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Cover Story

Northern Exposure
People who live in the historic neighborhoods of North Knoxville don't doubt that it's the best place in town. And they don't much care what you think about it.

Features

Coming Up?
Oakwood, Lincoln Park and North Central look for their own resurgence.

Building North Knoxville
It took a dummy and a minister named Isaac.

Class Issues
North Knoxville schools pose problems for new arrivals

People who live in the historic neighborhoods of North Knoxville don't doubt that it's the best place in town. And they don't much care what you think about it.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

"Thank God for North Knoxville
Where this town still looks like itself,
It's the last place in America
Ain't trying to be somewhere else"
—"North Knoxville," Todd Steed & Apelife

Alma Oxendine is sitting on the broad wooden porch of a Victorian house at the corner of East Oklahoma Avenue and Cornelia Street. She is a small woman with a blaze of white hair and a clear, sturdy voice. She knows this porch well, and these sidewalks and streets. Just inside the front entrance, through the second door to the right off the main hall, is the room where Alma was born. That was in 1907. Her father built the house in 1895.

She spent the first 25 years of her life here, the youngest of four daughters born to John Housholder and his wife Mary Elizabeth (known to everyone as Molly). John Housholder was a railroad machine shop foreman who walked to work at the Coster yards across Central Avenue every morning and walked home every evening around 5 o'clock. The neighborhood children would wait out on the sidewalk. "It just looked so secure and good seeing the daddies all come home," Alma says, gazing toward the street.

She has stories about every inch of the block—the grassy strip between the sidewalk and road where children would gather in the approaching dusk and scare each other with ghost tales; the long-vanished grape arbor out back where her mother would sit and patiently use twined horsehairs to pull worms from the throats of young chicks and ducklings; the house down the street where a free-spirited girl named Ruby Green played loud ragtime piano in the evenings, to the widespread disapproval of the neighborhood's mothers; and the front steps where the boy next door, Harry Oxendine, spent 10 years courting Alma before she finally agreed to go for a date with him.

"He just stuck right here," she says, laughing quietly. "There wasn't much getting away from him."

But until recently, Alma had little reason to hope that those steps and the porch they lead to would be nearly so persistent. She moved away long ago—now widowed, she lives with her son and daughter-in-law in the Powell area—and periodic drives through her old neighborhood were invariably depressing. Every time she came back, more of the houses she remembered were gone. She thought it was only a matter of time before her father's joined them. "There was one time I came by here, and I just thought it was going to fall down," she says. "There was a big pile of rubbish in the back, and I thought it would just all fall down. It didn't look a thing like it used to."

That changed last year. Out of nowhere, Alma's son Harry got an email from two men named Kevin Jeske and Andrew Polyak. They had recently purchased the still elegant house in the nieghborhood now known as Old North Knoxville, and begun renovations. In researching its history, they traced the Housholder family and tracked down Harry, his wife Eva, and—to Jeske and Polyak's delight—Alma herself. Alma was astonished to be invited back to visit her childhood home.

Like many of North Knoxville's recent transplants, the house's new owners are not from around here. Polyak, 40, is a business analyst from New Jersey. Jeske, 46, works at Community Television and has lived all over the country. They moved here in 1998 because Jeske attended the University of Tennessee years ago and has always loved the region—and because they knew they could live affordably in an old-fashioned city neighborhood.

"I grew up in New Jersey in the suburbs of Trenton," Polyak says. "That's all I ever knew, subdivisions—much like West Knoxville. This area has so much personality. All the plots are so different; all the houses are so different; all the people are so different."

Not all of North Knoxville is marked by such dramatic renewal as Old North, but most of the neighborhoods between downtown and Fountain City share the characteristics Polyak identifies. There is an inescapable sense of history in the houses and the streets and the huge trees that tower over them. Heading north along Broadway, you can trace more than a half-century of the city's evolution and cultural shifts. And however overused the word "diversity" may be, it sounds convincing coming from the people who live in this patchwork of overlapping communities, where Victorian mansions and modest mill-workers' houses sit side by side or street by street. From Fourth and Gill to Lincoln Park to North Hills to the Fairmont/Emoriland area, there is a broad consensus that this is the best, most neighborly place in Knoxville.

