Abstaining with prejudice
by Jack Neely
The Preservation Pub is a gorgeous new bar on Market Square, in the space where the old Mercury Theatre used to be. It's at its best when the sun's shining through the generous transom in the late afternoon, when its rosy walls and long, simple wooden bar glow. One day last week, someone sat down near me, looked around and heaved a sigh of relief. "I was afraid this was the pro-trees bar," he said. Maybe it was, for all I know, or maybe it was the anti-trees bar, and the pro-trees bar was Macleod's that night.
I'm mainly tickled to see that so many people care about the place, one way and another. Market Square is the most historically interesting spot in East Tennessee. But to tell you the truth, I tried to stay out of this fight.
The stir's all about the Kinsey Probasco plan, which has gotten preliminary blessings from the mayor and most of the Square's property owners. Though it got through the public-charrette process in June with flying colors, hindsight has some erstwhile urbanists seeing Lucifer his own self in the details. As originally proposed, the plan would call for the removal of the maple and sawtooth oak trees thriving on Market Square today. They may have to amend the plan. On Tuesday KCDC apparently tried to strike a balance between their boss, the mayor, who likes the trees; and their celebrated subcontractor, Kinsey Probasco, who want to remove them. KCDC declared that at least the oaks should be preserved.
The Kinsey Probasco plan is the first mostly good one I've seen, and better than I've come to expect that we deserve. After enduring the wrongheaded details of so many bad plans for Market Square, the Kinsey Probasco plan seems like a gift horse. My first instinct has been to avoid looking it in the mouth.
Some earlier plans, like one proposed by the then-director of the Dogwood Arts Festival six or seven years ago, called for permanently removing all the trees to make the Square more "programmable." Another one called for doming and air-conditioning the place. (Would the trees think it's always fall?) The open-air Kinsey Probasco plan is certainly the greenest of all the plans. It reportedly calls for 50 percent more trees than we've got now. They just won't likely be the same trees.
The ones there now are pretty trees, but not ancient ones. The trees planted here during the pseudo-suburban redevelopment of 1961 are apparently all gone. They were sycamores, which vanished without memorable objection sometime during the inevitable decline of "Market Square Mall." Then someone planted sawtooth oaks, and they're the focus of Tuesday's sanctuary initiative by KCDC.
Apparently not included in the sanctuary are four younger maples in the middle, which may date from the 1986 anti-Mall renovation. (Or five maples in all, if you count a smaller out-of-line maple that I suspect is an accident, perhaps a forgotten scandal in the tree community.)
I hate the idea of cutting down healthy trees anywhere. I don't want to be there when it happens. I've been looking at them outside my office window for seven years, sometimes astonished at them when they turn bright colors in the fall. In the days when Market Square seemed like a secret refuge from chrome-and-pavement Knoxville, my kids grew up climbing on those maples while we waited for supper at Tomato Head. Over the years I've met dozens of friends and strangers beneath the shade of those oaks.
Several of the plan's supporters have told me those who oppose cutting down the trees are just "afraid of change." Of course, there were quite a few more people afraid of change when that change involved doming and air conditioning the place.
People who want to save trees always have, at least, one legitimate and unsentimental point. Trees are good things to have around. They provide shade, and produce the oxygen we breathe, and the older, bigger ones tend to do the job the best. Because it takes some years before a tree gets to be big enough to serve as a significant shade tree, you don't want to cut down mature trees unless you have to. In some cities, trees are protected just like historic buildings; removal of a tree calls for some identifying sign on the tree, with note of a specific hearing about it.
On the other hand, Kinsey Probasco's proposal looks appealing on paper: to plant new trees in one two-block allee from Clinch, across Union, to Wall, uniting a more-open Krutch Park with Market Square. It would form sort of a modest Champs Elysees. The expanding Museum of East Tennessee History anchors the south end, just like the Louvre does in Paris. Maybe we should build an Arc d'Triomphe on the north end. Or, at least, a Shed d'Triomphe. First, I'm afraid, we'd need some sort of Triomphe.
Anyway, my prejudice is to get something worthwhile locked in while we have an agreeable administration. We'll choose a new mayor next year. I like some of the candidates for the job, but I have to admit I'm not sure how any of them might respond to truisms still cited by many older folks: that what we really need to do is bring cars back on the square. It was once, after all, a parking lot.
History doesn't offer much advice on the subject. Neither of the tree plans— the current arrangement, nor the Kinsey Probasco rearrangement—are historical. Before 1961, the most conspicuous trees on the Square were Christmas trees.
But there at the pub, my friend Harry Savage did bring up an interesting point: order and symmetry is anything but Knoxvillian. That much is true. Symmetry doesn't come naturally here. Union Avenue is crooked. So is nearby Walnut Street, which used to be called Crooked Street. Linearity and unity of any sort is a bewildering and foreign concept to most of us, especially when it goes on for two whole blocks. A jag in the line of trees might be an honest and useful symbol of our inability to get together on anything at all, ever since the day in 1803 when Andrew Jackson drew his cane sword on John Sevier on Main Street.
Any authentic historical interpretation of Knoxville would have to allow for a certain amount of chaos. If you were to pick the most architecturally, culturally, and politically chaotic place in Knoxville, it might well be Market Square.
I wouldn't suggest that a little symmetry would wreck this asymmetrical old town, just to see what happens. I'm not convinced that planting trees in long twin rows is necessarily "anal" or "Disneyfied," as it's been characterized. Maybe, at age 211, Knoxville's mature enough to handle a new concept.
I claim to see both sides, but it may be more honest to admit that I don't wholly see either side. I don't understand why these particular trees are more important than the theoretical ones. Then again, I don't understand why the theoretical linear trees are more important than these. They talk about "sight lines," but I can already see Market Square from Clinch. Sure, most of what I see is green and leafy, but there's nothing unwelcoming about that. Some urban design concepts are theoretical, clever things on blueprints which may or may not mean a great deal to citizens in tennis shoes on the pavement.
Me, I like hidden places. I was surprised, at the charrette in June, when some people stated that Krutch Park was intimidating to many people because it was so lush it was "dark." In seven years of working in a building right across from that park, it was the first time I'd ever heard that complaint, but I don't doubt that it's so. I like lush undergrowth and secret pockets that you don't see until you're right there, which may mean my personality isn't that of the typical conventioneer. I'm fond of alleys and surprising corners, which may make me temperamentally more congruent with the homeless guy that this plan seems designed to discourage.
But if we've got eager investors who are willing to save Market Square without ruining it, I can play along, talk colonnades and sight lines with the best of them. Heck, I could support nearly any idea that promises the basic tenets of the Kinsey Probasco plan: the pedestrian plaza, some kind of significant arboreal greenery, movie theaters, the independence of individual property owners and tenants combined with the mandate that they keep their buildings up and use them for purposes livelier than storage.
Here's another idea. Jackhammer up all the concrete floor of the Square, and let grow what will grow: hackberries, mimosas, blackberries, privet, honeysuckle, kudzu. This being East Tennessee, within a year we'll have a regular little jungle there, disorderly and Knoxvillian. Gilligan's Island-style paths could connect the restaurants and shops.
There'd be no place like it in the world, a Victorian thicket. For once, we'd get somewhere before anybody else did.
August 15, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 33
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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