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Hidden in the heart of Knoxville, eclectic Maplehurst is changing

by Jack Neely

Some claim this tree-shaded historic neighborhood is the best place to live in Knoxville. It's the site of the city's only bed and breakfast, some of central Knoxville's ugliest and prettiest buildings, and a $20 million upscale residential development that sounds unlike any other in Knoxville's history. Still, some longtime Knoxvillians claim they've never heard of the place. People who drive along Neyland Drive spy the clay-tile roofs peering up above the trees on the hill, and wonder where the hell they are.

Where's Maplehurst? Well, if you can find the corner of Front Street and South Broadway, it's easy. Never mind that South Broadway hasn't been connected to, or even near, the rest of Broadway for about 75 years. And this one scrap of Front Street is the only remnant of that notorious avenue that once spanned Knoxville's riverfront. The spine of the Maplehurst is "West Hill Avenue," a well-known thoroughfare. But if you follow the familiar West Hill Avenue, the one that goes by Blount Mansion and the Lord Lindsey, from downtown, you may never get there.

But still, trust us, it's right there on West Hill, between UT and downtown. It's just that it's in a slightly different dimension.

In its copse of leafy trees, back behind the huge Church Street Methodist Church, which isn't on Church Street, it's not clearly visible from the mainstream.

It's even harder to walk to than it is to see. From UT it's across a big creek, up a steep slope, across the tracks. From downtown, it's on the other side of formidable Henley Street. Despite the installation of a pedestrian signal, it's still chancy, even if you wait for the fleeting assurance of the white walking man. Perhaps two-thirds of the drivers turning right on red fail to pause even long enough to read the glowing No Right Turn signal. Some Maplehurst residents prefer the subversive route, under the Henley Bridge.

The way some longtime Maplehurst residents talk about it, it sounds like Shangri-La. And strangers may not ever visit the place unless their DC3 happens to crash there.

Maybe because getting there is not a simple thing, Maplehurst has been evolving, Galapagos-like, a little differently from the rest of the city for decades. Its architecture is different: Tudor revival, Spanish colonial, Gothic, Italianate. A two-car garage is equipped with an industrial-sized chimney, now covered with vines. Narrow steps lead up between bulging walls. Others lead down to eroding garden terraces. One building is accessible only by a concrete bridge with iron-pipe railings. Some of its inhabitants are pretty different, too. But things may be changing.

John Montgomery is a massage therapist who helps run Maplehurst Park, one of the largest of the older brick apartment buildings. It's a symmetrical brick house, classical in style. If mansions were built as duplexes, they might look like this. Montgomery, who also owns a home in Blount County, has lived in Maplehurst since he moved in in 1991. "I never expected to be in the city that long," he says. "I'm a mountain guy. But if you're going to live in downtown Knoxville, for my tastes, there's not another place. Nowhere downtown has this combination of beauty and green space. I wouldn't have lasted in Knoxville this long if not for Maplehurst." He talks about the rare combination of people who live there. Of his 18 apartments, only two are currently rented by students; other residents include an art professor, a musician, a carpenter, a photographer, a charity administrator, a commercial-video specialist, three librarians.

Suddenly he stops talking. "What's that over there?" He points to something lying in the road. From this distance, it looks as if it might be a dead crow. "Excuse me," he says, and walks over to pick it up. It's a dark-blue baseball cap with an orange T. Not long ago, it would have been a puzzling artifact.

Definitions of what "Maplehurst" is vary, but people tend to describe everything on the hill south of Cumberland, between UT campus and Henley, as Maplehurst. To others, Maplehurst is strictly Maplehurst Court, the tree-shaded ca. 1915 double-cul-de-sac on the top of the hill. By the broader definition, Maplehurst is home to perhaps 400 people, though precise figures are hard to nail down, and they're subject to change.

So close to Neyland Stadium that many residents can only try to get used to waking up to the sound of the Pride Of the Southland Band practicing in the mornings, it's obviously influenced by UT. Considering that the largest apartment buildings are collegially cheap, it's likely that more than half of the people who live in the area between Second Creek and Henley are UT students. But residents and property managers in the lush, historic Maplehurst Court section estimate that as few as 15 percent of their neighbors are students. It has a reputation as an enclave of people who are defiantly unassociated with UT, bohemians who know Vol game days mainly as the six days a year when it's hard to park at home. A couple of years ago, Vol fans searching for free parking in these narrow streets were confronted by a Maplehurst resident dressed as a giant rabbit.

