Ruminations about the only metal building on Gay Street
by Jack Neely
Last week marked the third anniversary of the City Council's dramatic meeting to pass the mayor's plan to save Market Square by calling the bluffs of a couple of do-nothing landlords, forcing them out and acquiring their property for responsible businesses and residents.
Today the bold initiative is known in downtown shorthand as "the '98 Plan"—but it was passed in '97. I remember it well; the meeting was in an old restaurant on the square, a cold, rainy Friday, Nov. 21, 1997. It was the only City Council meeting I've stood and applauded. By Knoxville's status-quo standards, it seemed revolutionary.
Today, the targeted landlords are still on the square, still doing nothing. They got a three-year-plus reprieve by virtue of the city's uncertainty about development related to the new convention center, several blocks away. Market Square's storefronts are emptier than they were on that Friday in '97. Its 1980s-renovation canvas awnings are tattered. Market Square's still waiting for its prince to come.
At least we're distracted by more positive signs a half-block to the east. The city did renovate the Millers Building on Gay Street, which is at least near Market Square. And just last month the CBID finished a facade facelift on the same block. On the west side, besides the new Miller's, is Yee-Haw Industries, an imaginative poster shop that's a much-needed bit of color on this misnamed gray street of bankers and lawyers. With the brewpub about to reopen and the Fowler's building being renovated even after the delay caused by a near-ruinous fire last year, things are looking up for the 400 block of Gay Street. It's a block with a history, of course, with its Victorian commercial buildings still intact.
It was this block's east side that was destroyed in the worst fire in Knoxville history, the fatal Million Dollar Fire of 1897. That and a series of later disasters, especially the dynamite explosion that destroyed the front of Woodruff's in 1904, convinced the superstitious that the block was cursed. Not just generally cursed, but specifically cursed by the spirit of a gypsy circus animal, a rare white mule, which had died on the spot long before the first buildings were built here.
Every building has a presence here, but one has always caught my attention. Three stories of bay windows, it seems smaller than that, dwarfed by the other building on the block. It looks almost as if it's been squeezed together by the two giant buildings on either side. It's a very narrow building, hardly 15 feet wide. But what's unique about it is that it has a metal front. Its old pressed-metal panels still bear what looks from the ground like a wreath-and-torch motif.
I've seen a few metal Victorian buildings in other cities. Cast-iron and later steel construction was once believed to be the durable architecture of the future. The facade on Gay Street may just be stamped tin. It's probably not the only metal-front building ever built in Knoxville, but it's the only one that survives. Until recently it caught your attention, especially if you were of a melancholy frame of mind. Of all the run-down buildings on Gay Street, it was the only rusty one.
As near as I can tell from the city directories and a few old promotional photos, it was built around 1905, soon after the explosion, apparently as the pharmacy annex to the New York-based M.M. Newcomer's Department Store to its immediate north. It filled in what had been an alley between buildings, maybe a non-flammable space left by builders whose memories of the fire were recent. It's a bit of a mystery why it was built with metal, in such a different style from the then-modern buildings around it; with its gable and ornamentation, it actually looks older than the building it augmented.
Anyway, as Newcomer's shriveled in the early '20s, their old metal-front pharmacy became Beeler's Bootery, a shoe store sometimes listed as Beeler-Coffin. In the mid-'30s, it became Reed's Millinery, a ladies' hat store. Then, just after World War II, it became the Federal Bake Shop.
How it came by that name I'm not sure, but the word federal had a less controversial reputation in 1946. Even Republicans patronized it. The narrow bakery with the odd facade was apparently a popular place; an ad from its heyday announces daily specials: coconut chiffon pies, "Melt-Away" coffee cakes. Patrons remember it as a modern, spic-and-span kind of place. The Federal Bake Shop stayed in business here for more than 20 years, making it the building's longest-term tenant. By 1967 or so, the bakery was over with, and this orphan building, which started life as part of a department store to the north, became part of another department store on its south.
The Edwardian pharmacy was part of an expanding, pre-mall J.C. Penney, and remained so until the department store ended its Gay Street presence about 15 years ago. Since then, it's just been rusting and intriguing pedestrians who happen to look up. The dark little metal building crowded by the huge masonry buildings looked like a scene from some child's parable, its moral forgotten.
It's now covered with a thick coat of beige paint, and the old pharmacy/bootery/ millinery/bakery doesn't catch your attention like it used to. If it dulls its effect, at least it will keep it from rusting away. But they say there's a hole in the roof of the little building at 410 Gay, and rainwater on the floors. Without renovation, it may not be long for the world.
The facade work won't save this or the other buildings. But at the moment, it seems to have robbed detractors of the main aesthetic reason they can claim to be embarrassed about Gay Street.
November 30, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 48
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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