From the top of Sharp's Ridge on a sunny spring day, with young leaves on trees only partly occluding the view, you can see most of Knoxville and a good deal beyond. Hazy blue mountains back up against the southern horizon, with hills rolling forward to the south banks of the Tennessee River. The University of Tennessee perches on its mound, the buildings of downtown cluster together in neat rows, and the Sunsphere looks like a sparkling toy. The wide gray rush of Interstate 275 arcs through Sharp's Gap to the west, joining Interstate 40 in an asphalt approximation of the fork where the Holston River meets the French Broad.

Closer to hand, filling up most of the visible space, is an undisciplined array of streets and railroad tracks, sidewalks and houses, alleys and driveways. Between a few major arteries—North Central Street and Broadway are visible from here, Whittle Springs is hidden up a hill to the east—the neighborhoods of North Knoxville are packed in side by side.

To write about North Knoxville, you first have to figure out where exactly it is. Going by a city map, you could technically apply the label to anything from Norwood to Fountain City to the Alice Bell community. But if you're looking for cultural and geographic coherence, it makes sense to narrow the scope. Ironically, for an area developed well before the interstate system, North Knoxville is easiest to define by the highways that encircle it. Roughly, we're talking about the neighborhoods north of I-40 and south of 640, between I-275 on the west and Prosser Road or thereabouts on the east. The northern boundary is also naturally demarcated by Sharp's Ridge itself, with its spired fence row of TV and radio broadcasting towers.

These are unapologetically urban neighborhoods, including some of the oldest in the city. Census tracts don't exactly overlap with the area in question, but according to the 2000 data there are approximately 20,000 people here. Median ages range from a low of about 30 years in the Lincoln Park area, where there are a lot of school-age children, to 43 years in the tract that includes Fairmont/Emoriland. About 53 percent of the population is female, and about 10 percent is African American. Census income data hasn't been released yet, but there are other indicators of the area's mixed population: It's almost evenly split between owners and renters, with approximately 54 percent of the housing occupied by owners; 52 percent of the households are "families," half of them with children; nearly 30 percent of the households include someone older than 65; the average household size is just over two people, but almost 40 percent of the homes are occupied by single people living alone. In other words, you can find a little bit of everything.

'Too Far Gone'

When Bill Murrah moved there in 1972, the neighborhood was not called Fourth and Gill. It wasn't really called anything, except disreputable. "It was a slum," Murrah says. "It was an inner-city low-income community, I should say." Murrah was a young, idealistic seminary graduate seeking an inner-city ministry. He found it in the raucous, densely populated streets and boarding houses and rat-warren rental units off of North Broadway. Beginning as early as the Great Depression, the grand old houses that were once home to Knoxville's prosperous classes (see sidebar, "Building North Knoxville") began to be sold off and divided and subdivided into increasingly tiny apartments. Landlords interested in maximum profit and minimum investment slapped up walls and rerouted staircases willy nilly, throwing in cheap drop ceilings and painting over intricate woodwork. By the time Murrah got there, the neighborhood had also been ravaged by the construction of Interstate 40, which demolished hundreds of houses, sliced blocks in half and rerouted roadways in such confusing patterns that North Knoxville may now be the only place in the nation where you can stand at the intersection of Fourth, Fifth and Sixth streets.

The residents were mostly working class, many of them rural transplants not far removed from the hills. They worked at the nearby factories, like Standard Knitting Mills next to Bill Meyer Stadium and Brookside Mill on Baxter Avenue. Despite a bad reputation, it wasn't a dangerous place—Murrah says children played on the sidewalks and streets until late at night, and the biggest problems were occasional break-ins and fights between drunks. "It was really kind of an urban Appalachian community, with many of the wonderful things about that," Murrah says. "People sitting on the porch playing guitar, we used to have wonderful potlucks at the fire station with bluegrass music...people who worked in factories and retired with a gold watch and knew all the ballads from the region."

Murrah, who now works for Knoxville Legal Aid Society, spent 10 years working for Knoxville Urban Ministries out of a neighborhood center he helped establish. The center, which is still there, found a home in a refurbished house on the neighborhood's edge, at the intersection of Fourth Street and Gill Avenue. Over time, that address became synonymous with the entire area. Murrah and a group of residents formed the Fourth and Gill Neighborhood Association in the mid-1970s. They were worried about losing more old houses to neglect, condemnation and fires, and about commercial encroachment from both Broadway and Fifth Street. After Congress passed the Housing and Community Development Act in 1974, the nascent Fourth and Gill group pressured the city for some of the new federal money. Murrah says Mayor Randy Tyree's office was initially resistant.

