Metro Pulse/Cover/Emory Place

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Emory Place has survived isolation. Now, can its businesses, residents, and homeless shelters coexist?

by Jack Neely

Some people don't know this place exists. It was once an integral part of downtown, connected by busy streets and sidewalks and an unbroken chain of busy city blocks. It still looks like downtown, with two-story brick Victorian commercial buildings and sidewalks and alleys.

But it's different from any other part of downtown. Long streets that are parallel in the central business district grow wild north of the tracks and get tangled with each other in disorienting ways, forming acute angles and distorted blocks. Buildings have different shapes here; one brick building, which once served as a post office, is bent into a 45-degree joint. This place has more trees per sidewalk foot than downtown does, more high-technology firms, more obtuse angles, more roses, and more vagrants.

For almost half a century, I-40 has shielded innocents from wandering up into this complicated neighborhood by mistake. People don't like to walk underneath highways. The Central Business Improvement District has no ambitions to govern this area, and the interstate system seems to guide traffic discretely around it.

If you're feeling bold, you can bust through the invisible barrier of the CBID and keep following Gay Street north under the interstate, past the old prewar automobile showroom buildings, past the grand old First Christian Church, past Mer-Mer's Bakery and the old Beaman Building, as Gay Street dwindles into a quiet two-lane road. Gay Street ends improbably in a little urban glade of sidewalks and trees— a town square, or, more accurately, an irregular six-sided town polygon, surrounded by interesting old buildings.

Novelist and restaurant manager Jack Mauro lives here and often arrives by taxi. Astonished cabdrivers, he says, react to Emory Place "as if a house just dropped them in Oz."

Emory Place is the least-known and, perhaps consequently, maybe the loveliest spot downtown. Leafy trees shade interesting-looking brick Victorian buildings. A rose-garden courtyard enchants passersby. Few places see such extremes of promise and threat, and so many different activities and attitudes in one place. Like Oz, there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

If you move into Emory Place today, some of your neighbors on this one triangle that's not much bigger than a city block will be old-line Knoxville businesses, a gritty machine shop that retools hundreds of automobile engines, a tire store, a no-nonsense print shop. Some of your other neighbors will be a few of Knoxville's best-known high-tech communications firms and a top-of-the-top-of-the-line home-entertainment showroom. There are also a couple of pretty old churches; a 75-year-old oriental-rug shop; a kitchen-cabinet showroom; a bail bondsman; a tire store; and a walkup salon for bellydancing, massage, kung fu, and yoga.

Some of your other neighbors are residents, over 100 of them. Their apartments, no two of them much alike, range from student-ghetto efficiency to Edwardian grandeur. In three renovated apartment hotels which share a rose-garden courtyard, the monthly rents are higher than some Sequoyah Hills mortgage payments.

Just across Broadway on its west grows forested Old Gray, the most beautiful cemetery ever planted in this region. In this serene, shady place of giant oaks and silent Victorian monuments and marble crypts, it's easy to forget that some people are buried here because others who are also buried here shot them.

Things haven't gotten murderous across the street at Emory Place yet, but there are differences that will never be easy to resolve. Some of the differences revolve around one issue: ask anyone about what they like or dislike about the neighborhood, and the first thing most mention is the homeless. Adjacent to the pocket district's southwest is the section of Broadway practically delineated as Knoxville's sanctuary for the homeless and troubled. The Knoxville Area Rescue Mission, the Salvation Army, and a federal-prison halfway house are all concentrated in the two-block stretch of Broadway just southwest of Emory Place. Also there is the notorious Fifth Ave. Motel, the rowhouse-style tenement which strikes some neighbors as a sanctuary for prostitution and drug dealing. A likely addition to the mix will be the Volunteer Ministry Center, soon to arrive here from its rapidly gentrifying block of Gay Street.

