The ten most troublesome structures in Knoxville
by Jack Neely
Exasperated developers have been known to accuse preservationists, and this reporter in particular,of wanting to save just everything. Well, it's not true. In this new era of historic preservation in Knoxville, it's important that we remember one truth: Some old buildings need to be torn down.
It's not just a matter of poor maintenance. There are any number of buildings in town, especially downtown, which were once eyesores that somebody thought had decayed past the point of no return just because they were vacant or had bad paint jobs or boarded-up windows, but which are now functional and even beautiful credits to the city. The L&N, the Sterchi Building, the Emporium, the Bijou Theatre, the Candy Factory, the Miller's Building, the Phoenix Building, Sullivan's Saloon: all of them did time as ill-kept eyesores.
We're not talking about those. The ones that deserve most to be demolished are those that didn't look like much when they went up. Maybe demolition-happy developers could use a list of a few buildings that they can tear down without annoying preservationisis or damaging the city's architectural heritage. Most of these structures have been here long enough that many of us may associate them with sweet memories of youth. But after all these years, most of them don't have any more beauty or character than the old concrete highway bridges we've been blowing up lately.
These are one man's opinions. But I've spoken to enough architects, professors, and city planners to know that they're not particularly unusual opinions. Until now, I've kept my mouth shut, as others have. But it's 2003, and it seemed time to ask why developers never want to tear down the right buildings.
Readers might notice that some obvious choices, like the Thompson-Boling Arena, which a few years ago architects' poll as the city's single most obnoxious building, are not on the list. We've exempted buildings less than 25 years old for three reasons:
 because Scottish thriftiness forbids us from tearing down buildings before we get some significant use out of them;
to give new styles a chance to cure, to age and permit us to get used to them, and allow a building that's ahead of its time to prove itself; and, finally
to evade the thorny Sunsphere issue.
Some of them were designed by good architects, but were victims of an era when Americans were dazzled by the new wonders of air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, and it was the goal of architects to protect innocent people from the specter of ever going outside.
They're not all the worst, or ugliest buildings in Knoxville. In several cases, it's their placement that is the problem.
1. Inter-Agency Insurance Building
Our first choice is one that many friends and colleagues, when they heard we were proposing a story of this nature, insisted on: "The Inter-Agency Insurance building is on there, isn't it?" This unfortunate structure on the northeast corner of Kingston Pike and Concord at Neyland Drive may be the sine qua non of historic demolition. We're all experts on it. Thousands of amateur architectural critics who are, otherwise, commuters, students, or Vol fans, spend a part of every week contemplating it, just because it's right in front of one of the longest red-light waits in Knoxville. It may be our most-scrutinized building.
It's also the fresh-from-the-airport visitor's first impression of Knoxville architecture: a two-story modernist reflective-glass building with a sine-curve awning. It might be a creditable example of some mid-20th-century theory about commercial architecture, except for two facts.
One is that the building's in awful repair, and has been for years. Its steel framing is discolored with rust. Its window-walls show ugly water stains and look like they require a lot more than industrial-strength Windex.
Its other fatal flaw is that it's built in front of a nice old house. Kids, we've told you before, never build an office building in the neighbor's front yard. I don't care who told you you could. The house it screens from our view is the handsome hilltop brick place known as Oakwood, said to have been built in 1870 by former mayor Charles McClung for his son, Matthew. The McClungs were prominent among Knoxville's founders, and their house could offer a flattering first impression of town.
What they see instead is the creaky Inter-Agency Insurance Building. You could argue that it's historic, too. Built around 1960, as near as I can tell, it was originally IBM's local headquarters; the '60s was a big decade for IBM. Later, when it was a C&C Bank, the late C.H. Butcher, a kingpin of the 1982 World's Fair who was destined to be an engineer of one of the greatest bank failures in American history, had an office here. These ugly walls could tell some stories. Obviously, we'll need to work quick. It may be eligible for historic-register status in 2010.
2. Kingston Towers
While we have the wrecking crews in that neighborhood, there's the gargantuan brick building down the block at Kingston Pike and Alcoa Highway. Usually called Kingston Towers, or Married Student Housing, it's Communist Revival in style. When it went up in the '60s, some thought it looked like a giant cereal box. Others differed, insisting that it looked more like a giant box of Tide.
While it might not be quite as dangerous as it used to be a few years back, when it was coughing chunks of brick and mortar into the parking lot, the placement of this dysfunctional building is still perilous for the students it serves. To house foreign students, many of whom don't have cars, and dare them to cross five lanes of Kingston Pike, off-interstate traffic on foot, without a crosswalk, just for the privilege of catching the bus— well, that's either stupidity or insti- tutional sadism. Tear it down, find a better site downtown or on campus, and build them something nice.
