A Hopeless Cause?

Re: "A Fort Divided," by Jack Neely, Vol. 8, No. 37. The problem with the Fort is that it's a college neighborhood, and it's in Knoxville. All the government assistance and all the money on Earth won't help. Designating it a national historic district, assuming that's even remotely possible, will only drive up student housing prices to silly levels, and then where will students live? Major college cities must accommodate their college students. Some seem to think government intervention, grants, or whatever, will help restore the Fort. It won't happen. It's simply a neighborhood (and oftentimes architectural) sacrifice communities must make if they want the money and the educational and cultural (Go Vols?) benefits of a large college.

There is an even worse problem. Knoxville and Knox County governments have a nasty and decades-old habit of implacable, relentless encroachment onto private residential and business property. It has removed major areas of the downtown business district from the tax rolls by replacing private businesses with Jabba The Government. It has replaced businesspeople and spending customers with bureaucrats, driving business into the suburbs and impoverishing what used to be a thriving center city neighborhood. UT condemned one of the most beautiful old neighborhoods in Knoxville to erect architectural horrors. The city refuses to implement a separate set of building codes for historic structures, making it impossible to renovate most historic buildings that cannot be brought up to new construction standards. Is it any wonder so much of the downtown is boarded up and rents are high?

If a renovated historic district is to succeed, it must have permanent protection from the kind of ignorant, out-of-control, culturally impoverished mentality exhibited by most government officials here. They aren't through, either. They will build another jail downtown and remove even more private business property from the tax rolls, instead of instituting tax and other incentives to encourage private business and residential development and renovation. Wow! What a great idea. A jail should bring lots of big-spending families of inmates downtown to attend the symphony and dine out in restaurants. They've turned a beautiful business campus (the Whittle building) into another government building.

Chattanooga gets it. Spartanburg gets it. Jacksonville gets it. Greenville and Beaufort, S.C. get it. All over the South they get it. Well...almost all over.

As an example, the entire downtown of Beaufort, S.C. has been designated a national historic district, and therefore protected from crazy, empire-building bureaucrats who would rather confiscate your beautiful waterfront view for themselves. You can't put up gutters or paint your house without approval from the Board of Architectural Review. City commissioners and the mayor live downtown. It encourages huge investments in restoration, that would never have been made otherwise, of what were once, and are now again, handsome antebellum homes on beautiful, quiet, tree-lined streets where everyone walks. The kind Knoxville used to enjoy.

A couple on Washington Street in downtown Beaufort invested nearly a million dollars just in renovation of their private residence. People with that kind of money now live in Beaufort, not Knoxville. Multiply that by scores of houses over several years to get an idea of the money stable historic neighborhoods can bring into a community. Think they would have done that under the conditions that exist in downtown Knoxville? Many of the beautiful homes in Beaufort not long ago were rotten, long-abandoned, rat-infested hulks in far worse shape than anything in the Fort, with fallen-in roofs and walls, and floors long ago rotted through. Many had been condemned by the city as hopeless. Without any government help at all, most of these hulks have been turned into gorgeous homes and wonderful neighborhoods, and the rest soon will be. Many are well over 200 years old, a few nearly 400 years old; they've often been abandoned for decades, and restoration is expensive. They still didn't need government money in Beaufort, they just needed not to be near a college or nutso government officials.

Neighborhoods all over the country are devalued by the presence of a college, for so many obvious reasons I needn't go into them. I'm not saying that to bash UT, it's just that nobody wants to live around college students but other college students, or those still adjusting to reality after having recently graduated. That's not a bad thing—I have great memories of the Fort, and students must have a place to live, after all—but it's unfortunate Knoxville is focusing so much of its energy on a hopeless cause.

Sure, many of us are nostalgic about the Fort. A few of us even cherish fond memories of necking on cold nights in a charming, quiet neighborhood of old homes where the west UT campus and dorms now squat. A few adults with enough money to live in nicer neighborhoods are willing to tolerate students and governments that don't have a clue in order to live there, but it's not the only historic neighborhood in Knoxville.

Any place not next to UT and downtown can be restored. The Fort cannot. Not here. Go have a good cry over a beer for what's gone, and then get over it.

Robert Loest
Knoxville