Downtown's unheralded success

by Jack Neely

A good pollster doesn't argue with his subjects. A few weeks ago, working on a opinion-survey story, a couple of ex-Knoxvillian surveyees remarked that our downtown was "dying" or even "dead." I bit my tongue and said mm-hm and copied it down as any good pollster should. When you call somebody for honest quotes, you don't pick fights.

Most of the people I interviewed lived in other states—but what they said was stuff I'd long heard from West Knoxvillians. When West Knoxvillians say that downtown is dead, they mean that Miller's is closed and Woodruff's is closed and the S&W is closed and the Market House and the Roxy and WNOX Studios are gone. That's the downtown they remember. All their retail needs are served by chain discount stores with bigger, freer parking lots. Now some boast that they haven't been downtown in 25 years.

And when they plead for projects to "help downtown," even downtowners can make downtown sound awfully pitiful, as if appealing to Christian charity, implying the strong should help the weak. The assumption is that ever since West Town opened in 1972, downtown's been the weak party in that contract.

I remember downtown before 1972. Thanks to the bus lines, it was the only place where a kid with no driver's license could go and not be at the mercy of parents. For a quarter fare, I was free. There were indeed crowds on the street and lots of stores open downtown, even on a Saturday, and I miss some things, like the Miller's Grill and the Riviera and the Hobby Shop and the grumpy old man who traded rare coins on Wall Avenue.

Nostalgia's irresistible, as we observed when a recent City Council meeting loosed a stream of barely relevant stories about what Market Square was like in the carefree days of childhood. But without perspective, nostalgia can give you and everybody who hears your stories a twisted impression of the present. With a few notable exceptions, downtown retail has indeed declined. But some things have even gotten much livelier.

Look at Cyberflix, Jupiter Entertainment, Atmosphere Pictures—growing downtown-based media companies experimenting with technology and playing on a national field. If there was much of that in the S&W's high-gravy-mark days, I missed it.

And back before suburban malls fired the first shots at Gay Street retail—who actually lived downtown? I was just a kid, but it seemed to me it was mostly people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. Snickering and pointing at tattered curtains on second-floor windows on the "Gay/Way," my 6th-grade colleagues whispered that they were all whorehouses.

In 1998, the hundreds of downtown residents are members of some of the world's newest professions. Today, more middle-class people are living downtown than at any time in the last 50 years. Their numbers are still growing.

Eighteen years ago, I worked as a copyboy at the News-Sentinel. I lived in Fort Sanders and didn't have a car. When I worked the night shift, I'd get out at midnight, or if there was a late-breaking story, maybe 1 or 2 in the morning. Then I'd walk home to Fort Sanders. It could be plenty spooky, because there wasn't much going on between here and there: no restaurants still open, rarely ever anything going on that late at the Tennessee or the Bijou. Downtown proper was utterly dark except for that hole-in-the-wall beer joint I read about every week in the News-Sentinel's "Crime Roundup." In my 13-block walk home, I rarely encountered anybody at all, and when I did I was reasonably sure they were up to no good.

There was a demolition site at the corner of Gay and Church. As I walked by it I'd select as big a chunk of brick and concrete as I could carry, just so I could brain anybody who jumped me.

It's different now. There are remote corners I don't transgress after dark, but I feel silly recalling being spooked about Gay Street or Clinch, because I still walk the same blocks of downtown alone late at night and never look around for a brickbat. I don't because I see a lot more faces now than I did then, and they're mostly friendly ones. It's partly because I know them now, even the erratic homeless folks who give provocative lectures to spirits, and know they're harmless. But mostly it's because there's just much more going on downtown after 5:00 than there was 18 years ago.

Today it would take me much longer to walk to Fort Sanders at night. See, I'd feel obliged to drop by the brewpub and hear some sociological debates, then say some howdies at the Tomato Head, then see who's playing at the Mercury. Maybe I'd even be tempted to walk down to the dozen clubs and cafes of the Old City which still seem to do lively late-night business even though everybody knows the Old City is dead.

None of that was even there 18 years ago, none of it sufficiently born to be called dead. Good thing, too, because I would have been lucky if I got home in time to go back to work.

Downtown has changed, but I'm not hearing any death rattles. I can show you parts of downtown that aren't even wheezing, places so burly they can be intimidating: Harold's Deli on Saturday morning; Lawson McGhee library on a Sunday afternoon; any of several bank lobbies on a Friday afternoon, the brewpub or Tomato Head on a Friday evening; Calhoun's, the busiest restaurant in Tennessee; the Tennessee Theater on opera night; the Mercury Theater at 2 AM; Perry's, Pete's, Line's, and a dozen other diners at weekday lunch time. That's without even venturing into the mercurial Old City.

Help downtown if it'll do some good. But know what we have now.