Maplehurst's era of blissful remoteness may be waning. Change is in the breeze, and given the character of the neighborhood, the tenor of Maplehurst's upcoming changes seem a little ironic. Today, the biggest property owner in the Maplehurst area—indeed, owner of most of the historic part of Maplehurst—is something called "The Tennessee Gameday Center: A Luxury Sports Condominium." The project, one of four occurring in college towns around the Southeast, was the brainchild of Gary Spillers, a former Troy State (Ala.) linebacker and Deep South real-estate man. His idea was to build swanky condos near football stadiums; the condos are geared toward home-game days—there are six of them a year, on average—but owners can use or rent them for the rest of the year. It sounds like that was the original idea, anyway.

After reported financial problems, some Knoxvillians have assumed the Gameday project has been abandoned. Announced in 2000, it was expected to be done by fall 2001. It hasn't been in the news much since. Now the $20 million project is going full steam ahead. However, Spillers—or maybe it was Maplehurst itself—seems to have amended the plan a little bit.

The larger part of the Gameday project is focused on new construction along the western fringe of Maplehurst. The "Phillip Fulmer Building" is a ground-up rebuilding of a previous conventional three-story motel-style apartment building off Poplar Street. The 17-unit condo building appears to be almost finished, with units going for upwards of $125,000.

The "Riverfront Club" is closer to the stadium, the longer, lozenge-shaped new building; groundbreaking for it is expected to start late this year. Dee Canizales, Gameday's no-nonsense property manager, says the 34-unit condo building is about half pre-sold.

However, the intent is to transform about seven of the old houses along old Maplehurst Court into the Gameday model. One of Maplehurst's old houses—the one on its far eastern end, overlooking South Broadway—is already converted. Its model condominium, open to the public last week but recently sold, has an interior arranged like an upscale lake house, the living room separated from the simple kitchen by a faux-antique leatherette bar. There are three in this building, all of them sold.

"People want to buy them to live in them," says Canizales. "They're beautiful homes." She sees UT professors as a likely market.

That may not be the end of it. Gameday also owns a string of drab postwar apartments along the Front Street line, down the hill from the rest of Maplehurst. Though Gameday workers talk about a huge "motel" to go in the site, Canizales says it will probably not be a hotel, but condos, and that they probably won't be built very soon, but perhaps five years out. Asked about the chances of it happening, Spillers says, "I don't know, but they should be good. Tennessee should be as good a market as the University of Georgia," where he's working on something similar.

They're already in business in Auburn and Tuscaloosa, Ala., where Gameday Centers are much more strictly focused on serving the athletic fan base, according to Spillers, than Knoxville's will be. The Athens, Ga. project, after running into opposition from preservationists and displaced business owners, seems to be proceeding under an altered plan. Maplehurst is the first Gameday project attempted in a place that's not mainly a college town, and it's by far the biggest. Contacted at his office in Auburn, Spillers confirms that the Knoxville project is different from his others.

Here, he said, his clientele is "people who work downtown, at the university, in the hospitals—in a city atmosphere like this, you get a lot of that." Knoxville's Gameday residents, he expects, will be mostly families who will choose to live in the condos or rent them out. "But some don't want to rent them out," he says. "In fact, most don't." Spillers says the people who will live in Knoxville's Gameday Center aren't necessarily even sports fans.

Spillers' soft-pedaling of the "sports condominium" concept is a little surprising, because everything else about the project screams Big Orange. A promotional letter from the realtor is addressed, "Dear VOL Supporter," going on to mention that "each condominium is fully furnished, designer decorated and completely accessorized down to the VOL napkin rings." The model room in the Gameday house on Maplehurst Court is pre-furnished with Vol paintings on the wall. Of course, the company in charge of sales is Heath Shuler Real Estate.

The namesake of the newest Gameday condo building is himself a prominent promoter of the Gameday project. Phillip Fulmer is profiled on the web page that describes the development. The first thing you see when you walk into Gameday's offices is an orange-and-white football marked Go Vols! and signed by the coach.

Coach Fulmer is the only active football coach who sits on Gameday's Advisory Board: all the others, including Kenny Stabler, are former players or sports commentators. And in Gameday's four-city network, Fulmer also appears to be the only flesh-and-blood individual for whom a condo building is named.

Given the vicissitudes of college football, isn't it risky to name a major project after a mortal coach—who may, God forbid, someday have a losing season—or, worse, be hired away to Florida? "Not that I'm aware of," says Canizales. "I don't think about it."