The highest points in Emory Place are the Gothic spires of the ornately marbled St. John's Lutheran church. It's been right here for almost 90 years; Steven Misenheimer has been pastor for 14 of those years. The neighborhood has changed a lot, but the 800-member church isn't budging. "We believe we are right in the place where a church needs to be," he says.

Emory Place's conflicts get to the heart of the collisions between different extremes of people living close together in a city.

In This Corner: Hi-Tech and Upscale

Emory Place has been green for only about 14 years. Its current appearance has a lot to do with the vision of a prominent architect whose office is still here. In 1982, the architectural firm of Grieve and Ruth moved to Emory Place, attracted to its provocative arrangement of late-Victorian architecture. Duane Grieve, lately best known for his heroic renovation of the Miller's building, has had his office here ever since. Grieve grew up in Norris, and had since lived in Detroit and had his office on Market Square. But he fell for this lesser known part of town, and specifically for a Victorian building with the 12 small lions' heads peering from the second-floor brickwork. It happened to be the old Walla Walla Chewing Gum factory. "I saw the design of the buildings, the brick detail, the arched windows, the colored glass, all the rich elements that might attract an architect," he says.

At the time, the space in front of the building was still just "a whole sea of parking," that he says was largely used by thrifty commuters who hiked from here to that other, bigger part of downtown. Around 1984, as they renovated their building, Mayor Testerman declared their firm to be "urban pioneers"; Grieve laughs at the distinction now. Renovating downtown doesn't seem quite as unusual as it used to be.

With the help of a federal block grant, Duane Grieve and some allies led a movement to transform what had been a surface parking lot between Central and Broadway into a pocket park, with a quiet through street. "At the time, we felt that you could create an environment for a mixture of businesses that would compliment each other—that could be in the city, but still have trees. We also thought we had the potential to be a gathering spot for Fourth and Gill and Old North," the two successfully renovating residential neighborhoods nearby. "That hasn't really happened, but there's still the potential."

"We're four blocks away from the Old City. But unlike the Old City, this is a quiet business area." He's a little frustrated that, by post-I-40 custom, people tend to cut downtown off at the Gay Street viaduct, between Jackson and Depot. "But we've always considered ourselves downtown," he says.

He has a cabinet of interesting things he's found in his building. Perhaps rarest are a couple of Walla Walla chewing-gum packs: a variety called Blended Fruit, lettered in an art-nouveau style you might associate with Toulouse-Lautrec posters.

Since then, his urban Eden has had its ups and downs. A year or two ago, things were looking up; Comcast Cable was a major presence here, as was a high-tech communications business called Lightstream. But Lightstream went belly up, and Comcast moved to a surprising new location on Asheville Highway. They didn't answer our query about the move, but some say parking was a major concern for the growing cable-TV company. Today, there are vacancies on both sides of Grieve's studio, but he remains upbeat. The J.P. Hogan communications company has moved into Lightstream's old space, vacating its plainer office building on Fifth.

Though much of Emory Place has been renovated, some of it never has. The inscribed cornice of one small, forlorn building on the north side declares it to be the office of DR. D.W. HUGHES. A veterinarian, Hughes left this place before World War I.

It's a place that, after 14 years, or 114 years, however you date the history of Emory Place, seems to be still becoming whatever it is.

What it is depends on whom you talk to. "It's a little high-tech corridor," several say, mentioning some of their neighbors, like Esper Systems, Knoxville's most successful internet service provider; customers up and down the east coast have esper in their e-addresses. With no need for a street presence, Esper has employed 15 on the second floor of a renovated Victorian building overlooking Emory Place for about four years. Though most of their customers never see their headquarters, they're proud of Emory Place and feature a photo of it on their web site. One employee says they like the location because it's close to downtown "and the central pops—the main junctions for telephone lines. We don't have a lot of extra fees when we're so close."

