How Knoxvillians show their appreciation for history
by Jack Neely
Historical geography is a fascinating business. Mysterious forces are at work beneath our feet, aligning and re-aligning our behavior. If anybody ever doubts that historic sites are relevant to our daily lives, look at parking rates downtown.
At some metered spaces, thrifty folks park for about $1.25 a day. But just a block away there's a parking garage where hundreds of cars, some otherwise identical to those parked at the metered places, are parked for $8 a day. What could account for such a difference? I'm not sure, but I have a theory: the $8 a day parkers are history buffs. They enjoy that special feeling of leaving their cars on a spot hallowed by the past.
See, there's an interesting phenomenon at work here that holds true across central Knoxville with only a few exceptions. People pay more to park in the older parts of town. Every block of downtown is old, and arguably historic for something. But the oldest sections—and by oldest, I mean really oldest, the parts that were incorporated as "Knoxville" by 1792—are the same parts that are the most expensive to park on today. That would include anything on Main Street, especially between State and Walnut Streets, and stretching up Gay Street to Church Avenue. This is the historic heart of town, the kernel from which Knoxville grew. It's just about a quarter of downtown today, but in the days when folks still wore three-cornered hats, this was what people called "Knoxville." And today, it's the only place in Knox County where people pay $6-$8 a day to park their cars.
You can't necessarily tell it's historic by looking at it. This is the site of our two glass-and-steel skyscrapers, as well as the large, modernist City County Building. Except for the old courthouse, Blount Mansion, and the Bijou, it's not old-looking. Still, the dirt beneath these blocks is more likely than any other dirt in town to turn up shillings and shoe buckles and shards of 18th-century china. And today, it's the most expensive dirt over which to leave your automobile.
The crescent to the west and north that was annexed in 1795 is just a little cheaper, but even that's relatively expensive. Taken as a whole, the area circumscribed by the 30-block city plat of 1795, which ended at Clinch Avenue to the north, Henley Street to the west, and Central Street to the east, are the main places where it's typical to pay $5 or more per day to park (the main exceptions being a couple of publicly subsidized parking garages that charge as little as $3). When you step out of those 1795 city limits, parking rates drop again.
Those parts of downtown that were developed and incorporated in 1815 are cheaper: that's another broad arc including Maplehurst, Market Square, Summit Hill. It includes our building; all-day prices hereabouts range from $2.25 to $5.
The areas that were incorporated in the annexations of 1852 and 1868—the section we know, a little fudgingly, as the Old City, plus Emory Place—are cheaper still. On selected weekend nights in the Old City, the price may go up to those 1815-annexation rates, but otherwise, only $2 a day is typical throughout these Civil War-era annexations. There's even some free parking there.
All these places are within an easy walk of each other, and in some cases, a few steps makes a big difference. It may be most startling on the Church Avenue viaduct. One end of the viaduct is in the original 1790s incorporation. The meters there charge a quarter for a half hour; that comes to $4 or $5 a day. But just down the sidewalk—near the very point where you cross from 1790s Knoxville into the 1868 annexation—the rate plummets by 70 percent, to about $1.25 a day.
With the exception of the UT area, the sections annexed after 1868—Mechanicsville, Old North, Fourth & Gill, on out to Bearden—are generally characterized by acres of free parking, either on the street or in shopping-center parking lots.
So people pay extra to rest their tires on mid-Victorian annexation, and even more to do so on a Federalist-era incorporation. A distinction of about 40 years of the early-to-mid-19th-century history can cost three or four dollars extra per day. But folks seem willing to pay it.
So, for the benefit of historically minded parkers, here are a few suggestions of our more historic parking spots: When you park in the Plaza Tower garage, you're parking on the site of the old Staub's Theatre. Your car occupies space once crossed by the Barrymores, Pavlova, Jenny Lynd, Rachmaninoff.
If you park at the surface lot on Gay Street between Cumberland and Church ($6), you park at the site of the constitutional convention of 1796, and the birthplace of Tennessee. (It's almost twice as expensive as the 1920s Pryor-Brown parking garage right next door to it, which raises a puzzling corollary: that people pay more to park on the sites of demolished historic buildings than inside actual historic buildings.)
If you park at the surface lot at Church and Walnut, you park on the site of Ross Flats, probably the most beautiful apartment building ever built in Knoxville. It was torn down to give you this privilege.
The State Street garage, at $3, is a relative historical bargain. Though it's just outside the 1792 city limits, it's the actual site of James White's 1786 fort. (When Capt. White co-founded a city, he apparently chose to leave his family on its outskirts.)
So, if you hear someone say that folks these days don't appreciate history, don't believe it. They pay thousands extra to appreciate it every day.
June 13, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 24
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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