"We were told by [Tyree's] staff people that our community was too far gone," Murrah says. "They told us they were using a triage approach to our neighborhood. It was like saying, 'OK, your community is going to die, so there's no point in putting it on life support.'" Instead, the city planned to spend its urban development money on areas in Fountain City and farther north. But after extensive, aggressive lobbying, Murrah says Tyree was persuaded to make Fourth and Gill a "target area." He estimates the city spent about $2.5 million on community improvements in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the first of many victories for the neighborhood group, which also eventually won more restrictive zoning and got the area declared a National Historic District.

Murrah notes with a mixture of pride and regret that most of the initial organizing was done by people who have long since left the neighborhood (the exception being Murrah himself, who still lives with his family on Gratz Street). "Some of the people who are known as 'urban pioneers' really came into a neighborhood that had already turned around," he says. "A lot of the hard work at the beginning was done by people who were really low-income renters. But they had to move out."

Still, the neighborhood's gentrification was a slow process. Murrah remembers being astonished the first time a house in Fourth and Gill sold for more than $20,000 in the early 1980s. One of those houses was sold to Barbara Simpson, who bought a small Victorian home on Luttrell Street in 1981 for $22,000. At the time, she was a single mother of college-age children, and she didn't feel any sense of community in her Lovell Road subdivision. She got invited to a party at a friend's place in Fourth and Gill and was taken with its shabby charms. Soon after, she went to look at a house that was for sale.

"I walked in, and the plaster's falling off the walls, the ceilings in the bedroom were sagging. It was horrible," she says. "I loved it, and I bought it."

You can hear stories like that throughout the neighborhood. Bob and Melynda Whetsel bought a house on Eleanor Street in 1980, attracted by low-interest loans and elegant architecture. Their families thought they were crazy, and the day after moving in, Bob Whetsel started wondering himself. Hearing a knock on the door, he answered it and was confronted by one of his next-door neighbors. "He said, 'Sir, I need to tell you before anyone else does—I shot the last guy that lived here,'" Whetsel recalls. It turned out there was broad consensus that the man who'd been shot deserved it (even a judge agreed), and Whetsel says he built a good relationship with his neighbor.

Whetsel also became one of the neighborhood's biggest boosters in the late 1980s. Convinced of its potential, he quit his job teaching school and started selling real estate in Fourth and Gill. His zeal and success brought him to the attention of a mayoral candidate in 1987 who was looking to align himself with neighborhood interests. Whetsel's pitch was so convincing that a few weeks after meeting with him, Victor Ashe formally announced his first candidacy for mayor on Whetsel's front lawn. And when Ashe first ran for re-election in 1991, he came back to Fourth and Gill to launch his campaign, this time at Whetsel's current home on Luttrell Street. Not long afterward, Ashe asked Whetsel to come work for the city; he is currently the director of the public service department.

A few houses down from Whetsel is yet another prominent political player. Before attorney Rob Frost was elected to City Council last fall, he was best known as a fierce advocate for Fourth and Gill, representing the neighborhood group on contentious zoning and codes issues. Frost's election was a sort of culmination of the neighborhood's 30-year quest for clout and recognition. A Webb School graduate who grew up in Sequoyah Hills, Frost developed a taste for historic homes while he was a law student in New Orleans. When he came back to his hometown, he went looking for someplace like that city's Garden District. He bought a house on Caswell Avenue, two blocks off Broadway.

"You could almost say I was returning my family to North Knoxville," Frost says. "My grandmother grew up on East Scott in Old North Knoxville." That doesn't mean his family was happy about the move. "My parents were dismayed, and [his wife] Erin's parents were dismayed," he says. "But once we actually got into the area and got working on our house on Caswell, once you get people into Fourth and Gill, you just see eyes pop open and jaws drop open. People say, 'Oh my, I never knew this was in Knoxville.'"

