Gay-Street sitting, and other improvements
by Jack Neely
Complaints are a newspaper columnist's stock in trade. Just lately, somebody has been spoiling several of my ripest ones.
Some readers have remarked that the Inter-Agency Insurance Co. building at Kingston Pike and Concord Street, the ca. 1960 modernist office building I proposed should be demolished for aesthetic purposes, is looking spruced up. It still blocks the brick Victorian-era house behind it, but its discolored windows have been replaced, and its trim, if that's what you call it, has been repainted. It won't trick you into thinking it's still the New Frontier, but it does look better.
Meanwhile, its neighbor, Kingston Towers (don't ask me why it's plural), for which I also proposed demolition, is also still there. But one of my chief complaints about the Tide Box is no longer as acute. The residential building has always been full of car-challenged students, and to catch the bus they've had to cross multiple lanes of busy traffic without a secure crosswalk. At long last, they do have a marked crosswalk with Walk/Don't Walk signs to a concrete island where the bus stops. It's not ideal, but this is Knoxville, and pedestrians must learn to lower their standards for safety.
Just downhill from there is my favorite symptom of progress. The Third Creek Bike Trail is an unappreciated asset to this city, commenced in the '70s, completed through to the riverfront paths in the '90s, and connected last year to Forest Park Drive alongside the Bi-Lo. For the first time ever, you could ride or walk from Bearden to UT and downtown without tangling much with auto traffic.
That is, you could, except for the fact that a crucial joint of the trail was closed for the better part of several years, mostly for TDOT's massive Alcoa Highway redesign. A sign in Tyson Park said it would reopen in September, 2001. Then a convenient piece of tape changed that date to September, 2002. After that, the sign disappeared, replaced with a ramshackle barrier that looked like a Dogpatch hogpen.
I was all set to write a column complaining about the fact in March when, quietly, it reopened. Now, for the first time ever, you can bike, walk, or jog, from Bearden to the east side of downtown without sharing the road with cars, except for three easy road crossings. Not only that, but Donna Young at the city says there's going to be a big new steel bridge across the creek at Tyson Park, one that's not as likely to be washed out by seasonal floods.
The other day I rode the thing from Bearden to the First Creek bridge at the riverboat landing, and didn't break a sweat. Along the way I watched part of a rugby game, confronted a couple of hissing fullback-sized geese, failed to startle some fairly suitcase-sized turtles sunning themselves near the mouth of the creek, inspected some riverside fishermen's catches of toxic carp, and witnessed the Three Rivers Rambler huff away to points east. It was a fine day.
 All the attention to long-neglected
Market Square is good to see. There's more business activity on the Square
than I've seen in years, and more people living there now than there have been in decades, with more to come. Signs of actual progress in the mud are hard to discern, but I'm told most of the work is underground, replacing ancient networks of plumbing. I heard they even found some old wooden pipes down there.
It is, for my money, East Tennessee's most historic site. Everything that happened in this region happened on Market Square in one way or another. It's fun to have lunch out there and contemplate its whole noisy story. But it's hard to overlook one bleak irony. This is the first spring in 150 years that no fresh produce was available on Market Square.
The most obvious reason for the lack is that, while earth-moving construction is still going on, there's no safe place for a produce stand. If that were all there was to it, we could wait it out. But the sad truth is that Sherrill Perkins, the Square's most dependable vendor over the last decade or two, has retired. A couple of others I spoke with last year—they were pretty old, too—weren't sure they'd be coming back, either.
Are there young farmers to take their place? Does ConAgra ever send its bright young reps to downtown markets to sell fresh tomatoes and okra? Big cities do still support downtown produce markets. We can only hope Knoxville can, too. But bringing the farmers back downtown may be as challenging as making the do-nothing landlords get the hell out of the way.
I'd been a little worried about a Market Square neighbor I can see out our window: the Kern Building, home of the Soup Kitchen and the Hotel St. Oliver. The ca. 1872 three-story brick building was originally German immigrant Peter Kern's bakery and "Ice-Cream Saloon." Until recently, its paint was peeling badly.
It was great to see workers come in a few weeks ago them and scrape the yellow paint off the old brick. Meanwhile, they repainted the trim vanilla yellow. After it was over, some old paint still clung to the brick, but I thought it gave the old girl character. The Kern Building looked, for a couple of weeks, like one of those old hurricane-battered houses in Charleston or Savannah that look like maybe they were painted once, sometime during Reconstruction, but not since.
Somebody else apparently didn't like it as much as I did. Last month workers came back and painted the brick a dull brown. Maybe it's meant to evoke the color of a Kern pumpernickle. Maybe it will weather better than the previous color did. But I still think it will look better, after a few summers' worth of peeling, when Herr Kern's old brick begins to resurface.
Beginning maybe a decade ago, outdoor cafe-style seating has caught on downtown as never before. In the days when Knoxville was famous for its sootfall, dining outdoors was never an appealing idea. But despite ozone levels, the downtown air does look cleaner than it once did, and it seems safe to come outside.
It helps, I think. Outside drinking and dining belies the notion that downtown is ever "dead." Thousands of people come downtown every day of the year, but you never see most of them. Air-conditioning and modern architecture have concealed us so effectively that it's too easy to imagine we're not there at all. A few restaurants with outdoor seating do more to promote downtown than a dozen overinflated destination-attraction presentations can.
In the business part of downtown, most of the outdoor cafes have been around Market Square, though, and most of their patios have in recent months been abolished for the duration of construction. They'll come back, but probably not before the end of summer.
Meanwhile, after working with the codes folks, the Downtown Grill and Brewery, Knoxville's original brewpub on Gay Street, staked out a beer-drinking patio on its broad front sidewalk. And people are using it. It's a historic gesture, I think. Gentlemen used to sit in front of hotel saloons and cigar stands in the middle of the 19th century, but not so much since they ducked inside during the Civil War. Gay Street sitting should revive as a Knoxville institution. I'll do my part.
May 15, 2003 Vol. 13, No. 20
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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