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The J. Allen Smith House

It's not the oldest, most conspicuous, or most public of Knoxville's many threatened historic buildings, but it's probably the prettiest. That fact, along with high-profiled and dramatic personae on both sides of the issue, accounts for its place as the year's preservationist cause celebre. Built in 1916 by White Lily Flour tycoon J. Allen Smith (but also known by the name of its last residents, the Coughlin family) the gorgeous Mediterranean-style Lyons View mansion became a test case for an aggressive new form of preservationism: the city-imposed H-1 overlay. Neighbor Cherokee Country Club, which has had the joint surrounded for years, bought the house in 1999 and announced its intention to raze it for the purpose of adding surface parking and a practice putting green. When the mayor declared it a historic building worthy of preservation, Cherokee Country Club challenged the overlay with two lawsuits against the city; one, which found in favor of Cherokee, is now under appeal in state court.

Cherokee also took the cause to Nashville by lobbying for a sly amendment to a preservationist bill that would have given owners a six-month window to demolish a building deemed historic, and thereby threatened preservationist causes statewide. (The amendment passed in the Senate, died in the House.) With big shots in state politics and the president of the National Historic Trust weighing in on the issue, much of the rest of the year was like a tennis match, with the advantage swapping from the preservationists to the country club, then back to he preservationists. At year's end, it's still anybody's set.

The Sprankle Building

Built by influential developer Ben Sprankle in 1904, the five-story Union Avenue building had once been a luxury apartment building, but later served as a flophouse; all along, it also housed one of Knoxville's oldest intact restaurant spaces, most recently occupied by Pete's. The upper floors had been vacant and boarded up for years, but the street level had been one of Knoxville's liveliest corners. Then, neighbor Home Federal, which had bought the building a decade ago but never renovated it, evicted all the building's ground-floor business tenants and announced intentions to demolish the building, with vague long-range plans to build a new headquarters. As local architects opined that the building was indeed salvageable and worth the trouble, the mayor stepped in and declared the building off limits to demolition in a second flexing of his new involuntary H-1 strategy. However, evictions proceeded without regard to the building's hope for salvation; the last tenants left in September, most of them relocating in the neighborhood. At year's end, the building is, for the first time in its 98 years, utterly empty; the date on the MPC hearing announcement changes monthly, as secret negotiations between the city and the venerable bank are said to be in progress.

Historic markers

Lest there be any misunderstandings about the notion that Knoxville has some significant old buildings, Knox Heritage in collaboration with the Junior League installed handsome plaques on 30 historic structures downtown, indicating each building's year of construction. It may not lend much official protective status to them, but before developers of the future demolish these buildings, they will have to at least pause to contemplate these dates and the fact that someone once considered them worthwhile.

The Keller House

Meanwhile, UT, which has had a reputation as Knoxville's most demolition-happy institution, showed unexpected signs of softening. UT evicted art students' studios from the ca. 1910 brick Keller House (the longtime home of businessman and sometime City Councilman Ernest Keller), located on Cumberland Avenue between 16th and 17th and used by UT in recent years as the Art Annex. UT undertook this with an eye toward demolishing the house to make way for the prospective Howard Baker Center for Public Policy. However, UT relented a little when it offered to delay demolition plans and proposed to sell the structure to preservationists who wished to move it. To some preservationists, this offer was small comfort. Much of the house's value is that it's one of the last two residential-style houses remaining on Cumberland Avenue, a street that was once mainly, and grandly, residential. A move would end that distinction and remove the possibility of historic tax credits. At year's end there were no takers. But for whatever it's worth, UT has lately offered the same deal for the remaining historic homes on its campus.

Ft. Dickerson

Ft. Dickerson is not your typical historic building. Actually, it's a steep-sloped forest with some peculiar ditches and mounds at the summit. But some facts give this dirt meaning. It was built in 1863 as a Union fort which served Gen. Burnside's purposes admirably in the successful defense of Knoxville during the three-week siege of the city by Confederate Gen. Longstreet (Gen. Joseph "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler led an unsuccessful charge at the fort). Largely overgrown, in recent decades the South Knoxville citadel has been an assignation spot for the lusty of various persuasions. But freshman City Councilman Joe Hultquist has helped create a task force to study the property and possibly make the hilltop fort accessible to the public. Volunteers did a lot of brush clearing in the fall, and some were surprised to learn the property contains a hidden quarry/swimming hole. Meanwhile, a replica cannon, recently contributed by the local Civil War Roundtable, demonstrates in an unsubtle way that history is the boss here.

Candora Marble Building

Candora Marble Co. in Vestal is one of Knoxville's architectural rarities. Once headquarters for one of the city's best-known marble companies, the almost-all-marble building, which resembles some Italian temple, was built to show off the company's wares. Its interior rooms functioned as showrooms for the full spectrum of marble then available in the Knoxville area. Facing Candora Street, just off Maryville Pike, the building and its grounds have for the last two years hosted the lively and exotically diverse Vestival, a May festival celebrating the neighborhood that features everything from Baptists to bellydancers. This fall, anonymous benefactors bought the building itself, to save it as a local landmark to be kept in the custody of the South Knoxville Heritage Center, which occupies part of it.

South High

Long abandoned and in poor repair, in another era the old public school would merely have been razed. But in 2002, a collection of alumni and general-purpose preservationists pushed to save the early-20th-century school building, as a few others on the east and north sides have been saved in recent years, in hopes that it may open again for some public use. At year's end, the school system, which had been willing to see the building razed to make way for a metal warehouse, is reportedly insisting on maintaining control of the building as a public (non-residential) building, in case future growth calls for its reinstatement as a school.

New houses in the Fort

In 2002 we also got to see the first fruits of Fort Sanders' NC-1 zoning, which is something like Historic Zoning Lite: it doesn't prevent demolitions or alterations, but does call for new houses to be built in accord with the neighborhood. Last year, when six houses on Highland Avenue were torn down illegally, all the city could do was fine the owner $50. (That experience led to the popular but ultimately unsuccessful initiative to allow an increase in such fines statewide; Question 2, as it was known, drew a majority of state voters in November, but not the constitutionally required supermajority.) The new two-story houses in the emptied space don't look exactly like the Victorian houses that still dominate the neighborhood. But they do look better than most of what has been built in Fort Sanders in the last 50 years.

Glencoe

No one knew the ca. 1905 Glencoe apartment building on State Street was even endangered until some prospective plans for the Tennessee Theatre expansion/renovation leaked out; some of them called for demolishing or at least compromising the three-story, 25-unit brick structure. Since preservationists are used to thinking that anything good for the Tennessee is good for preservationism, it threatened to pit preservationists vs. preservationists. For the time being, it looks as if the Glencoe will stay.

December 18, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 51
© 2002 Metro Pulse