3. Old KUB Building
While buildings once more decrepit-looking than this place ever was are now enjoying exciting new revivals as residences or office/studios, the old KUB building remains mostly vacant. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
It has a strange history that almost makes it endearing. The garish facade, hardly softened by a more-recent striped awning, went up in 1963. But underneath its New Frontier stylings is allegedly some part of the skeleton of a Reconstruction-era furniture factory. There may not be anything serviceable left of that, but it was still a three-story Victorian building when KUB took it over in 1938 and sometime afterward remodeled it with trendy modernist stylings, including a gracefully curved corner. But then came the '60s, and faced with the necessity of adding a fourth floor, KUB picked an unpropitious era to renovate again.
The current building was called "handsome" in a 1965 newspaper article, but it's less likely to get that compliment today. Maybe its glazed green bricks are supposed to be "avocado," anticipating the kitchen appliances of a coming era. Even if you put on rose-colored glasses (they'd change that green to more-becoming purplish brown), the building itself, with its unopenable windows, blank expression, and a pebbly concrete casing of what I understand is known to some as "peanut-brittle architecture," it doesn't look like a downtown building. It looks like it would be much more comfortable in the middle of a big surface parking lot on an interstate exit, surrounded by Impalas and El Caminos.
If that sleek, streamlined, late-moderne articulation had survived, it might be one of downtown's trendier addresses. Which brings up a provocative question. Art deco, which peaked in popularity in the 1930s, was scorned as tired, embarrassing proto-modernism 20 or 30 years later—only to be exalted as the Coolest Thing Ever by Generation X. Will the same phenomenon also lift up 1960s commercial architecture like the KUB building? Could the KUB building be the trendy lofts of the 2020s? I should say, you never know; but in this case, maybe you do.
4. TVA Towers
Either or both. In 1976, TVA closed down a functioning street to move its headquarters into what look like a couple of giant concrete parking garages. Knoxville tried to be a good sport about it. After all, TVA did commit to downtown Knoxville in a mall-addled era when everyone else was fleeing the old neighborhood. We smiled like grateful hostages.
They're plausibly historic. Decisions made within these walls have influenced river levels and utility rates from here to Mississippi since the Ford administration. Marvin Runyon, later to be U.S. Postmaster General, once had an office here. Bob Clement, congressman and former senatorial candidate, likewise. Aubrey Wagner, one of the last of the real public-power tycoons, ended his long career here. For 27-year-old buildings, they have seen more than their share of history. I'm sure they've entertained a lot of famous visitors. I talked to one of them.
When this visiting lecturer left his room at the Radisson about three years ago, he said the sight of the TVA towers nearly drove him back inside. He said his first impression of Knoxville was that it had lost its soul, just like every other damn city in America. Norman Mailer has said some crazy things over the years, but that was not one of them.
Beyond their oppressive plainness, one expert after another has told us—under their breath, for the most part—that their placement is a major handicap to the renovation of Market Square. "TVA's there, and there's nothing we can do about that," they say.
More outspoken than any local architect I know is Fred Schwartz, the New York designer of the new Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and currently a leading architect in the master planning for the World Trade Center site. He was visiting friends here a few months ago. Strolling around Market Square, he admired some of the Square's architecture, especially the Kern building on the Union Avenue corner. He was curious about the Market Square redevelopment projects—but then he told me flatly that Market Square would never work as long as those big concrete boxes were there. He said there wasn't even any use trying.
Schwartz hasn't studied the Square, and maybe he was in a bad mood that night. But the towers do make it impossible to reopen the northern blocks of Market Street, which during the Square's century-long heyday fed traffic into the square from the north. As long as they're there, Market Square may remain an interesting eddy more than the town center it once was. TVA's siting may have seemed a godsend to Market Square businesses in the '70s, but after massive layoffs—and TVA's more-recent initiative to feed its employees in private restaurants inside their building—TVA's impact on downtown lunchtime retail has dwindled.
Moreover, the towers seem to have had a pernicious influence on the design of later buildings in the neighborhood. The Radisson and the Kimberly Clark building mirror TVA's parking-garage style. (One of them, the Summer Place building, actually is a parking garage.) I suspect the hotel's architects played a little underhanded joke on the TVA plaza in their siting, giving it a place of honor that makes it prominently visible between the towers. From Market Street, TVA's headquarters looks like the wings of an enormous Radisson.
