Metro Pulse/Secret History/Historic Preservation Dr.

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And other contemporary non-sequiturs

by Jack Neely

Three months after we published that original article about buildings we might be better off without, I continue to get enthusiastic nominations. After dozens of additional comments, three themes emerged.

One is the institutional L.T. Ross Building on Western. Also known as the MLB building (for Mechanicsville, Lonsdale, and Beaumont), it's supposed to be a county community center, but the flat concrete plinth looks like an enemy bunker. A lot of worthwhile work is done there, but the building's anxiety about its neighborhood is palpable.

There were also votes for the nearby News-Sentinel building (and not just from Metro Pulse staffers, honest). You could argue about how this blocky modernist building, conspicuous at the crest of a big hill, looks from town. There's less argument about how it looks from Western, an elevation that the architects contemptuously ignored.

And one nomination I've gotten from several unrelated sources lately is "the big buildings with broken glass that you can see from the interstate." To thousands who pass on the highway daily, the big dark brick building with broken windows does make downtown look looted and pillaged. The people who mentioned these buildings described them by description, not by name, and apparently didn't know that they're the McClung warehouses, which have been at the center of strenuous, though embattled, efforts to renovate. We've been hearing plans for a long, long time, though. And if they still look like this by the time that, say, the U.S. withdraws from Baghdad, it may be hard to keep believing.

Someone passed me a press release titled, "Bowling In Knoxville Dates Back to 1900." They mention the lanes in the basement of the Hotel Imperial, calling them "the first pair of lanes for commercial use," and at the old YMCA on State Street. Bowling was indeed a big deal here then. Knoxville's annual bowling tournaments, held at Chilhowee Park a century ago, were sometimes the biggest thing going on Christmas Day.

However, bowling in Knoxville goes a good bit farther back than that. There are mentions of a bowling alley in the early days of Market Square, ca. 1860; it sounds like it was near where Tomato Head is now, in a long-gone one-story building. I'm not even sure that one was the very first.

Speaking of the Hotel Imperial, and the 1916 fire that destroyed it, I got a note from antiquarian Ron Allen. Some years ago, as he mentions in his book Knox-Stalgia, an interesting encyclopedia of the almost-forgotten, he found reports that there was a pioneer documentary filmmaker on the scene. He filmed the blaze that destroyed the elaborate Victorian hotel at Gay and Clinch, and showed it at the nearby Queen a few weeks after the fire. Allen doesn't know what became of the film. But if anyone out there happens to have a copy to show, I'm pretty sure I can help drum up an audience to watch it.

Back in 2001 I wrote a couple of stories about a legendary silent film by pioneer cinematographer Karl Brown called Stark Love, shot in the Smokies and starring the elusive North Knoxville beauty Helen Mundy. Released in 1927, it was controversial, though not mainly for its brief nude scene; some objected to its depiction of thuggish mountaineers, which was either stereotypical or hyper-realistic, depending on your perspective. The film hasn't been shown here in many years. I've never seen it, myself.

Two years ago, some local institutions were hoping to obtain a print of the film, but prospects looked bleak. There were said to be only two in existence, and neither of them in very good condition. One was said to be on a long waiting list for restoration.

However, local archivist Brad Reeves has learned that there are now four copies extant, at least one of them recently restored. He's hoping to put together a showing of the film sometime soon.

Knoxville's been the victim of a series of loopy street renamings in recent years, but for sheer absurdist value, they all have to bow to the one I noticed the other day: "Historic Preservation Drive." It's on the east side of downtown and runs one way between the Coliseum and the Marriott; it's not a real road so much as a one-way chute to the interstate. You could rocket toward Lexington along this entrance ramp and not guess historic preservation has any meaning in Knoxville.

There's no trace of it along this strip of asphalt, anyway. Historic Preservation Drive does skirt the sites of some long-gone historic buildings, including the childhood home of poet Nikki Giovanni, which she mourns in a well-known essay, and the home of Parson Brownlow. The rambling place where the loyalist editor and Reconstruction governor died, on what was then East Cumberland, may have been Knoxville's most-celebrated historic shrine for the 50 years after the Civil War, visited by a whole string of Republican presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt, a Brownlow admirer. It was torn down around 1920 to build some new apartments, which were then torn down themselves, clearing the way for this forbidding tangle of asphalt and concrete, eventually including the one now named Historic Preservation Drive. The state historic marker that used to mark its approximate site vanished sometime during our well-paved drive to the future.