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A third-floor surprise in a familiar old building

by Jack Neely

The three-story Keller Building on Summit Hill is the largest building on its old Victorian block and was, until now, the last unrenovated one. Built of brown brick around the turn of the century, it might have been named for any of several prominent Kellers, the Kellers of old Keller Bend who claimed close kinship to their disabled niece and cousin, the reformer whose first name was Helen.

About six months ago, Psychologist Ron Breazeale bought the Keller Building to renovate for his practice. It's in bad shape from water damage, but with lofty ceilings and time-stained brick walls, it has what people like to call character.

It's not something a building's born with; character has to do with the building's experience. The eastern half of the Keller Building, number 106, was Burton's Hardware. For a while, it was even a hardware factory. A variety of tenants kept the second-floor busy, among them a black physician who kept his offices for a while, later a tinworker. A VFW post was based here for a time in the '60s. At 108, the western half of the building, the second floor was something called the Douglas Fraternal and Social Benefits Club, and later headquarters of the Variety Press, a black-owned printing company, that in the 1950s churned out a civil-rights monthly known as the Independent Call. The third floor was Kingdom Hall for a congregation of black Jehovah's Witnesses. At various times, the Keller Building also housed a clothing store, a furniture store, an army-surplus store. Over the years, the Keller Building could have passed for a small civilization.

Dr. Breazeale knew a lot of that, but when he explored the creaky upper floors of his new project, he came across a surprise.

Up on the eastern half of the third floor are about 44 folding theater seats with elaborate Victorian-style ironwork at the ends. There are two doors with peepholes hidden by sliding paddle-shaped wooden panels. And at one end of the 100-foot-long hall is a good-sized stage.

Originally, of course, the street out front was Vine Avenue, a lively commercial stretch of poolhalls and furniture shops and drugstores. Leading from the Catholic church on the hilltop deep into East Knoxville, Vine Avenue was maybe the most diverse street in Knoxville, central to Greek immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and especially blacks. This particular block was also the location of a couple of the first movie houses that catered primarily to blacks.

A colleague of Breazeale's found a sharp old photograph of the intersection of Vine and Central, dating from 1918. Out front, above the sidewalk, spelled into three glass globes in the vaguely Asian lettering of the art-moderne period, is the word GEM.

Breazeale sees this as strong evidence his building was once one of the locations of the legendary Gem Theater. Knoxville's best-known black theater wasn't just a movie house; it was a music hall. Bessie Smith appeared at the Gem, as did many of the jazz greats of the '20s and '30s. Among them was the great Ida Cox, who performed at the Gem in 1930, here in the city where she was eventually buried. Poet Nikki Giovanni fondly recalls the Gem of her youth in the '40s and '50s, in her memoir, Gemini.

Lots of folks recall the Gem, but nearly everyone who does remembers it in a long-gone building on the east side of Central—the James White Parkway side where there's now no trace of any buildings at all. However, when the Gem originally opened, around 1913, it was in this west-side block.

Whether the Gem was ever here in the Keller Building is a matter of faith. Some aspects of that photograph are puzzling; city directories indicate the original Gem was in another building next door, at 102 West Vine. The Gem moved to the now-erased east side of Central around 1922.

But if the Gem wasn't here on the third floor of 106 West Vine, well, what was up here on the third floor? City directories often detail businesses and residences on the upper floors of a building, but the 3rd floor of 106 Vine is rarely mentioned. All those theater seats—which, for all we know, may have come from the original Gem—suggest it was something popular. And the peepholes suggest it was something surreptitious: not necessarily the sort of thing that would show up in a city directory.

There's no mention of any occupant on the third floor until 1930, when it's listed as something called "the Band of Mercy." Soon after that, for four or five years, it was the headquarters of the American Woodmen Camp Number Four, a black fraternal organization. The Woodmen weren't as secretive as some fraternities, but that may have been the origin of the peepholes.

But that's just speculation. To learn more about it, you may have to talk to some real people. Onetime civil-rights activist Avon Rollins, now director of the Beck Cultural Center, remembers. In the '50s and '60s, he says, this third floor was an unlisted joint called "the Worker's Club." It was a place you could go to eat lunch, drink whiskey, and listen to some jazz or blues. And you could play the numbers. "The numbers," for us timid, law-abiding folk, was like a lottery, but usually keyed to stock quotations; results were announced twice a day. Walk-up speakeasies and gambling parlors (sometimes called "athletic clubs") were common downtown until fairly recently.

Rollins knows the Worker's Club mainly by reputation. He wasn't allowed there, himself, only because the proprietors knew his parents. "You can't come in here," they'd say. "But I'm 25 years old," he'd plead. As far as they were concerned, he was still a kid. "I'll call your mama," they'd say, and he'd just go back home.

Breazeale has invited Rollins to see the third floor of the Keller Building, and assures him that he can stay as long as he wants to.