Like many of his neighbors, Frost works downtown, which gives him a 1.3-mile commute in the mornings. He rattles off the places he can walk to: the Domino's pizza on Broadway, the Knoxville Food Co-op, Sassy Ann's blues club, the Real Peking Chinese restaurant, Abba's corner grocery store. "It's a great urban area," he says. He notes that many of his friends bring their children to Fourth and Gill for the neighborhood's huge Halloween party every year.

Frost sold the Caswell Avenue house after completing work on it and is currently renovating an 1895 house on Luttrell, Fourth and Gill's main drag. "It's coming along very nicely."

So is Fourth and Gill. Even Murrah is reluctant to complain about the increasingly upscale nature of the neighborhood he helped transform. It's true that the Fourth and Gill Neighborhood Association's newsletter no longer proclaims itself "A voice of poor and working people" as it once did, and you're more likely to hear Verdi wafting from the porches than fiddle music. But even though Murrah acknowledges missing some of the "flavor that's been lost," he says, "It's a great neighborhood. It's a real community now. My kids have been raised there, in a community where they can walk down the street and people are sitting on the porch and say, 'Hi, come on up for some tea.'"

Old (North) Friends

Fourth and Gill is not the only place with porches and friendly neighbors. Just to the north and west is Old North Knoxville—where on a warm Saturday afternoon, a dozen people are gathered on the wooden deck off the side of David Vogel's stylishly restored Victorian home on East Scott Avenue. They're a mixed group by age, gender and background, ranging from a professional chimney sweep to an airline ticket agent to an investment advisor; there's a married couple who have been together for decades, and an engaged couple in their 20s; there are natives and newcomers and everything in between. What they have in common is a fierce affection for their neighborhood. They are all active in the Old North Knoxville neighborhood association, and they have all bought homes in the historic district sometime in the past decade.

"We have big houses, we have little houses," says Vogel, general manager of Community Television, offering his guests a casual lunch accompanied by wine and homemade spice cake. "We have a shotgun house down here that sold for $8,000, and we have houses that are worth a quarter-million dollars." When Vogel bought his large two-story house, built in 1906, it was condemned and had been repeatedly vandalized by intruders. Now, it's a fully restored marvel, its bright airy rooms decorated with an array of modern art and its hardwood floors gleaming. The window over the kitchen sink looks out on Vogel's deck and swimming pool. In the distance are the mountains.

Like Vogel, his guests say they were drawn by the houses, most of which are close to 100 years old, but also by the personality of the neighborhood. They brag about the friendliness and cooperation—they keep an eye on each other's houses if someone's out of town, they loan out ladders and power tools, they make a point of greeting new residents and inviting them to neighborhood events. They trade stories about their houses and the people who used to live in them. And inevitably, they compare it to the modern suburbs that many of them fled to come here.

David Palmer, the aforementioned chimney sweep, moved here with his wife Lynn from California in 1993. They picked Knoxville out of the Places Rated Almanac, for its climate and beauty and affordability. At first, they rented a house in Farragut. "That was my fault," says Lynn Palmer, a school teacher. "That showed us where we did not want to live." They hated the traffic and found the surroundings sterile; it didn't feel like they were in Knoxville, or anywhere in particular. Then, on a home tour, they discovered the old city neighborhoods.

"I have never been in a neighborhood where I've been as involved as I am," says David Palmer. "I've never been in a neighborhood where I know as many people as I know." He was president of the neighborhood group for three years and helped organize the effort to get banners on streetlights at the various entrances to the neighborhood welcoming people to the "Old North Knoxville Historic District." Of course, all that neighborliness has its price: "I started mowing my lawn this morning," Palmer says, laughing. "I was stopped three or four times by people walking by."

Sarah Neessen, who bought a house on the corner of East Scott and Glenwood with her fiancé Marty McBrearty, says, "My favorite thing about our house is the front porch." Everybody nods. Porches are important in these neighborhoods, providing a transition between public and private spaces. Last fall, the Old North neighborhood group sponsored a "Sunday on the Porch" walking tour, with more than 20 houses offering refreshments to passers-by. Like its Fourth and Gill counterpart, the Old North group is one to be reckoned with—it has lobbied successfully against commercial rezonings in the area and attracts upwards of 1,000 people to its signature home tour every December.

"I think if we had to move out of this neighborhood, I would just leave Knoxville," Lynn Palmer says.

