UT wears down one last homeowner's resistance to its plans to build a parking garage in an old neighborhood

by Jack Neely

Say you're a married professional in your 50s. You own your own home, and it's an especially nice one, a lovely old brick two-story with a slate roof. This was, in fact, your parents' house; your family has been living here for 40 years.

You don't necessarily expect anyone to tell you you have to get out. But that's what the University of Tennessee told Gail McGinnis and her husband Richard. UT wants to tear the McGinnises' Terrace Avenue house down to build a concrete parking garage here.

At first glance, Terrace Avenue, two blocks south of Cumberland, looks like a comfortable middle-class residential neighborhood of another era; most of its houses are intact, and fairly well-kept. Lining the street are substantial old homes, shady with tall trees. Not too long ago, and for years after Gail McGinnis first moved here, Terrace was still dominated by families, including some of Knoxville's most prominent. But soon you notice that many of these front yards have regulation university signs in the front yards. Most of this neighborhood is now a university campus. It's university policy that all of it should be.

One of the avenue's more striking old houses is number 1851. It has unusually thick, almost medieval-looking bricks in solid walls a foot deep, old-fashioned handblown windows on hinges, hand-hewn beams, a dark-slate roof, and a slate-floor screened porch that overlooks Mountcastle Park. Around the house are old boxwoods, dogwoods, the tallest sassafras trees you've seen in a suburban yard and, in back, a four-story magnolia.

Built in 1924 for Knoxville businessman C. Newton Calloway and his family, 1851 Terrace is one of the few addresses here that has never belonged to UT. It has been a family home, strictly, for nearly 75 years.

The current owners would prefer it stay that way. But the house's history will probably end this fall. Intimidated by UT's pressure, the McGinnises have entered a preliminary agreement to sell their house. It's all part of a campuswide plan in which the McGinnises—and all other Knoxville citizens unaffiliated with UT—have no voice.

"I can't get it through my head," says Gail McGinnis. "I cannot comprehend they're going to take this house and tear it down for a parking garage."

The McGinnises aren't your typical university-area evictees. Gail moved into this house with her family in 1959, when she was a teenager. She and her stockbroker husband spent several years away, living in Chattanooga, as Gail's mother lived on at Terrace. When Gail's mother died seven years ago, the McGinnises moved back to Knoxville only because Gail wanted to spend the rest of her life in her family home.

The McGinnises are UT alumni and enjoy the convenience to campus, but mainly they just like the house; they brag on it as if it were a favorite child. "It's such an efficient house, it's unbelievable," McGinnis says, referring to its near-perfect insulation. They say the house has required no major maintenance in the seven years they've lived here. Clearly, these thick walls could last a few more centuries.

In recent years, McGinnis says, UT has torn down 13 other houses in their neighborhood. Several demolitions have been on this block. Another architecturally unusual house next door to hers went down in July; demolition crews began on it in the dark of night. The McGinnises have been the only holdouts on a block of trees and surface parking on gravel that will be leveled for a five-level, 800-car parking garage.

In May 1994, the university released a long-range vision of what the campus could be. Called the "University of Tennessee Knoxville Units Master Plan", it's on file at the UT Library. Much of it is an admirably progressive attempt to deal with some of UT's long-standing design problems, especially the surplus of automobile traffic on campus. To meet those ends, the plan calls for three new parking garages, two of which have already been built: one on White Avenue in Fort Sanders and one on Neyland Drive near Thompson-Boling Arena. The third and by far the largest in the plan was to be an enormous 2,600-car facility that would be built on the big blank parking lot on Stadium Drive, adjacent to Neyland Stadium.

That certainly makes sense. For years, football fans and others not even involved in traffic engineering have wondered why nobody has put a big parking garage there already.

However, that particular garage is not in the works. Another, an 800-car garage a half-mile away on treelined Terrace Avenue—one not mentioned in the 1994 master plan—apparently is.

That plan does reveal a sort of manifest destiny for this old residential neighborhood. "The Terrace Avenue District is seen, in the long run, as an area that can be...integrated into the campus by selective acquisition," it states. "Although no specific new uses are earmarked for the area at this time, the goal is gradually to redevelop the area with uses that bridge the campus with the Cumberland 'Strip' area..."

However, the switch to target private property on Terrace Ave. with the third garage was provoked not only by an imperialistic UT administration, but by UT students. "It's a process driven by the users," says Greg Reed, head of UT's civil and environmental engineering department, who chairs the university's Transportation and Parking Authority. Most of the members of the committee are UT students; they're the ones, Reed says, who decided to move the third parking garage from Stadium to Terrace. Most of the dormitory dwellers, he says, just don't want to walk all the way to Stadium Drive to get their cars.

It's not that the original site was particularly remote; the Stadium Drive garage would have been practically adjacent to the University Center. Many students walk farther every day just to get to class. For a university that prides itself on athletics, a walk equivalent to a stroll across the West Town parking lot might not seem a strenuous feat—but Reed says UT's Student Government Association has made convenient parking for resident undergraduates a priority. He says students insist that their parking be as close as possible to the dormitories of Andy Holt Drive.

