The J. Allen Smith house, by any other name
by Jack Neely
People have asked me why I haven't written anything about the embattled J. Allen Smith house on Lyons View. Here I am, the history guy, and everybody from Phil Williams to Joe Sullivan has discussed it, but I haven't.
The reason I haven't written about it is partly that I don't really know the place. I've never been inside it. I've never even been in the driveway. It has always been the home of people I don't know well.
Suburban residential areas are private places. Strangers like me aren't allowed to enjoy them except from the street, passing by. If I stop and enjoy them too long, somebody will call the cops. Tear one down, and I can't feel I have a right to miss it, any more than I ever had a right to browse in their rose gardens or walk right into their bedrooms and take a nap.
On Lyons View, especially: there's no place to walk safely, no place to pull over. Like most Knoxvillians, I have hardly ever seen the J. Allen Smith house except from an automobile driving at 45 mph—and even then mainly when someone else is driving and I have the leisure to look out the window.
It's a pretty house, sure enough, a gorgeous house, a long symmetrical two-story hacienda with clay-tile roof—but I'm not sure how soon I would have noticed it gone. The people most likely to miss the sight of it are the members of Cherokee Country Club, of which I am not one.
Some erstwhile preservationists have been uncharacteristically quiet on this issue. Some of them call it "poetic justice" that Lyons View should lose a handsome building to a parking lot. They say Lyons View residents and country clubbers have been demolishing pretty buildings and dumping asphalt in other parts of Knox County for decades. It's only fair they should smell the hot asphalt, like brimstone, themselves, and be inflicted with something as ugly as a surface parking lot. That's what I've been hearing from some people who have been involved in preservation efforts elsewhere in town.
Is it historic? It could pass for it. Barber & McMurry designed the housein 1916, not long after Charlie Barber and Ben McMurry started their well-known firm. It was the last home of J. Allen Smith (1850-1925), the original manufacturer of White Lily Flour, which may be industrial Knoxville's single best-known product today.
I'm inclined to think the still-thriving factory Smith built downtown, the White Lily flour mill, is more historic. Parts of the factory are a good deal older than this house. That factory's the main reason Smith was able to build such a grand mansion; the old man didn't mill much wheat here.
It's been called "the J. Allen Smith home," but when you hear a prominent businessman of that era lived in a particular place, you know it's likely that all he did was sleep there, maybe eat breakfast, and otherwise try to stay out of his wife's hair. A member of the family for whom Powell is named, Lillie Powell Smith lived here several years longer than her husband did. Maybe the house should go by her name.
Maybe all houses should. Kids talk about going to "Grandmother's house," even if Grandfather still lives there, too. People sense, maybe before they even learn to talk, that a house reflects the personality of the woman who lives there, more than the man.
When it was built, this house was still out in the country. Sequoyah Hills didn't exist in 1916. Cherokee Country Club was nine years old, housed in a more modest building than it is today. It was just before the United States joined the Great War, and when the young bachelor McGhee Tyson, who had not yet learned to fly aeroplanes, was a golf bum at Cherokee.
The house was here in 1918 when the great modern poet Wallace Stevens strolled out Lyons View and described, in a letter to his wife, the beauty of this country lane in the springtime. It was one of the few times a stranger has come to town in the 20th century and called this city beautiful. Stevens didn't mention this house, but described the "swank" vista of the river from the bluffs of Lyons View.
But for most of us, Lyons View is no longer even a view. If Stevens could retrace his steps to see the same view today, he'd run into privacy walls. His country stroll would set off security alarms and barking dogs.
There are no sidewalks on Lyons View, no public accommodations until you get to Lakeshore Park. With or without the houses, Lyons View and its beauty is a private place where most of us are not welcome. Should we get worked up about a house there? Can a city count mere beauty, wherever it appears, as a public asset? And can a city defend private beauty by public policy?
Some surface parking lots are contoured and landscaped and blooming with flowering shrubs. Some parking lots are less ugly than others. They are all uglier than this house. The people who are going to have to live with the loss of a beautiful house and the gain of a parking lot are the ones who have decided to take that step.
Usually when a historic house is torn down for a parking lot, the powerful are inflicting themselves upon the powerless. In this case, the powerful are inflicting themselves upon themselves. You might think, maybe it's about time. And that maybe this time the powerful will learn from their mistake. But I know just enough about the powerful not to count on it.
March 28, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 13
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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