Another high-tech business of a very different nature is just across King Street. Open only by appointment, Matrix Installations is one of Knoxville's highest-tech—and highest price—video and audio stores. For electronics enthusiasts, the showroom's something like a remote-control funhouse. (Some neighbors compare it to the top-secret offices of "Q" in James Bond movies.) Window shades raise and lower on their own, shutters on a large mahogany cabinet slide closed over a five-foot-long screen. Radio stations from Los Angeles come through loud and clear, high-definition television and DVDs are playing all the time on large plasma screens. Prices for these custom-designed entertainment systems range up to $300,000.

Owner Tim Rose is in charge of the place and plays his office like Bill Snyder plays the Wurlitzer. In the back is a demonstration personal movie theater; with a touch-screen computer from which he also controls the room's climate and lighting, he quickly keys in the ultraviolent action movie Blade; it emerges on the 110-inch screen with throbbing audio, as bone-jarring as it is in any Carmike theater. This weekend, though, he's planning a private party in here for the Vols game. A bumpersticker near the stockroom declares "My House Is Smarter Than Your House"; you don't doubt it.

Originally from Chattanooga, by way of Charleston, Rose is a renovation enthusiast, and chose to move his upscale store into an old hosiery-mill building on Emory Place in 1998. "I'm not embarrassed to say we got a pretty good deal on the place," he says.

In This Corner: Downtrodden and Down and Out

For the first few months Rose had to deal with what he took to be resentment of his place, expressed in when he found on his lawn: "broken beer bottles and drug paraphernalia, and some disgusting things I don't want to mention. The vagrants didn't want to give up on this area," he says. "This was their perch." With some other businessmen, he got the police to monitor the area. "My clients, as you can imagine, are like a Who's Who of Knoxville," he says. Some of them aren't familiar with Emory Place. "Thank God for Regas," he says. "For them, that's a landmark. I tell them to follow Gay Street to the end."

"First impressions are everything. I didn't want them coming here and being panhandled." He says the police aren't around much anymore, but that the loitering seems to have ceased. "I've never had one client complain," he says.

He seems happy with business, which he puts at "a couple million," but seems a little anxious about his precarious existence. "People pull in and say, this is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. But then they go back on Broadway and Central, and they feel like they're in a demilitarized zone.

"Most people will tell you this area, from Regas north, has been abandoned by the city," he says. "There's always homeless, always vagrancy, it's how the city deals with it. And I don't think it has been dealt with." His lease is up in 2004, and he's not sure he's staying. "I've got to make a hard decision," he says. "I can't afford to have my business right in the middle of the social-service corridor, if you will."

His concerns about the homeless are shared by some of his business neighbors, like Richard Wood. He runs the Wood Printing Company, near the corner of Broadway. Its sunny front office might remind you of an old-fashioned country filling station; pull up a chair. Originally from the Cumberland coal fields, Wood escaped a coal-miner's life when his family brought him to Knoxville at 13. He grew up in the apartment building now known as Fifth Ave. Motel—in the '30s, he says, it was a beautiful place. After a wartime misadventure in the Navy, which he had to leave due to poor eyesight, he was trained as an army flame thrower. A career in Oak Ridge followed, but in the '70s he moved back to his old neighborhood to open his own print shop. It's now a busy place, employing six, including Wood's wife and son. They have 350 clients from Kingston to Middlesborough; among their latest jobs are 35,000 bus schedules for KAT.

"We like our place, but we don't like the problems we have," he says. Wood is skeptical of the homeless; he and his wife say they use their front door as a toilet. He puts a lot of blame on the nearby agencies that aid the homeless.

He doesn't think much of yuppie ideals for downtown, either. He's against the idea of people moving into the Sterchi Building ("That should be a furniture store," he says), and he frankly doesn't even like the development of Emory Place as a green space, because it deleted a number of parking spaces. Gesturing at the grass and trees out her window, Francis Wood says, with honest nostalgia, "All that was rows and rows of cars."

The redevelopment hasn't hurt their business, they admit. "But it hasn't helped." Asked what he likes about Emory Place, he says it's convenient and easy to tell people how to find; and that, unlike downtown, it has available free parking.

