Metro Pulse/Secret History/Addenda

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Notes on street clocks and street parades

by Jack Neely

A few weeks ago I quoted a column by an anonymous reporter who described Gay Street in the dead of night in the winter of 1901. Central to his nocturnal adventure was the ticking of a large freestanding clock on the sidewalk; he called it "the Hope Clock." The clock's mechanical ticking, inaudible in the noise of the day, seemed uncommonly loud in the middle of the night, when he could hear it halfway down the block.

I got curious about the Hope Clock, which sounded like something in a Poe story, and looked into it. It was fairly easy to nail down the jewelry store called Hope Brothers on Gay Street. In their circa 1900 ads, they boasted that they were located "at the Sign of the Big Clock." I didn't find a photograph of the Hope Clock. I did find, in a brittle old promotional booklet at the McClung Collection, one drawing of it. It was a fluted Victorian thing, apparently painted, or gilded, in contrasting tones. The word HOPE was printed vertically on its four-sided base.

I didn't notice at first that the clock in that old drawing looked something like the 14-foot-tall clock of black-painted cast iron in front of Kimball's, the one I walk by every day. But when I did see a vague resemblance, I doubted it could be the same one. Hope Brothers wasn't here on the 400 block. It was across the street, and a block down.

Finally I did what I should have done to begin with. I called Jim Overbey, who's in charge of Kimball's, and has been for a long time. It turns out the clock that still keeps good time in front of Kimball's Gay Street store today is the Hope Clock that the nocturnal spy described in 1901. Around 1897, Hope acquired a big clock they had mounted on the sidewalk in front of their store.

But in 1929, Hope Brothers moved to what's now the Kimball's location. They brought their Big Clock with them. During the Depression, Hope lost their lease, and their assets. The landlord reopened the jewelry store as Kimball's.

Hope Brothers soldiered on for several years in a more modest place on Market Square. But Kimball's is still in business, the last real jewelry store downtown. And they've got custody of the Hope Clock, which has been keeping time on Gay Street for 105 years now. Maybe the HOPE signs are still there somewhere, underneath the black paint.

I don't have any reason to think they'll represent the Hope Clock in Masterpiece Theatre's production of James Agee's A Death In the Family, which airs nationally on March 25. Agee didn't mention it in his book, but in 1916 the clock was definitely part of the Gay Street neighborhood that forms the book's opening scenes.

As I mentioned in a column a while back, when I first learned they were shooting the Knoxville-based story in Franklin, the charming 19th-century town that doesn't look like Knoxville at any point in our history, I was skeptical about how faithful its setting could be. A lot of Agee's Knoxville remains. I hear Masterpiece Theatre has done a good job with the film, but I still think they should have shot Knoxville's best-known story here.

Now I have a lenten-season apology to make. In a column several years ago I made tongue-in-cheek fun of Knoxville's Mardi Gras parades. That column somehow made it into my first collection, Knoxville's Secret History, which is, for several good reasons, out of print. Anyway, I ridiculed the notion that Knoxville had any right to make a big deal of Mardi Gras.

I've enjoyed New Orleans' Mardi Gras, but I thought for years that Knoxville's latter-day attempt to acquire Mardi Gras for ourselves was mainly embarrassing.

It seemed a sad state of affairs when one 18th-century Southern city imitates the culture and cuisine of another 18th-century Southern city. New Orleans never imitates us; if they threw their own version of the Dogwood Arts Festival, I have this sinking feeling that they'd have us licked. They might even transform it into an arts festival. But cities with a healthy sense of themselves don't imitate other cities' culture.

However, since then, as I learned how important parades and street parties and masquerades were to 19th century Knoxville's cultural life, I began to get it. I began to suspect that maybe our real problem was that at some point we started imitating other, blander American cities; at some point maybe 85 years ago, Knoxville actually stopped masquerading and throwing downtown street parties. Maybe that fact was what we should be embarrassed about.

Partly with the encouragement of my daughter, I swallowed my principles and began to make a habit of Community Shares' Mardi Gras bashes. I even wore a mask in parades and threw beads. I couldn't deny that, shamelessly derivative though it might be, it was also a great deal of fun: to see people hollering from their third-floor windows, to see kids diving into the gutters for strings of plastic beads, to get people outside interacting with their own streets and architecture as we never do on any other day, for any other occasion. And I have to be honest about my regret that it didn't happen this year.

In its 13 years, Community Shares' Mardi Gras at least proved that this city craves a real, lively street celebration. We can only hope someone else will pick up where Community Shares left off. Maybe some of Mardi Gras' revelers' pent-up energy will find an outlet in what I hear will be a newer, livelier Dogwood Arts Festival.