From Fellini to Fulton

Further north along Broadway, you come to a cluster of North Knoxville institutions: the Broadway Shopping Center and, just across Woodland Avenue, the hill that is home to both St. Mary's Medical Center and Fulton High School.

The Shopping Center was built in the 1950s, and it shows—it's a long, flat-roofed plaza with no distinguishing features except for the narrow gulch of First Creek that runs along its front property line. (The creek continues across Broadway, where it is paralleled for a short distance by the first leg of what city officials promise will eventually be a greenway system connecting North Knoxville all the way to the downtown riverfront.) The stores themselves stand as a resolute rebuff to anyone concerned about North Knoxville getting too gentrified. With one pawn shop, two cash advance places, two rent-to-own stores, a Goodwill, and both Dollar General and Family Dollar along with Deal for a Buck, it's a reminder that this is still a strongly working-class area with a lot of residents less concerned about saving old houses than paying next month's rent. It is also a testament to the diversity North Knoxvillians lay claim to—there aren't many places in town where you can walk from a $200,000 house to a Save-a-Lot in five minutes.

At the northern end of the plaza is the grocery store widely known as the "Fellini Kroger." It's not clear where the name came from, although the reference is obviously to the strange circus of characters who populate Italian director Federico Fellini's movies. People who have moved to North Knoxville in the past decade say they heard it from their neighbors. Longtime residents say the name surfaced sometime in the late 1980s; some suspect it was the invention of former Whittle Communications employees, many of whom rented or bought houses in Fourth and Gill. Some people don't like the designation, seeing it as a snotty bourgeois put-down of the low-income population that shops at the store. Others prefer to think it simply refers to the oddball mixture of people from all walks of life you're likely to encounter in the heart of North Knoxville. In any case, the name has stuck, and it is almost always used affectionately.

It also has the region's most prominent Catholic hospital. In 1927, following a report of a hospital bed shortage in Knoxville, the Sisters of Mercy of Nashville agreed to establish a new medical center here. The local DeWine family donated 70 acres of land on Oak Hill. In April 1930, St. Mary's Memorial Hospital opened, with a total construction cost of $425,000. The St. Mary's system has grown considerably since then, now encompassing three hospitals across the region and numerous clinics and health centers. The medical center on Oak Hill remains its headquarters, with 1,800 employees and 506 beds. And it has long been deeply involved in the surrounding neighborhoods. Hospital administrators serve on the boards of local neighborhood associations, and St. Mary's provides nurses to some of the nearby schools. Many employees live near the hospital as well.

"We consider it very important that we participate in the neighborhood in which we live," says St. Mary's CEO Debra London. "...I don't want to be seen as this big entity on the hill that does not get involved in the community."

Right next door is Fulton High School—home, as a banner in the art deco-ish lobby announces, of the Fulton Falcons. Fulton, which draws on all of the nearby neighborhoods and also reaches across I-275 to Western Heights and east to the Knoxville Center mall area, is the most racially diverse high school in Knox County. Of its 850 students, 76 percent are white, 21 percent are black, 2 percent Hispanic and 1 percent Asian. The school, celebrating its 50th birthday this year, was recently given a $14 million renovation, including construction of a massive new gym complex next to the football field.

Assistant Principal Kitty Hatcher can see the gym from the window of her office on Fulton's third floor. Hatcher grew up on Emoriland Avenue, graduated from Fulton in 1974, and spent her first years as a teacher here. The biggest difference since her own student days is simply in the size of the student body; 28 years ago, the school had about 400 more students.

"The neighborhood has been an aging population," Hatcher says. "But I think that's switching." Hatcher herself is illustrative of some of those trends. Like many of her North Knoxville peers, she eventually moved further north, to newer suburban developments in Halls. But she says even the expatriates maintain strong ties to Fulton and the local neighborhoods, returning often to patronize favorite businesses and support the school's sports teams. When Hatcher came back to Fulton as an administrator two years ago, she brought along her own daughter, who transferred from Halls. "She has absolutely loved it," Hatcher says, which means the family will soon have two generations of Fulton grads.

"We have a tremendous amount of teachers here who were [Fulton] students as well," she says. "I think it makes a big difference as far as being able to be here and relate to kids and understand where they're coming from."

