Market Square's endangered aberration
by Jack Neely
As bulldozers keep moving dirt around and the sounds of new construction reverberate around 150-year-old Market Square, another change may be afoot, this one unexpected. The Metropolitian Planning Commission has made noises that it might become necessary to renumber the addresses on Market Square. Some reconstruction efforts, notably the Wests' mixed-use reconstruction projects on the east side of the Square, and likely David Dewhirst's reconfiguration of the Watson's space on the west side, are raising logical conundrums. What's someone's address if their door is at number 18, but their apartment is over number 16?
There are all sorts of code issues dealing with fire protection, especially, that indicate to the bureaucratically gifted that these buildings need to be renumbered. To renovators up to their ears in red tape already, it makes for another delay and, for some, an extra expense of ordering new letterheads. But there may be more to it than that.
Anywhere else, it probably wouldn't be any big deal. If you live in a house in Knoxville that's more than, say, 50 years old, there's a good chance that you've had your street address changed on you sometime over the years. There's some logic in consistency. Standardized or, in some cases, re-standardized addresses can give you a rough idea of where a place is. It's especially helpful to drivers of emergency vehicles.
However, changes were surely annoying to the residents at the time, who had to change their checks and return-address stickers, repaint their mailboxes and pry the old brass numbers from the porch posts. These shifts remain a trap for historians trying to research the history of a house. Little dysfunctions like that are what keep history safely out of the hands of amateurs.
Downtown's street numbers have held pretty stable for over a century, though they did have to be jiggered a little before that. Street numbering was slow in getting here to begin with. By the 1860s, a handful of businesses on the more-crowded blocks of Gay Street had begun favoring one, two, or three-digit numbers to describe their position in the half-mile from the river to the train station. Prince Street (later Market) followed with a few numbered addresses of its own. But most folks were content with descriptions instead of numbers: "Crooked Street, between Clinch and Church, east side" or "Asylum, northeast corner of Crooked." The idea was that if you can't find the place with clues like that, you don't have any business dropping in anyway.
But sometime in the early 1880s, perhaps shamed by obsessively numerical
big cities, the whole of Knoxville got numbers. Numbering began economically, with very low numerals, for the most part, like "5 Vine." Market Square got numbers at the same time. Starting with Peter Kern's bakery at 1 Market Square, odds on the west side, evens on the east, progressing north until they got to 37.
Most folks' street numbers didn't stay the same for very long. By the Gay '90s, an extravagant era, somebody up there—actually, it was probably somebody here on Market Square, which was then the home of City Hall—decided that Knoxville's numbers weren't nearly long enough. Maybe they were embarrassed by all these one- and two-digit numbers, and wanted to prove that all these streets go on for blocks and blocks. Henceforth, came the decree, the lowest number permissible in this town shall be 101.
So by the early 1890s, hardly a decade after people got used to having numbers to begin with, they had much bigger ones. Downtown was renumbered, using the intersection of Jackson and Central as an axis. Everybody in Knoxville had to have a three or four-digit street number, and the sequences would march in uniform lock-step from the approved axes that divided the city into quarters.
Everybody, that is, except those who
had their residences and businesses in one particular place. Market Square was the significant exception. Peter Kern, the
German immigrant and bread tycoon,
was mayor of Knoxville in the early 1890s, about the time the grand renumeration was going on. Maybe he wanted to keep his prestigious address at 1 Market Square. In any case, the Square was exempt from all this obsessive renumbering business. Not only was Market Square allowed to keep its one- and two-digit numbers, but Market Square's numbers ascended in a defiantly contrary direction, opposite from those all around it, rising south to north, while the corresponding blocks of Gay and Walnut rose north to south.
Market Square's aberrant numbering remained intact through the 20th century and into the 21st. They witnessed the construction of a Market House in the Square, and they witnessed its demolition 60-odd years later. They survived dozens of bad ideas for the Square, and a few good ones; they weathered the departure of Kern's bakery for South Knoxville and the closing of the north end of Market Street with the construction of TVA's headquarters. They witnessed the planting of the first trees that were ever on the Square and the hour of their cutting down and the replanting and cutting down of a second crop.
Peter Kern's building is still there, and still at 1 Market Square, as it was in the days when most Republicans were Union veterans. These are the oldest addresses in Knox County. These one- and two-digit addresses are still there, standing obstinately against the tide of progress, and I, for one, am right proud of them.
April 17, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 16
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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