As Knoxville once again dooms its historical buildings, some local architects make a last ditch plea to save the S&W Cafeteria.

by Jack Neely

It's still there, if only for the moment, and there's no other place much like it in Tennessee. A huge restaurant built in the distinctive art deco style of the 1930s, it fronts once-booming Gay Street in an eclectic cluster of commercial buildings, most of them much older. The S&W Cafeteria has been closed for over 17 years, but its polished porcelain and metallic surfaces still gleam blue and gold in the afternoon sun.

Look fast; chances are, the S&W will be gone before Memorial Day. In late 1997, when patience wore thin after months of arguing about where to put the new Justice Center, County Commission looked this way, drew a line around several old buildings, including the S&W, and called it the Justice Center Site. The Public Building Authority turned it over to Barber & McMurry to come up with an appropriate building plan. The S&W isn't in the current drawings.

Thousands of East Tennesseans have nostalgic memories of the S&W. They fondly recall the lady who played the organ, the winding copper staircase, the interior balcony, and private booths. They even get misty about the long lines.

Mark Schimmenti doesn't remember any of that. The 46-year-old architecture professor moved to Knoxville in 1995, after the huge Gay Street cafeteria had already been closed for more than a decade. He says the S&W is worth saving only because it is one of Knoxville's three or four finest buildings.

As recipient of the international Rome Prize for architecture, Schimmenti spent half of 1998 in Italy. When he returned, the nationally known authority on urban design moved into a new studio apartment on Gay Street. Just last week, he opened UT's first downtown-Knoxville Urban Design Studio on Market Square. He has walked by the S&W a thousand times, but each time it seems to strike him anew. "Now that's a gorgeous building," he says, walking by it once again at lunchtime. "I'll tell you the main reason they should save it: because it's beautiful. Look at the awning. I can't even figure out how it's structured. It's beautiful, the way it just hangs there." He describes the copper and bronze work, and the ceramic tile. "You can't afford to build anything like this again. The materials are just too rich."

On that point, at least, many architects agree. Professor Jon Coddington, head of the school's graduate program, calls the S&W "one of Knoxville's best commercially designed spaces."

"We know for a fact that if they tear it down, we're not going to get anything comparable," Schimmenti says. "Once it's gone, it's gone."

Interestingly, a majority of those who are most vocal about salvaging the S&W don't recall it as a cafeteria. Originally from Florida, architect Buzz Goss has been responsible for many of downtown's successful renovations in recent years, including the JFG and the Great Southern Brewery interior. He never had a single Salisbury steak at the S&W, but last fall he organized a small demonstration. (Of the dozen-odd downtown professionals who carried SAVE THE S&W signs, only one had lived here long enough to recall the S&W as a cafeteria.) "Architecturally, it's unique to the entire region," Goss says. "In fact, I haven't seen anything anywhere that rivals its deco-Egyptian style."

City architect and newly elected County Commissioner Dave Collins has admired the building for years, but says his regrets about losing the S&W were partly alleviated when the Miller's building renovation disclosed a near-forgotten art-deco portion of that store. The concrete 1930s annex doesn't have the extravagant stylings of the S&W, but at least, Collins says, we're no longer losing the only art-deco building on Gay Street.

At a County Commission meeting unveiling preliminary plans for the Gay Street site in 1997, Schimmenti made an impassioned plea to save the S&W as part of the overall design of the new justice center. His idea was seconded by outgoing community development director Laurens Tullock. County Commissioner Madeline Rogero asked Barber & McMurry to consider ways of incorporating the S&W into the design. "I had hoped that they would find a way to save it," she says. Today she says she's disappointed she never heard anything more.

Mike Edwards, of the Public Building Authority, did discuss the matter with Schimmenti's colleague, Jon Coddington, who ultimately lost faith in the idea.

However, the architects at Barber & McMurry, skeptical about the proposal, never made any detailed sketches for incorporating the S&W into their Justice Center plans. Firm CEO Ron Bomers says it was an impossible dream from the outset, that saving the building would present tremendous logistical problems. Even if only the front section of the S&W were saved, it would scuttle plans for a part of a three-level parking garage underneath it. The S&W space itself, Bomers says, is dysfunctional by modern code requirements. He mentions handicap-accessibility problems which all federal buildings are required to respect. Admitting he hasn't actually been inside the place in 15 years, Bomers is also skeptical about sanguine estimates of the building's soundness.

"It's just not possible to save the S&W and integrate it into the program," Bomers says. He quotes developer Ron Watkins of Partners and Associates, who says he tried to develop the site for 15 years, but each of eight promising proposals fell through, mostly for logistical or codes-related reasons. The biggest disappointment came about 10 years ago, when Baptist Hospital backed out of a publicized plan to make the S&W a health club, citing unexpected costs dealing with codes, as well as problems with the then-disheveled state of Gay Street during the city's massive street renovation.

By the mid-'90s, the once-magnificent S&W was beginning to seem like a white elephant—or a dead horse. Longtime Knoxvillians may have tired of more than a decade of earnest renovation proposals and disappointments. Schimmenti counters that 17 years is not necessarily a very long time in the life of a building, or a street. "Gay Street has been dysfunctional for a very small percentage of the history of the town," he says. He thinks projects that failed in the past, during Gay Street's downward spiral, might work today or in the near future—especially if they were adjacent to a justice center.