Around the corner on Broadway is venerable Harb's Carpets. Owner Ramsey Harb shares some of Wood's concerns about the homeless. He says he hasn't seen any improvement in the situation in his 20 years here, and he says the number of homeless seems to be growing. He says "they try to bum money off our customers in the parking lot." He says he's heard a lot of talk, but little action; he says he and his neighbors feel abandoned by the city.

The sentiments of some neighborhood merchants raise the question of why Emory Place isn't part of the CBID, responsible for many improvements in the better-known parts of downtown. Some up here plainly don't want to be included, but one CBID officer speculates that the boundaries, established years ago, had something to do with urban contiguity: the long lateral fissures formed first by the train tracks and then by the interstate cut Emory Place adrift from the CBID's "downtown."

Other businesses claim not to suffer any trouble from the homeless. Esper Systems doesn't depend on walk-in customers, and in fact doesn't have a public lobby. One prominent employee, who prefers not to be named, says she works there all hours of the day and night, and feels safe. "They're people," she says. "They go about doing their business, and we do ours."

A couple of longtime businessmen prefer to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the wealthy inhabitants of the townhouses on Fifth. "They're terrible neighbors," one says; they're a bigger problem for him than the vagrants are. Spoiled college kids who have, for years, smashed wine and beer bottles in his parking lot and on top of his roof. He says they're distinguished from the homeless by the labels on their expensive beer and wine bottles and by the fact that, when they are encountered parking in his lot, they're more "belligerent." Puzzled about the fact that they seem to be a different crop of college kids whose behavior is consistently awful—beyond any reasonable college term—one businessman concludes that they must be members of a permanently stupid fraternity. His associate says given the choice between vagrants and frat boys, he'll take the vagrants. Any day, he says.

The folks at Mer-Mer's Bakery, in the unusual, vaguely Swiss-looking Beaman Building have been in business here for almost four years. It is, a reporter quickly learns, the only place to buy food in the neighborhood. The rich pound cake, sold by the slice, is a specialty. "I have a lot of walk-in customers," claims owner Chandra Taylor, who named the place after her little daughter's nickname. Employees from BellSouth, sometime folks all the way from old downtown. "There are homeless people here, but I don't have a problem with them," she says.

For the record, in several hours of walking around the neighborhood for this story during daylight hours, this reporter was never panhandled once, though a couple of ladies of indeterminate age called after him without stating their business.

Duane Grieve is of two minds about the problem. He originally planted some benches in Emory Place, but said he removed them because he was tired of picking up the litter invariably strewn around them on Monday morning. He doesn't mind the homeless much; he knows some of them well, like the guy who's been living in an old Lincoln near his building. He says they watch out for each other; even the prostitutes are handy on occasion. Once, he says "There was a gal who caught a guy who threw a brick through our window."

Probably the most unusual attitude toward the homeless is that of Pastor Misenheimer, who welcomes opportunities to help them. "It's an extra responsibility, but I wouldn't call it a burden," he says. "It's a rich and wonderful blessing, to feed the hungry and minister to those who have desperate needs." Several of the homeless join his congregation on Sundays. "If I didn't enjoy my ministry down here, I wouldn't have stayed for 14 years," he says.

The problem is not the homeless-aid agencies that draw the homeless to south Broadway, says Misenheimer, who seems pleased that Knoxville has a regional reputation as a haven for people with serious problems. "I think they're well cared for in Knoxville," he says. "We have better facilities than anywhere around. The word is probably out." He singles out Knoxville Area Rescue Mission, now in new facilities on the block south of Fifth, for praise. "They do a wonderful ministry," he says. "If I were homeless, that's where I'd go for help." For him, the adjacency of the homeless only gives him more opportunities for Christian ministry. But he does see serious problems, and doesn't mince words about what they are.

"The real cancer in the community grows around the Fifth Ave. Motel," he says. "What they provide is a place for pimps and prostitutes and drug dealers who prey on this vulnerable population." He says he sees drug dealers and prostitutes working out in the open every day.

