by Jack Neely
Nostalgia is seductive. We all have spells of nostalgia, of missing things that are gone. It's a marketing cinch to appeal to that sense of loss. Over and over in recent months, with the announcements of various downtown projects, we've heard the phrase "bring downtown back." There's never any discussion on that point, and everyone seems to agree on it.
The never-answered question is, which downtown? In its 21 decades, Knoxville has seen dozens of different downtowns on this same weary bluff. Downtown has been a fort, a state capital, an industrial park, an upscale neighborhood, a shopping mall, a high-density housing project, a river port, an educational center, a railroad hub, a concentration of saloons, a federal-project headquarters, a church district, a warehouse district, a cluster of restaurants, a theater district.
As fascinating as some of downtown's phases were, most of them had significant problems it would be better if we didn't repeat.
The era implied in many public announcements about "bringing downtown back"—and the era explicitly targeted in one Worsham Watkins presentation—is Knoxville as it was circa 1950.
There were some good things about 1950: the S&W Cafeteria, Miller's Department Store, the movie theaters, and dozens of stores and restaurants up and down Gay and Market. It had WNOX's daily country-music variety shows. Harold's was already there, and that in itself counts for something.
However, even if we leave broader conditions like strict racial segregation out of the picture, 1950 could seem like a golden era only in the eyes of children who didn't notice the crippling problems that city fathers were ungracefully wrestling with in 1950. And because it was the only downtown we knew, we didn't notice what downtown didn't have.
It didn't have, for example, any parks. Some in 1950 thought Knoxville was the largest city in America without a downtown park—unless you could count tiny Emory Park, a grassy spot at the northern fringes of downtown established by default, but in 1950 even that was about to be paved for parking.
The river stank so badly few ever considered walking alongside it—but hundreds of those who didn't have any choice lived down there, in shacks, under bridges, on rafts.
The streetcars had already shut down by 1950. Ridership on the public buses was falling off rapidly as more and more people drove cars, which they parked and double-parked haphazardly all over downtown's streets.
Downtown had no art or history museums, maybe because we couldn't think of anything we were proud enough of to show off.
It had no sidewalk cafes. No one would want to eat outside in a place where they measured the annual "sootfall" in the hundreds of tons.
The sootfall was one reason residents who could afford to were fleeing downtown Knoxville in 1950; they had been fleeing for half a century. (Many fled the whole city; Knoxville's population declined steeply in the '50s.)
On the other hand, in 1950 downtown did have joints where you could buy strained Sterno as a beverage, and lots of inexpensive companions who kept rooms in historic hotels. It did have the Lyric Theater, a decaying Victorian opera house, which sponsored wrestling and, on special nights, even bear wrestling. And it had the Roxy, a burlesque house on Union.
When a popular travel writer John Gunther described Knoxville as the ugliest city in America, he wasn't talking about Cherokee Boulevard or Fountain City. He based his observations on a few days in downtown Knoxville—at what we've lately been calling its "height."
We vilify John Gunther as a northern liberal intellectual, but the fact is that between 1920 and 1970, downtown Knoxville didn't impress many visitors. It struck several as an ugly, godforsaken wreck. They couldn't all have been Communist propagandists; it would have wrecked the Soviet budget.
To name a few: Annie Bly (1924); Odette Keun (1936); Malcolm Muggeridge (1947); Phillip Hamburger of the New Yorker (1961). All of them visited downtown Knoxville for a few hours, a few days, or a few months, were either amused or horrified, and damned the place in the national media.
As gentle a soul as Ernie Pyle wrote, in his Scripps-Howard column around 1935, that he had heard Knoxville, Tennessee, was the dirtiest city in the entire world. After his first visit downtown, he admitted that, as far as he knew, it was true. When he wrote a 1935 article about TVA for Fortune magazine, even homeboy James Agee described "smoky Knoxville" in unnostalgic terms ("walk up sooty Gay Street and turn down smudgy Union").
If anyone knows of an objective description of downtown in the middle part of the 20th century that's complimentary, please let us know about it. It deserves a place in the rare-documents room in the McClung Collection.
Maybe the downtown we remember nostalgically wasn't downtown at its best. Look at the buildings; relatively few of them were built in the mid-20th century. Most of the buildings downtown today were built before 1915, when downtown was a very different place from the retail-centered downtown of the '50s and '60s. It was a downtown that did impress visitors.
When these buildings were built, retail wasn't the only thing going on downtown; it wasn't necessarily even the main thing. Downtown had a lot of what we have now, like law offices and churches, plus wholesale houses and small factories. But downtown was, in large part, a place to live.
There's a lot we can learn about that more dynamic period, roughly 1875 to 1915. In many ways, Victorian Knoxville was the future many progressive American cities are striving for in 2000: mixed-use buildings, architecture on a pedestrian scale, ample public gathering places, good public transportation, fresh-produce markets, popular street festivals, and many, many residents.
The residents left, in large part, because of the noise, smoke, and soot of burgeoning industry in the downtown area. (Ironically, that industry left downtown not long after the residents did.) Apartment buildings and townhouses were demolished. Others became retail shops, law offices, bank annexes. Many Victorian upper floors, irrelevant to street-level retail, were abandoned. Generations grew up believing that the main purpose of a downtown was to be a shopping center. When that left, too, they declared downtown was "dead."
In recent years, though, residents have quietly been returning to a cleaner downtown than we knew 50 years ago—one that does have parks and museums and outdoor cafes. They belong here, as they did a century ago.
History provides valuable lessons about what can work and what might not work. Nostalgia, by contrast, can warp our perception of what was, and what is.
June 22, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 25
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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