facade, you might guess this building's original purpose. Built around 1940 as Walgreens, it was an old-time drugstore with a lunch counter down the side. In his novel, Bijou, David Madden describes footloose kids, circa 1946, swarming around this place, sometimes skipping out on tabs. It served that dual role well into the '80s, when Todd & Armistead finally closed. At the time, the lunch counter was so popular it expanded into the old drugstore half. Phyllis, the waitress who's worked there for years, says the counter we sit at for lunch at Gus' is the one that was here during the Walgreens era.

This counter was the site of some of the most dramatic moments of Knoxville's Civil Rights era. In the summer of 1960, when Knoxville College students challenged segregation laws by staging interracial sit-ins, they targeted several downtown lunch counters. This may be the only one where you can still sit and order a Coke and picture someone dumping it on your head.

If truth be told, Knoxville desegregation wasn't very dramatic stuff. Merrill Proudfoot, a KC professor, did describe some events at this counter in his nationally hailed book, Diary of a Sit-In—but don't wait for the movie adaptation. There were no attack dogs, no fire hoses, no bloody faces. A badly thrown salt shaker here at Walgreens, which got mentioned in the national press, was one of the most exciting moments.

Nearby's an unkempt, boarded-up three-story Victorian building which baffles passersby with a partly fallen and strangely garbled motto: Where Smart Knoxville Buys, it appears to say. The sign probably dates from the middle of this century, when a ladies' clothing shop was on the first floor. But up on the third floor of this building were the studios of WROL, just as that radio station was becoming known for popularizing country music. It was probably on that lonesome third floor, in the mid-'30s, that future Opry star Roy Acuff's voice and fiddle were first broadcast.

You probably won't find much sentiment to save either of those buildings. But right in the center of the block is a larger place that's a little different. Once called the S&W, the most glamorous cafeteria ever built in East Tennessee and, for most of its 45 years, downtown Knoxville's most popular restaurant. The S&W is loved, at least in memory. (Walk in the Great Southern brewpub down the sidewalk—the most conspicuous decoration there, after the gorilla, is a huge photo of a busy day at the S&W in the '30s.) And to architects who don't remember the S&W, it's also among Knoxville's most interesting buildings; UT architecture professor Mark Schimmenti calls the S&W one of downtown's three most distinguished structures, ranking with the Main Street Post Office and the interior of the Tennessee Theater. A rare relic from the Art Moderne era, the S&W still flaunts its style; its gilt flutings and polished terra cotta tiles still shine in the afternoon sun.

But it closed 16 years ago, and despite sundry rumors of it reopening as a dance club or a retail outlet/boutique or health club—and despite the fact that little Asheville was somehow able to usefully renovate its own downtown S&W—Knoxville's has remained central, beautiful, and utterly vacant.

Schimmenti sees the S&W as an important symbol of the city. He's okay with the Justice Center going in here. But he wants to preserve the elegant old S&W—and incorporate it as a lobby for the new Justice Center.

If the S&W doesn't look solemnly legal, it definitely has lots of legal associations. Most of Knoxville's lawyers and judges held court at the S&W at one time or another. Among them was maverick attorney John R. Neal, the eccentric law-school professor (fired from UT in the early '20s for various idealogical outrages), assistant in the defense of John Scopes in Dayton, and the chief attorney who drew up TVA's durable and admirable charter in 1933. He later founded his own law school here, the John R. Neal School of Law.

My favorite Neal story is told in Cormac McCarthy's novel, Suttree. Neal was a familiar sight at the S&W, often eating by himself. One of the absent-minded genius' manifold eccentricities was that he saved on belt leather by tying his pants up with a rope. One day Neal had gotten his tray full of lunch, had paid the cashier, and was looking for a place to sit when his rope came untied. Neal stood there, helplessly holding his tray, his pants around his ankles—until a merciful friend got up and helped him out.

Granted, Schimmenti's proposal to front a justice center with a '30s art-moderne lobby is probably a more imaginative proposal than Knoxville's likely to approve. But before you pass judgment, take just a minute to have a look at it, and consider.