It particularly troubles Schimmenti that in the street-level maps on Barber & McMurry's drawings, the space now occupied by the most distinctive parts of the S&W is entirely plaza space in the Justice Center designs.

"They're not even planning to build anything here," Schimmenti says. "It's just a big, empty, stupid, windswept plaza."

Schimmenti says plazas often don't function as designed. He mentions the plaza areas in front of several modern buildings in downtown Knoxville—especially the City-County Building and Plaza Tower—which are underused, empty most of the day. He's also critical of this plaza's 200-foot breadth. "It's too big!" he says. "Tell me, why does the plaza for the Knox County Justice Center have to be a bigger space than the one in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington?"

Bomers defends the broad plaza in Barber & McMurry's design as "very fitting with this type of building. There are times when a great many people will enter the building. It's a reasonable-sized plaza. It makes a good transition from the streetscape: street, plaza, building."

Looking at an elevation sketch of Schimmenti's plan for a scaled-down plaza, city architect Dave Collins approves, saying this much-smaller plaza could work just as well. He's more concerned about what's underneath the plaza. That is, three levels of parking. That's also Public Building Authority administrator Mike Edwards' chief concern. Edwards says the plaza is less important than the number of cars that can be parked underneath it. Saving the S&W would seriously pinch the underground parking space the Justice Center is counting on. Schimmenti questions just how many parking spaces would be affected by saving the S&W. Though impressive from the street, the S&W occupies less than 10 percent of the Gay Street courts complex. Schimmenti says he would gladly donate his time and expertise to find alternate parking solutions.

Schimmenti is not a purist. Apparently accepting the inevitability that a Justice Center in Knoxville will have a plaza of some sort, windswept or no, his own plan calls for one that's 100 feet wide, stretching from the S&W to the Fidelity Building, and he says it's every bit as big as plazas of comparable purposes in bigger cities.

And he's not an all-purpose preservationist. His counter-proposal calls for the demolition of two other buildings that are also condemned in the Barber-McMurry plan, a 1940 drugstore/restaurant with a history significant in the civil-rights movement, as well as a still-handsome turn-of-the-century three-story commercial building.

The plan would, however, save three smaller, older buildings to the south of the S&W. One is a three-story building that has deteriorated somewhat but was recently identified as a country-music shrine: the circa 1935 headquarters of radio station WROL, where Roy Acuff's voice and fiddle first went over the air. (The future "King of Country Music," Acuff became country's first national star and popularized the string-band pop music that later emerged in rock 'n' roll.) Just last year, the building was marked with a metal plaque describing its significance. Under the Barber & McMurry plan as approved by the county, this building will be demolished this spring along with the S&W.

The state of the S&W can be a puzzle to the lay observer. Two years ago, press reports stated the building was in a seriously "deteriorated" condition. Bomers of Barber & McMurry believes those reports to be true.

Last year, however, Schimmenti and two colleagues, architect Jeff Wilkinson, known for several downtown renovation projects, and Coddington, head of UT's graduate program in architecture, gave the S&W a thorough inspection and found not a crack. "The building is sound," Schimmenti says. "Absolutely sound." Coddington and Wilkinson concur. "The building's architectural and engineering systems appear to be in good condition," says Coddington. "The front half is certainly salvageable and worthy of preservation," Goss says. (The less-distinctive rear portion of the building would be demolished in Schimmenti's plan.)

"We've done projects as big or bigger," Goss adds, adding that he's angry that many of the S&W's most interesting interior-design elements have been removed and installed at Gettysvue, another Partners & Associates project.

Coddington agrees with Schimmenti that the S&W should be saved. In a statement he circulated last spring, Coddington wrote, "Quite simply this distinguished building does not need to be demolished and has the potential to once again contribute to the social life and history of Knoxville."

However, Coddington also agrees with Bomers that there's no way to save it as part of the Justice Center project. "If the Justice Center is to proceed with expediency, then the S&W Cafeteria will need to be destroyed."

Coddington is harshly critical of the siting, which he says was "one more of convenience rather than one of strategic planning." He says it clashes badly with Gay Street's commercial architecture and traditions.

"What Knoxville needs to commit itself to," Coddington concludes, "is a vision and a comprehensive physical plan which will not allow such either-or-conditions to prevail."

Bomers declines to comment on his opinion of the S&W as a work of architecture. "I think it's a wonderful, romantic idea to try to save it. But we need to place it in its right time period." Schimmenti counters that architectural diversity makes a city strong.

At the moment, Schimmenti's alternative proposal has no official status except as the subject of a magazine feature. "I'm still positive that something can be done to save that building," he says. "But I'm not sure there's any support—from anybody." His 11th-hour—make that 12th-hour—proposal is probably a quixotic lost cause, and he knows it. "I'm just tired of people who don't live downtown making deals somewhere out on their polo ponies, coming in and messing up where I live. As long as the public doesn't cry out, they're going to continue to operate this way."