Ironically, the agency is Knoxville's most distinguished architectural institution. Architects from around the globe once came here to study TVA's works, which were famous for their modernist beauty. If they'd built a big headquarters here during their esthetic height, ca. 1936, it might be hailed as Knoxville's finest building. But they never built a headquarters building that was as good-looking as any of their dams.
To be fair, the TVA buildings are victims of the good intentions of a different era. On the inside, they work; the few who are allowed inside the towers have lots of sunny views all around. Planned at the height of the energy crisis, they're said to be models of energy conservation. And their now-awkward siting was actually the result of a 1972 downtown-planning task force. It wasn't their purpose to close North Market Street just to construct one lofty plaza for TVA employees on smoking break. Documents suggest the plaza, originally planned to have direct, unbaffled access to the Square, was meant to be a well-used public corridor, a poignant first step in a plan to transform all of Market Street from here to the river into an "Auto-Free Pedestrian Core."
In the last 27 years, TVA's downtown population of employees has shriveled to 1,100, less than one-half of the number that these buildings were built to serve. The rumor is they're going to shut down one tower and sell it. But let's do it one better; tear it down. It will give us an idea of how good the place would look without the other one.
5. Kingston Pike west of Bearden Hill
Most of its post-1950 buildings, anyway. It may not stand alone as the ugliest street in Knoxville—parts of Chapman Highway, Broadway, and Clinton Highway have similar problems—but Kingston Pike is the street that's alleged to be a commercial success. Considering the millions exchanged there every day, it has no excuse to be this ugly.
For shoppers, it's Knoxville's main street. But with a few important exceptions here and there—a half-dozen historic houses, some interesting prewar tourist architecture, and a very few well-designed recent buildings—it's 10 miles of unplanned, poorly conceived architectural crap, dominated by signage and recklessly large parking lots. Fast-food joints and filling stations stand in the front yards of ante-bellum mansions. Its shoulders are strewn with fast-food trash. Nobody cares much about the trash on the road, because there's very similar, though much-larger trash with identical colors and logos mounted in steel beams up in the air, and illuminated so you can see it from the interstate at night.
These are buildings built cheaply to maximize profits. And judging by the number of chain stores that dominate the place, those who profit most live out of state. Yankees rake in the dough on West Knoxville and then come here and make fun of how ugly and cheap it looks. Like frat boys make fun of the blondes they took advantage of. Ever flattered by their attention, we smile and sign another contract.
6. Walters Life Sciences Building
Over the holidays I walked clear around a building set back from the intersection of Cumberland Avenue and Phil Fulmer (the street, not the individual), and found no clues to its name or function. The building is mercifully unmarked. After some diligent research I learned that it's called the Walters Life Sciences building. If the Walters family's not complaining about the fact that their name's not discernible on the building, there may be a reason. It's the blankest, dumbest building on UT's campus. It's a life sciences building with no life.
I wondered about it when they built it in the '70s. This big blank windowless wall, like a vertical parking lot, set back from Cumberland with a parking lot in front, is right on the edge of the architecturally crowded Hill, which is supposed to be the pretty, historic part of the university. Though it's located on what may be UT's busiest corner, it looks as if it should be a secret laboratory in some off-limits quarter of the Y-12 plant. Mum's the word. Thousands of noisy students pass it every day, but all day long, it sits there and says nothing.
7. Interstate 40 Downtown
All of I-40 between the I-640 interchanges, especially in the downtown area. Close to 50 years old, some of this stretch was the old "Magnolia Expressway," built before the national interstate system. For an interstate, you could almost call it "historic"— especially when you consider that our interstate system was inspired by the Nazi Autobahn. Teachers, if you want to show your kids the influence of Hitler in Knoxville today, take them for a field trip down the interstate. Spend a lot of time on an urban stretch of interstate, and you start understanding how der führer's mind worked, and how he came to hate everybody.
They're talking about closing it down for a while to repair it. But if they can close it down for a while, why not close it down forever? Why not blow it up? A nice treelined boulevard would serve free people much better.
In the 1950s, the federal government promised that interstates would abolish traffic jams forever. Well, somehow we've still got traffic jams; the main difference between '50s traffic jams and interstate traffic jams is that the latter allow no hope of escape. In old-fashioned traffic jams, relief was as close as the next cross street.
Interstates are useful for long trips like, say, trips between states, but some recent studies indicate they don't do much for a city. Is it surprising to anybody that the construction of I-40 through downtown signaled the beginning of a 40-year decline in downtown retail? Even though far more cars than ever before were passing through downtown? It takes more than carbon monoxide fumes from cars whizzing by overhead to boost business. Why should non-stop traffic be useful to a downtown? To be of any use to a city, wouldn't the cars passing through have to actually stop?
