In search of an elusive species
by Jack Neely
Working downtown, I see all sorts of folks: artists, accountants, architects, alcoholics, bankers, classical musicians, Japanese photographers, sometimes an old movie star or a quarterback or two.
But there's one class of people I don't see much any more. Sightings of them are rare and fleeting. Sometimes I'll spot one at the airport or in a hospital lobby. Sometimes, in a traffic jam on Kingston Pike, I'll glimpse one through a windshield. Sometimes I'll wave, and sometimes they'll wave back. It's not like they're unfriendly.
But downtown, at parades and festivals, in the public meetings where community decisions are made, they may be the rarest of species: the elusive Native Knoxvillian.
I can't tell them all by sight. But having grown up here, I can recognize more than a thousand of them without a field guide. Lately I've been needing binoculars.
Their elusiveness was, for years, just a vague suspicion. But I got to pondering the phenomenon last month, at the public presentation of the Kinsey Probasco plan. It wasn't surprising that the meeting, held in the old Watson's space, was crowded, standing-room only, and the conversation lively. After all, Market Square has been central to the city's culture and commerce for 150 years. Even recently, from vigorous residential development on the Square to the wildly popular Sundown in the City concerts, it's clear that a lot of people like the place, and care about the Square's fate. The Friday afternoon meeting was well-advertised, and open to the public, to everyone who was interested in Market Square and adjacent Krutch Park.
I sat in the back, looking around the room seeing how real Knoxvillians were responding to it. I knew, or at least recognized, about 60 people in the room. It was an eclectic group, representing all ages from infant (one) to retirees (several). They were a mixture of downtown property owners, residents, restaurateurs, city officials, boulevardiers, activists, developers, a few random downtown employees, a musician or two, a couple of artists, some reporters. Of the people I knew well enough to know where they were from, more than 80 percent had something in common: they weren't from Knoxville. The overwhelming majority of the people expressing opinions about ancient Market Square were people who moved here in the last 20 years.
This is America, and you're just as much a citizen of Knoxville if you moved here last week as you are if you were born at old Knoxville General. Many of them have great ideas. My only question is, where's everybody else?
I know people have conflicts, and if there'd been many more people in there, one of them would have been the fire marshal. I'm just curious about the phenomenon. Look at the people that keep downtown's bars and restaurants in business, the ones who come out for street festivals and Sundown concerts, the most vocal members of k2k. Some of them are old Knoxvillians. But a majority of them are from somewhere else.
Meeting new people adds to the enigma. You meet a whole lot of people downtown, but it's pretty rare to meet anyone who owns up to being from Knoxville. It may be more typical to meet folks who are from Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. Sometimes these people claim I'm the first lifelong Knoxvillian they've ever met. It makes me feel special, sure enough. But then I wonder where all my old friends and neighbors are.
I might suspect that most of the Knoxvillians I've known from my '60s childhood are dead or gone to Texas. Except that I do see them in traffic on Kingston Pike.
I've been working up a few theories to account for it. One has to do with federal recreation. Between 1930 and 1979, Knoxville found itself sharing its metropolitan area with a major national park and several pretty lakes. Never before had leaving town seemed so attractive. The families who were here at the time of the development of the mountains and the lakes had an advantage in grabbing the prime property for weekend getaways. Today, the older Knoxville families are much more likely to own a lake house than newcomers; and much more likely to be absent from urban events.
Also, most public occasions are downtown, and downtown went through some awful spells between 1930 and 1980. Maybe downtown was so hellish at some point in suburban Knoxvillians' memory that they wrote it off and don't ever want to return—maybe for the same reason that many people don't feel comfortable around their ex-wives.
My favorite theory has to do with the fact that Knoxville suffered a longer bout of prohibition than most American cities did. When they closed the saloons in 1907, Knoxvillians got in the habit of entertaining themselves privately, warily, and at home. By the time we got saloons back in 1972, hardly anybody was around who remembered saloons as places for business deals and lively political debate, purposes they had served in Victorian Knoxville. So they just kept doing most of their drinking at home, or at the club.
That 65 years was long enough for folks to forget what it was like to get together with people with whom we have nothing in common except a city: a city which, I think, seemed less like a city in 1972 than it had in 1907.
This longtime Knoxvillian expects to see a city here again someday. But I'm skeptical about how many of my old neighbors will be there.
July 25, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 30
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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