Queen Acres and Cas's Place

Where Hatcher herself came from was one of North Knoxville's best preserved neighborhoods. Newer by 50 years than most of Fourth and Gill, and farther removed from industrial grit and grime, many of the houses in the Fairmont/Emoriland area have changed hands only once or twice.

Joe Messer and his wife Gail Robertson live in a house on Clearview Street, a few blocks off Fairmont. A 33-year-old hair stylist who grew up in Knoxville and the Tri-Cities, Messer remembers coming to his grandfather's house on Grainger Avenue as a boy. He used to run around the Old North area—"I just remember being in love with all those big old houses." Messer and Robertson's home is newer, he guesses about 60 years old. It's on a street of comfortable 1940s houses clustered close together. "It's a very old neighborhood and all the houses are pretty individual," Messer says. "You see a lot of young families or retired couples. The folks on either side of us are retired." It's the kind of place where kids play in the street and people open their windows in warmer weather so you can smell dinner cooking.

"It's definitely in town, but you really don't hear of any crime," says Messer, who has an easy commute down Washington Pike to his job at Knoxville Center. There's plenty of dogwoods. We've got a young blossoming cherry tree in the front yard."

The trees are blossoming over on Emoriland Boulevard too. With its carefully tended flower gardens and cropped lawns, the street has a Depression-era elegance that seems both urbane and homey. That, plus its relatively affordable real estate, may have been what attracted one of the neighborhood's most prominent demographics: gay men and lesbians.

"You mean the 'Queen Acres'?" asks Joe Rader with a laugh. The retired UT professor says Fairmont/Emoriland has had that nod-and-wink sobriquet among local gays for years. He's quick to aver that the neighborhood is not some kind of "gay ghetto." But he suspects the area's architecture and personality, combined with struggling local schools, made it a natural magnet for gay childless professionals. "As is frequently the case in urban areas, gays will move into an area where the houses are nice but the prices aren't as high as the really premium areas," Rader says.

But he says the growth of a gay presence over time has led to remarkably comfortable relations. Since neighbors often get to know each other individually, by talking on the street, trading lawn care suggestions or just saying hello, personal bonds seem to override insecurities or preconceptions. "It has been remarkable to see how the gays and lesbians have been accepted by all the other people," says Rader, who jokingly calls Emoriland "a poor man's Sequoyah Hills."

That tony West Knoxville neighborhood is also invoked frequently in another district on the east side of Broadway, and not without reason: North Hills, with its winding roads and breathtaking vistas, was built around the same time as both Sequoyah Hills and Holston Hills. Kim Trent moved to North Hills two years ago with her husband David and son Spencer. They had been living in another historic district, the redeveloping area of Parkridge, but Trent fell in love with North Hills while cutting through the neighborhood on errands.

"I would always go down Fountain Park Boulevard because it was such a pleasant place to go," she says. They started watching for real estate listings. "We just got lucky," she says. "The house sold in four days. There's another house up the street that sold in one day. I think people have discovered our little secret place...We're having a lot of young professionals move in who really appreciate the architecture."

And while North Hills is very much built for automobiles—there are few sidewalks and every house has a driveway—Trent says its setting still encourages plenty of walking and neighborly interaction. As in Alma Oxendine's memories of East Scott Avenue, couples and families often go out for a stroll after supper.

One of Trent's neighbors is local rock 'n' roller Todd Steed, whose catchy anthem "North Knoxville" is available on his band Apelife's CD Natural Selections. "Driving down Gaston Avenue/Yens can still catch yens a hell of a view," the song says. "People act like people supposed to/You talk to them, they'll talk to you." Steed says he means every word.

"I grew up in West Knoxville," he says, "which I liked at the time a lot. But it's just gotten so ridiculous and expensive." North Knoxville, he says, "still feels like the Knoxville I grew up in...It's nice to be in a neighborhood that actually feels like one, where people will talk to you and watch your dog for you when you go out of town."

He notes that other local musicians and artists of his generation seem to be migrating north—singer/guitarist Mic Harrison lives in North Hills, poet/rocker R.B. Morris is in Lincoln Park. "It seems like it's kind of where you go when you graduate from Fort Sanders," Steed says.

And he can't resist pointing out that the venerable, venal Cas Walker lived the last many years of his life here. "If it's good enough for Cas Walker, it should be good enough for anybody."
 

April 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 16
© 2002 Metro Pulse