Vice Chancellor Phil Scheurer says UT considered several sites for the new garage, and lists student convenience among several reasons for favoring the Terrace Avenue site. The difficulty of displacing the parking in what's now called Lot 9 is another; the prospect of added traffic on Stadium and Neyland Drive is another. And he adds that "to maximize that space," they'd also try to build a new building on top of the parking garage, which apparently poses logistical problems. He doesn't recall who first came up with the Terrace Avenue site, but he acknowledges that it's been very popular with students.

Told the decision to build a parking garage on her house was largely prompted by students, Gail McGinnis says she's "flabbergasted." She says no one from the TPA, the SGA, or any other student-dominated group ever approached her about acquiring her house for their parking needs.

She says she has heard only from UT's administration, which has answered few of her questions about the site's fate. The McGinnises didn't hear their house was in UT's sights until August, 1997. That was when they got the first letter from UT indicating the university intended to acquire their house. There followed 13 months of mailed demands from UT representatives—in words sometimes apologetic, sometimes hostile, sometimes garbled—that she sell her house and yard or else. Early communications were mysterious about what the land was needed for; later ones mention a parking garage. The McGinnises expected a chance to plead their case with UT's Board of Trustees, but were told that was impossible.

Desperate, the McGinnises sent a letter to State Sen. Ben Atchley, pleading for help. They got a letter back—not from Atchley, but from UT President Joe Johnson. They'd also sent a letter to UT's Board of Trustees—and got a letter back from UT President Joe Johnson. All the mail they send to anyone concerning the demolition of their home seems to arrive on Johnson's desk, and Johnson has only one opinion. While professing that "I am sorry," in a letter the McGinnises received six weeks ago, Johnson was unyielding about UT's demands to acquire the house, and warned that he hoped to do so "short of legal action on our part."

The McGinnises have tried to fight the acquisition, but learned, to their astonishment, that they have no legal weapons. "You have nowhere to turn," she says. "It's like divine authority they have. The right of eminent domain is powerful. There's not much you can do in defense of it."

Last week the McGinnises reluctantly accepted a "final" offer. Gail says she did so only to avoid the promised lawsuit, especially considering that she could find no Knoxville lawyer who would take her case against UT.

She says UT has offered her what may well be a fair market value for the house, but it would not pay for rebuilding a house of its quality, even if that were possible today. She says she would drop the offer in a second if it meant she could stay. "People can't understand this," she says. "I've never been very interested in the money. I want the house." She and her husband have looked elsewhere in Knoxville for homes they could buy with UT's offer, but so far they don't like what they see. When they leave, they'll likely move back to Chattanooga.

The McGinnis case is a tiny part of a much bigger issue. It may seem surprising that UTK is still physically expanding, even though its student body has not grown in the last 25 years (in recent years, in fact, UTK has been dealing with 3-4,000 fewer students than in the late '70s). It's true that some colleges UT is in the habit of comparing itself with actually have more acreage per student than UTK does. Then again, most of them—Georgia, UNC, Alabama—are in rural settings adjacent to university-dominated college towns. Knoxville, on the other hand, is a city. It may be more instructive to look at other universities that contend with actual urban environments.

The University of Texas at Austin, for example, is located in a downtown of a city that's largely independent of the university, much like UTK. That other UT accommodates twice as many students as UTK does—on a campus only two-thirds the size of UTK's.

The nature of UTK's parking problem may seem especially foggy. With the same number of students—even fewer—why does parking only get worse? Reed says there are several factors at play. Parallel parking, he says, was once an option for UT students; in recent years the city—which still controls the streets that traverse UT—has added hundreds of parking meters, making longtime parallel parking for residents illegal. Also, new buildings and improvements have chewed up old parking areas that were not fully replaced.

"And I think there's also a net increase in use of automobiles by students," Reed says, remarking that when he was in college in the '70s, most freshmen didn't drive cars. Now, most do.

Unlike other campuses that encourage off-campus parking with a shuttle service—UGA is the nearest example—UTK students get to park their cars close to their classrooms. Several state universities, even those with larger campuses than UTK's, sharply restrict parking, especially for underclassmen; at the University of Virginia, first-semester freshmen aren't allowed to drive cars to school at all. Reed thinks UTK's unusually liberal efforts to provide cheap, ultra-convenient student parking help sell the university to prospective students. "By the time the student gets to us, they've been driving for two or three years," says Scheurer. "They consider that an entitlement. Our answer to the parking situation is to build more garages, and that's what we've done."

Scheurer acknowledges that UT intends to acquire all the privately owned lots in what he already calls UT's "institutional zone" south of Lake—"as they become available." The McGinnises, who never offered their property, are a little different. Scheurer declines to discuss their case specifically, but says, "the neighborhood already has changed. It's not the way it was in the '40s and '50s and '60s. It's transitional now."

Meanwhile, Gail McGinnis is packing and saying goodbye to a good friend she's known for 40 years. Her life, at the moment, is transitional.