"I'm not sure where the police are, in regards to their patrols. We used to see the policemen walking the beat. They'd come in for coffee. I'm not sure what happened to them."

He's also baffled, as many are, by the mysterious designs of TDOT, which he says has routed traffic away from Emory Place. Mentioning the Henley Street tunnel and the Blackstock-area construction, he says, "they spent millions, and no one can tell me why."

He says he's concerned that there's a mentality that all the homeless can be quarantined in one two-block area out of sight and out of mind. "You know, the convention center's only three blocks away; if you think the homeless population's going to stay here, that's short-sighted."

Some worry especially about Volunteer Ministry's tentative plans to move into the space at Broadway and Fifth recently vacated by KARM. Advocates of the plan say the daytime and evening services to the homeless will make life's necessities more convenient to them, as well as keeping them from wandering more broadly on the city's streets—especially North Gay, downtown's main connection to Emory Place.

It may be hard to describe the crimes of Fifth and Broadway as victimless, but many who live here say they're not much affected by it. Bethann DeGrow is a 30ish librarian who has lived here for several years. "I love living there," she says. "It's quiet, and close to everything. I think it's safe." She'd had trouble with break-ins when she lived in Fort Sanders, but never here. Except for a rash of people tearing into her convertible a couple of years ago—she thinks they were just looking for a warm place to sleep—she has never had any problem. She admits she is a little annoyed when men driving by make assumptions about an attractive young woman walking alone in this district. "I just say no and keep walking," she says.

She lives in Patterson Cottage, an ivy-covered brick apartment building on King Street. Another resident is Club LeConte manager, published novelist, and sometime Metro Pulse contributor Jack Mauro. He likes life at the Patterson, but says long-termers like them are rare. "These days, aside from one or two lifers like myself, the studios are occupied and emptied by students almost as frequently as if it were a hotel. Go figure."

Mauro says the first story he ever wrote he says—was "Roses, Stone," which appears in his 2000 collection, Gay Street. The eerie story opens in the odd courtyard rose garden established by renovator Kristopher Kendrick as "The Rose Park of Miss Mary Gill," the late beloved merchant of curiosities. Broken concrete pillars and rotting railroad ties, surrounded with well-kept but wild-growing rose bushes, gives the place, from King Street at least, the illusion of classical antiquity: "Stone pillars, cut to halves in length and stained with moss and age, stand aligned in a geometry of no purpose."

About 60 live in the three renovated townhouses that share the Mary Gill park: the Patterson, the Lucerne, and Sterchi Oaks, the most lavish of the three. On the broad veranda, one day last week, was a barbecue grill and a portable padded bar. Nearby, also facing Fifth, is Corniche Development's McMillan Flats renovation project, a residential renovation of more handsome old places, now underway.

Another Corner, Another Idea

Docked at Emory Place's east side like an ocean liner is huge old Knoxville High School, where the likes of James Agee and Patricia Neal may have learned a thing or two, at least about life in a crowded public high school. Its bronze doughboy statue, fist held high, charges perpetually toward Fifth Ave. The KHS has been closed for half a century now, and a fence keeps pedestrians away from its crumbling classical portico. It may be surprising to hear that the 116,000 square-foot building is nearly 100 percent occupied: still home to Board of Education offices, as well as those of the credit union, school security services, and vision and hearing specialists. Many of the old KHS classrooms are used daily for GED and vocational classes. There's hope for the building, too, which is embarking on a county-approved $340,000 project to repair its roof and porch; work should start soon.

But the biggest news of the year for Emory Place is the announced prospect of an ambitious memorial anchored here at old Knoxville High and encompassing most of Emory Place. It has little to do with any of the incongruous factors of Emory Place as we know it, with indigent vagrants or arrogant yuppies, nor with Isaac Emory, the demi-pacifist for whom it was originally named; but it was partly inspired by that statue that has stood in front of the high school for 80 years; lately, several have remarked on the fact that Knoxville never got around to erecting a World War II memorial of any substance. The East Tennessee Veterans Memorial Corridor and Plaza would honor the regional dead of 20th century wars. So far, the Memorial Corridor is just a labor of love by one Bill Felton and a committee of interested parties, including Patricia Neal, retired Brigadier General Walter Bacon, and County Commissioner John Schmid.