Some progressive cities, like San Francisco, have gone so far as to demolish urban highways, just because they were in the way. Recently, Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist was quoted as declaring, "the urban superhighway should be relegated to the scrap heap of history...."
So let truckers on their way from Charlotte to Memphis take an extra six or seven minutes to use 640 to go around town. Not only would there be fewer horrific high-speed crashes in the downtown area, but it would open up hundreds of acres of prime space for development, and long-divided neighborhoods, like Fourth and Gill and Parkridge—and downtown and downtown—could enjoy a reunion.
8. Old News-Sentinel Building
Not a very bold proposal, because it's almost certain to be demolished this year with or without our blessing. It's arguably historic—I'd always assumed it was a postwar building, but I've learned that, underneath its bland sandy skin, it may be 70 years old. For better or worse, it nurtured countless newspaper careers. A couple of Pulitzer winners have worked in there, though it was inconsiderate of them never to do their Pulitzer-winning for the News-Sentinel. Lamar Alexander worked here as a copy boy. So did I, for that matter. I'm fond of some of the interior features I remember, like the pneumatic tubes and the cluttered morgue and the weird narrow stairways up to the typesetting room and down to the printing press. I haven't been inside the place in about 16 years, but if they were to allow me in there, I could run around in there like a rat in his favorite maze.
Still, from the outside, the building's an eyesore, especially on this ideologically critical corner of Church and State, and has been for a long time. Our colleagues at the daily moved out of it a few decades later than they should have, and I can't think of a compelling reason to save the building.
With potential Gay Street frontage via the surface-parking lot space, it could be a great location for a large headquarters-type building. I'd like to propose it as a great place for Home Federal to move. It could also pass for a fine site for a new library.
9. Bel Air Apartment Building
It's the only building I know of that was subject of a serious effort to purchase it merely for the purpose of tearing it down for esthetic reasons. On Laurel Ave., what was once one of Knoxville's showcase streets squats an ignorant yellow box of frustrated students, surrounded by flat asphalt. Its name is a misnomer; though they were built in about the same era, it bears no resemblance to the curvaceous, chromy Chevrolet Bel Air.
It was ugly when I lived on this street 25 years ago. I knew people who lived in it—one left only because he was embarrassed about horrifying his guests and dates. He moved into a third-floor garret, which he considered a wonderful improvement.
Though its interior is said to have been renovated recently, its exterior clashes with its Victorian neighbors struggling to survive. No building has ever expressed its contempt for its neighborhood more loudly. If Fort Sanders were a club of gracious ladies convened for a tea party, the Bel Air would be their uninvited guest, a killer robot.
One worrisome factor is that, at almost 50 years old, it will soon be eligible for historic-tax-credit consideration. This building may scare the National Historic Register folks into stretching the minimum age to 75 years.
10. The Marriott
When they built this hotel, it was the Hyatt Regency, and , everybody said it looked like TVA had built a new dam but somehow missed the river. That resemblance may not be completely coincidental. Its design may be inspired by the great modernist architect Le Corbusier, who was allegedly inspired by his visit to Norris Dam in 1946. Architecture, like karma, comes back around to haunt us. But Norris Dam is prettier.
The hotel, constructed of hard-to-clean concrete, still looks like a misplaced dam. It still is a misplaced hotel. Arrogant on a hill that used to be a Methodist graveyard, remote from the business district, it adds little to the life of downtown. Perhaps jealous of the possibility that guests might want to leave the hotel to eat or entertain themselves, it willfully ignores the pedestrian. To this day, there are no sidewalks to the hotel; to get to or from it on foot, you have to risk walking in blind driveways. When some producers from the BBC stayed here in 1995, they said they felt trapped. They asked me to account for the design and placement of the place, and I could not. I got a similar comment from a visiting legal scholar from Oxford a couple of years later.
Its Aztec theme was lost on many, though it is no doubt appreciated by those patrons who are actual Aztecs. When it went up, its advocates said that Knoxvillians who thought it looked funny just weren't forward-looking enough. Well, it's the 21st century, and now it looks like a 1970 building. The irony is that its lofty, cavernous interior is the most attractive hotel lobby in town. You could argue that, though it sticks out like an air vent on Knoxville's skyline, it's the most architecturally impressive hotel built in Knoxville in the last 70 years. It's possible that, combined with Volunteer Landing, some radical redesign of its exterior could improve things. But as it is, its lofty interior cavern and glass elevators don't make up for the overall dysfunctionality of the joint as a downtown hotel.
January 9, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 2
© 2003 Metro Pulse
| 
