Can you move a neighborhood?
by Jack Neely
In the summer of 1979, not long after I moved into Fort Sanders, I was intrigued by a cluster of vacant old houses I'd never noticed before, two blocks from my new Laurel Avenue apartment.
There were three in a row, small in size for the Victorian elaboration of their woodwork; their porches were just barely big enough to sit on. Taller than they were long, with gabled rooves, they seemed almost as if they had been built in miniature, small houses stretching to look as big as the houses up the hill on Laurel. Unpainted, covered with vines and showing signs of decay, together they looked like a scene in a fairy tale about a forgotten city of gnomes.
I wasn't surprised to hear they were about to be demolished. A friend and I walked over one summer Sunday afternoon and took several pictures, just to preserve this image for posterity.
Today, 21 years later, I can't find any of the photographs I took. I don't need them; the houses are still there. Renovated, at considerable expense, they were among the few esthetic triumphs of the World's Fair, known to 11 million visitors as The Victorian Houses; they hosted several attractions, including a popular German-style beer garden. To many, this renovation job was more impressive than the laser light show or the bricks from the Great Wall of China. The houses fit so nicely that some believed they'd been placed there to serve the Fair, a misbegotten rumor that's still making the rounds today.
For most of the last 18 years, the houses have been occupied by foundations, galleries, and other small businesses. Among them are two very different cafes: Sonny's, a mom-and-pop snack shop which has been serving corndogs and frosties to hundreds of hungry kids at Fort Kid, an imaginative playground that is hardly ever quiet, for more than a decade; and the 11th Street Expresso House (the misspelling's deliberate, a now-obscure allusion to a previous business), which is open about 14 hours a day, often the only place open in this part of town. Owner Loretta Roscoe is a bright, energetic presence here since she opened the place in early '94, and it's not surprising that she draws nearly 200 customers daily. Even on a weekday afternoon during the summer doldrums, most of her chairs are taken. Roscoe recently learned that her cafe was one of only two Knoxville attractions recommended in the Lonely Planet guide to America (the other was Tomato Head). Lonely Planet is a guidebook especially popular among young European tourists.
"They come from Holland, Denmark, Venezuela, Brazil," she says. "And Germans, Germans, Germans. We have more Germans than we know what to do with."
Most of her clientele are young, college-age folks, but on Thursday nights she hosts a party for a group of over-60s who come to dance on her back porch.
If the city needs her to pay more in rent, she and some other tenants figure they can do it. They all pay rent to the city, which gets tax credits for renting these historic houses. I don't doubt that, in spite of their National-Register tax credits, the city runs the bulk of these houses at a loss. But the city gets something back besides rent.
Upstairs from the coffee house is the studio and gallery of Cynthia Markert, one of Knoxville's best-known artists, whose work is known around the region, especially in the upscale galleries of Asheville.
Next door is the Art and Antiques Gallery, where a co-op of dozens of local artists display hundreds of pieces of their work, which is mostly representational, living-room quality watercolors and oils. Their level of traffic varies, but their guestbook indicates they've recently greeted some of those European visitors Loretta talked about.
The Humane Society's development office is in one of the three smaller houses; they employ two full-time, another part-time. Upstairs is the tiny fabric gallery of elderly Liberian designer Fritz Massaquoi. Keep Knoxville Beautiful, the local affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, is also in one of the smaller houses; from here, they organize trash pick-ups and other projects like the Old City's new murals. Director Tom Salter, who has two part-time assistants, says, "People just don't believe how pleasant it is to work here."
The Actors Co-op, one of Knoxville's most dynamic and successful theater troupes, has another house they use for rehearsals and share with a vigorous for-profit business, the Talent Trek Agency.
All told, the 11th Street houses make a lively, tree-shaded village that employs about 20 and draws hundreds of visitors every day and occasionally gets written up in international guidebooks.
The houses apparently date back to the 1880s, when this was the corner of Altavia and Scott, just outside Knoxville's western city limits. Altavia became Laurel around 1889, when these houses were new. Scott became Third; counting from the east, it was the third street parallel to Second Creek. It was renamed 11th in the early '20s, to conform to the numbers of the addresses.
As you might guess, this neighborhood was never grand. Between the industrial railyard bottomland of Second Creek and the upper-middle class homes up the hill, on the higher parts of Laurel, it was a neighborhood of thrifty aspirants. Most of the people who lived here believed they were bound for bigger and better things; you can see their strivings in their architecture.
The four larger houses along Laurel were originally a little village of ministers of prominent churches. Among them was Richard Green Waterhouse—a young Methodist minister then, but later the longtime president of Emory and Henry College in Virginia, and later still, a bishop mentioned in national histories of the Methodist church. Later residents were middle management, coal people, dry-goods merchants, an attorney, modest professionals.
One of the early residents of the house that's now the Wyatt Gallery was Cooper Schmitt, the popular UT math professor and dean of the college of liberal arts.
James Brakebill, the well-known photographer, lived at 1012 Laurel—now the Art & Antiques Gallery. When he moved in here, around 1897, he was an apprentice in his 20s, a retoucher for Knaffl Brothers. He co-founded his own company—you still see the Brakebill & McCoy signature on some old Knoxville portraits—during the years he lived in this house. Nationally known for his techniques in portraiture, Brakebill was known around here as Genial Jim.
Those three little houses that first caught my eye were homes to stenographers (male ones, of course), electricians, clerks, cigar makers, coopers, tinners, small families. The widow Rosa McClanahan raised her kids here, including Norma, who was a schoolteacher at Girls' High downtown.
Old city directories also divulge a startling coincidence. Today, the Humane Society office is located at 404 11th Street. In 1895, this was 107 Third Street, and the resident, among the first here, was one Jacob Hieronymous. He's listed as an officer for the Knox County Humane Society.
There was diversity even in this tiny neighborhood. Maybe the most durable resident here was Simon Levy, who lived in the house that's now the Actor's Co-op. Next door was another long-termer, John Frazee. Levy was one of turn-of-the-century Knoxville's more successful saloonkeepers, proprietor of a bar on the busiest block of Union Avenue known as the Kentucky Liquor House.
Frazee, Levy's next-door neighbor, was the white-bearded pastor of the Pilgrim Congregationalist Church. Originally from New Jersey, Rev. Frazee was a Rutgers grad who had served the Union Army as both a chaplain and an attorney and worked directly with General Custer. A conservative who insisted that scripture was the only earthly authority, Frazee was popular among other conservative denominations in Knoxville.
Saloonkeeper Levy and Rev. Frazee lived next door to each other for at least a decade, apparently in peace. Even their tragedies coincided. In 1907, Levy's 22-year-old son, Arthur, died here in the house, of unpublished causes; Rev. Frazee died weeks later. Later the same year, Knoxville voted to shut down all its saloons and liquor stores. Levy stopped listing his profession in the city directories.
That's a quick take on the history of these houses' stories before 1910; I still have several decades to go.
As part of the Worsham Watkins redevelopment plan, all seven of these Victorian houses, along with popular Fort Kid and the adjacent parking lot shared by the KMA, are to be replaced by 80 residential units called "carriage housing." In drawings, "carriage housing" looks like conventional interstate-exit condominiums.
Developers say the houses will be moved to other sites not yet known. Some experts in preservation are skeptical that these houses can be moved safely. Even if they can, they'll lose their National-Register status, and for good reason. Moving a Victorian house is a huge expense and a small consolation. Old houses are valuable not just because their hardwood floors can be carbon-dated to another century; they're valuable for the stories they tell together, where they are.
August 3, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 31
© 2000 Metro Pulse
| 