As envisioned in a proposal in March, the memorial would stretch from the World War II statue, perhaps eventually including a museum in old Knoxville High—which, after all, educated thousands of future soldiers in both World Wars. It would encompass the green spaces of Emory Place, perhaps with some statues; then proceed down Tyson Street, which is named for a World War I general, to the original National Cemetery on the far side of Old Gray, resting place of veterans from at least six major wars. (One of them was an officer named Neyland.) Architect Lee Ingram has been working on the project, but says it's still in its early stages. He has always admired Emory Place as a "beautiful enclosed pedestrian space, reminiscent of a European square." He says he's committed to a project that wouldn't spoil that impression.

The Formation of Emory Place

The open square that distinguishes Emory Place is not a natural formation, nor was it a deliberate park. This cavity is an architectural fossil of a building that vanished a century ago. This open space was once the site of a large building known as the Central Market.

In the late 1880s, this delta at the convergence of Central and Broadway was at the very northern city limits of Knoxville, as it had been defined since before the Civil War. For travelers from points north, especially farmers from Anderson and Union Counties, it was their first encounter with Knoxville. Central Market likely seemed as if it would be a venue more convenient for farmers and shoppers who didn't want to deal with the already considerable downtown traffic in the vicinity of our older Market Square, as well as for the thousands of residents of the burgeoning new neighborhoods of North Knoxville. The Central Market House was a long, two-story, bent elbow of a building designed to be perpendicular to both Central and Broadway. It hosted 33 stalls catering to produce-sellers and bakers and fishmongers.

It may have been the first suburban commercial challenge to the center city. In its exciting early days, developers built buildings around it, and daring businesses moved into them. One of the square's best-known tenants, in its heyday before World War I, was the Walla-Walla Gum Co.; it was, for a time, the largest chewing-gum manufacturer in the South, with sales all over the United States.

The Central Market was never the center of a separate town, as some have assumed, though it may have seemed like one. It had its own post office and a firehouse. And here was the terminus of the old steam railroad to Fountain City, known for years, by various explanations, as the Dummy Line. The Central Market was the Knoxville end of the line.

But the market itself apparently didn't work as well as planners hoped. Maybe the 1897 construction of the big market house at the original Market Square knocked the wind out of this sassy challenger. After a few years of mounting vacancies, the Central Markethouse had suffered the indignity of employment as a "hay warehouse" before it vanished, likely in a fire, sometime very early in the 20th century.

The loss of the Central Market was a godsend to some progressive city planners. At the time, many Knoxville boosters were smarting about claims that this was the biggest city in America that had made no allowance for public parks. Suddenly, here was a place for one. In a big long grassy patch in the middle, trees grew. Remote as it was, Emory Park would be our only downtown public park before the 1980s.

It was named as a memorial to the hero of the day. He wasn't a war hero, like many of his generation of grizzled Civil War veterans; Isaac Emory was a minister. Originally from Fulton, New York, he came South as a sort of missionary. He worked a farm north of town, but this northerner with the prophet's beard spent most of his time here feverishly promoting an idea that was new to the South. He'd come here to introduce the idea of "Sunday School" to the benighted state of Tennessee. It was then something of a progressive idea, an attempt to improve the human character on a more intimate basis than a church could provide.

Getting Tennesseans in the Sunday School habit was a formidable challenge, and he took it upon himself to spread his gospel in person, by traveling to each county of the state on foot. Rev. Emory famously didn't like guns, and even in those dangerous years refused to carry one even for his own protection. He was known to hold his Bible aloft and declare, "Here is my pistol; it is the only firearm I have ever carried."

