What will you do when they come for your street's name?
by Jack Neely
I don't think of myself as a party-line conservative or a liberal. When either of my knees start jerking, I find me a good neurologist. But every time I drive down Cumberland Avenue I see something weird that makes me wish I had me a Gingrich helmet-style conservative hairdo and a gold flag pin and a handgun and a big proud American gut. See, I need to adjust my image, because I'm founding a reactionary right-wing anti-street-renaming coalition.
Lately these Bolsheviks on city council have been promiscuously desecrating the names of our old streets, most of which already had names that were time-cured and perfectly serviceable. Then they rename them after everybody and his coach.
The strangest street sign on this continent is the one hanging up above a Cumberland Avenue intersection. The one that suddenly says "Phillip Fulmer Way/James Agee St."
You don't have to be named Falwell to spot a perverse coupling. I've found dozens of occasions to applaud the work of Phil Fulmer, and author James Agee is one of my heroes. However, I'd feel a lot more at ease living in a city where Stadium Drive is still Stadium Drive, and 15th Street is still 15th Street.
One reason "James Agee Street" bugs me—besides the fact that it just screws up the numbering—is that it's a "historic" name that's not historic. Granted, this hasn't been called "15th Street" forever. Once it was called Dickinson Street; later it was 8th Street. In the early '20s, when city fathers standardized the street names to coordinate with the street numbers, they called it 15th Street. It made sense. Today, Fort Sanders, the most densely populated neighborhood in East Tennessee, is also the easiest to navigate.
James Agee knew this street well; the last time he lived in town, when he was a teenager, he knew it as 15th Street.
Phil Fulmer Way is a much bigger risk. With recent teams, Fulmer has proven he's a good football coach. That he's a legendary immortal is something that only the mayor and city council would presume.
There's also something hokey about using someone's first name in a street sign. It used to be that if you wanted to honor somebody with a street, you'd discreetly use just their last name. It kept things simple and dignified. If the honoree was still alive—and if he had a street named for him, he rarely was—he wouldn't have to be embarrassed, as any humble person would be, whenever he saw the signs. He could modestly tell his friends that he's happy to have something permanent to honor his family.
I never saw anyone's first name immortalized in a signpost before I toured some unfortunate rural developments, maybe 25 years ago, where there'd be a permanent street named for the 1971 Realtor of the Year, and they'd use his whole name on the signpost: Roy "Bubba" Hambone Jr. Boulevard. Knoxville, I fear, is becoming Bubba-ized. Should we complete the job? Add the familiar first names of everybody we've ever named streets for? Make it be Bob Neyland Drive? Dave Chapman Highway? Steve Holston Hills? Hank Knoxville?
Now I see that even old Mulvaney Street, which runs from the interstate to White's Fort, the Civic Coliseum, and the Hyatt, is now gone, renamed "Hall of Fame Drive."
That one's almost worth crying over. Not only is Mulvaney's origin one of Knoxville's endearing mysteries—but in essays about her childhood, poet Nikki Giovanni, one of our best-known living authors, rhapsodized about Mulvaney Street.
Chapter 1 of her autobiographical book Gemini is in fact titled "400 Mulvaney Street," the address of the grandmother who helped raise her. "Mulvaney Street looked like a camel's back, with both humps bulging—up and down—and we lived in the down part..." she wrote at the beginning of a poignant description of a neighborhood almost vanished. Gemini got national attention when it was published in 1971, and "400 Mulvaney Street" was republished in 1998 in an interesting collection called Bloodroot: Reflections On Place By Appalachian Women Writers.
Giovanni also recalled Mulvaney in another vignette of her childhood called "Coffee Signs"; it's in her 1994 collection, Racism 101. "For the longest time," she wrote, "I sang, 'Here we go round the mulvaney bush,' being quite sure at that young age that others were mispronouncing."
Of course, Giovanni remembers a Mulvaney Street we'd hardly recognize, an avenue lively with fishmongers and confectioners and eccentric old ladies. All that remains of her Mulvaney is the Cal Johnson Recreation Center.
You could argue that renaming the street helps direct people to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Sort of like Stadium Drive used to help direct people to the stadium, I suppose. But I suspect street renaming is more often perplexing to visitors. In every guidebook in print today, some or all of these streets appear under their former names. The new edition of an impressive guide called The Tennessee Handbook
is due out in bookstores nationwide this summer. It uses "15th Street," "Stadium Drive," and "Mulvaney" to direct tourists to points of interest. I'll be willing to bet that next year confused visitors to downtown or UT will log thousands of miles driving around town looking for lost streets.
I propose an emergency moratorium on street renaming—and a charter amendment holding that before any street name is discarded, a jury of literate citizens must declare it dysfunctional, culturally valueless, and in need of replacement.
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