In September, 1904, Rev. Emory boarded an eastbound train at the station three blocks south of the Central Market. He was on his way to deliver a funeral when his train collided with a westbound passenger train. The New Market Train Wreck remains, to this day, the worst transportation disaster in Knoxville-area history. Of the 70-odd people who died that day (the death toll is forever debatable), Rev. Emory was the best known. To thousands of Tennesseans, the day of the New Market wreck was the day Rev. Emory died.

Everyone came out for his funeral; Emory had been equally at ease in Presbyterian and Catholic congregations. He was buried in Old Gray, the big Victorian graveyard right across Broadway from the old Central Market, beneath a stone inscribed "The Children's Friend."

Emory Park soon became home to another memorial: a statue commemorating firefighters who had lost their lives in the line of duty. The bronze statue of a fireman holding a baby originally appeared here around 1909, and was the most conspicuous attraction of Emory Park, as huge Knoxville High was built next door. Every day for 40 years KHS disgorged teenagers in search of a place to flirt or throw a baseball.

As Knoxville High went up, the old Central Market area was suddenly trendy. The Lutheran Church was built here in 1913; the Christian Church followed in 1915, as well as others now gone. Soon it was best known as an architecturally impressive neighborhood of churches, and for a density of townhouse-style residences, many of them occupied by wealthy widows, some of whom presided over tea rooms here. Most of the dozen apartment buildings standing here now, from Sterchi Oaks to Minvilla Flats, later known as the Fifth Ave. Motel, sprouted up along Fifth Avenue in the years just before World War I.

Things changed, of course. North Gay Street, which runs into Emory Place, became a noisier place. When automobiles were considered high-technology playthings mainly for the wealthy, this was becoming something like the compact equivalent of a Motor Mile. By 1921, it hosted the city's greatest concentration of automobile showrooms. It's likely that most people who bought an automobile in Knoxville back then bought it on North Gay. You can still see the showroom architecture along the sidewalk, most of it now converted to other purposes.

The automobile habit, first acquired by thousands of Knoxvillians here in this neighborhood, changed the neighborhood in profound ways. In the mid-1950s, the new interstate erased a connecting band of city blocks and formed a concrete curtain between the Emory Park area and the rest of downtown. Bob Leonard, future mayor of Farragut was and is a parishioner of Fifth Avenue's First Christian Church. He grew up thinking of it as the northern part of downtown. "I guess the expressway is what cut us off," he says.

About the same time, Broadway went to four lanes, forcing the parallel parking off the street. It had to go somewhere, though, and that seems to have been the principle motive when, in 1955, the city cut down the park's 50-year-old trees, shoved the fireman out of the way, and turned Emory Park into a surface parking lot for cars. It didn't happen without protest: Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Lucille Templeton complained bitterly about its loss and the lack of long-range planning that contributed to it; she may have suspected that, for the rest of her life, Knoxville would have no urban parks at all.

Today, the Emory Place area is made up of pieces of its complicated past. North Gay's 1920s reputation for automobile dealerships survives in the Manufacturers' Acceptance Corp., the car-loan company still thriving on Fifth, and the AAA office, not to mention the machine shop and a few used-car lots hanging on here and there. The religion-based homeless services may have derived from the area's one-time density of churches. Emory Place itself is an echo of old Emory Park—which was, itself, a remnant of the old Central Market.

It's hard to mark Emory Place's trajectory; it may be too complex a place to conclude that the neighborhood's in ascent or decline.

All these pieces are still rubbing against each other, often causing friction in this place where there are few right angles. They're all still here: the yuppies, the homeless, the shopkeepers, the snotty college brats. None of them seem ready to give up their own eccentric corners of Emory Place.

With reshufflings of the homeless services, tensions between upscale residences and offices, the vicissitudes of high-tech businesses, more new renovations and a prospective war memorial, Emory Place is, at the moment in flux. But then, of course, it always has been.