Work is nearly done on the Fulmer building; workers are putting on the finishing touches. A bigger project will be the "Riverfront Club," a long, multistory 34-unit building in the southwest corner of the site, very near Neyland Stadium. Building it will entail tearing down several structures, including a couple of arguably historic buildings.

The Riverfront Club, with curved, glassy ends, will be an imposing presence from Neyland Drive and conspicuous even from Neyland Stadium. It and the new street that will run alongside the railroad tracks will provide a connection between Maplehurst and Neyland Drive that has not existed recently. (The new street approximates the route of a Victorian-era street called Churchwell.) Canizales says it will be ready for occupancy by the first kickoff of the 2004 football season.

Not all of the neighborhood could pass for quaint, and the prospect of turning Maplehurst's postwar sections into some sort of VOLhalla isn't likely to trouble many. On the fringe of old Maplehurst Court, in what might be called Greater Maplehurst, are other apartment buildings. If a couple are plausibly historic, most aren't: cinderblock structures constructed and maintained with little attention to appearance. The largest is the Neyland Hill apartments, a large, HUD-style institution that has about 96 units, some of them doubly occupied. Operated by the South Knoxville real-estate firm of Brown, Brown, and West, it rents to all comers, though most of its residents are presumed to be UT students, especially undergraduates. It has nothing to do with either Maplehurst Court or the Gameday project.

Around the corner, on an unmarked lane that approximates old Front Street, are several plain and incongruous apartment buildings. If Gameday is successful, they'll eventually be replaced by new development.

On the other end of the esthetic spectrum is what may be Knoxville's most picturesque apartment building. Built around 1929 and once known as the Terry, it's now known to some as the Edgewater, to some as the Swann, and to some as the Kristopher, after the owner, Mr. Kendrick, for whom modesty is rarely a priority. The multicolored tiles in the floors of the airy hallways and the wrought-iron light fixtures let you know that it's different. Flowers bloom in mossy stone windowboxes. A balcony is accessible from a climb-out window and, in the back, each of the three floors provides progressively better views of the river. The rooms have practical eccentricities like garbage chutes and dumb waiters and fold-down dining tables and roll-down window screens. Though it has been in recent years the site of unaccustomed violence—two in-hall knife fights, by one account—it is, to many, the only place in Knoxville to live. Among its 40-plus residents is Cynthia Markert, one of Knoxville's most successful fine artists, known for her wistful paintings of angular young women in more elegant eras. Markert has lived in Maplehurst for most of the last 20 years.

She remembers her first encounter with a friend's Maplehurst apartment: "the hardwood floors, the arches, the octagonal room with dark wood bookcases in the walls. And most profound was the mist coming up from the river, and through the French windows that were all cranked open."

She has lived in Washington, D.C., and moved back to Knoxville vaguely hoping to find a "Bloombury Group"; she found it in Maplehurst, a community of creative post-collegiate artists and musicians.

Markert has done a series of greeting cards with romantic photographs, called "My Knoxville"; not surprisingly, most of them feature photographs taken in Maplehurst.

"Maplehurst was the perfect retreat," she says, using words like ethereal, magical, divine. "It had a very yin spirit. I think the presence of cats had something to do with it. Lately, it's been changing to pickup trucks, baseball caps, and six-packs of beer. The cats slowly disappeared," apparently hastened by an interim landlord's no-pets policy. To her, the disappearance of cats symbolizes the loss of "a certain spiritual quality that I don't think will ever return. The Gameday people are catering to the sports fans—the last thing Maplehurst was ever about. Now I wonder if there is to be any spot that is truly spiritual and eclectic and bohemian in Knoxville anymore."

But saxophone sometimes wails from somewhere within the Swann building, and giant rabbits may fend away interlopers in the parking lot. To the casual yang observer, Maplehurst can still seem plenty yin.

Maplehurst looks so Old World it has hypnotized some into the conclusion that the place is some ancient enclave, maybe even antebellum. But there's a little sleight-of-hand at work here. Maplehurst as we know it, from the quaint historic buildings to the cheap postwar claptrap apartments to the grand, architecturally famous Methodist church, is almost entirely a 20th-century development. Of course, the land on which it sits does have a deeper history that helped form what it is today.

Two centuries ago it was just west of the compact city limits of Tennessee's capital. One of the area's earliest residents was Spanish immigrant George (Jorge) Farragut, whose ca. 1795 stone-and-log dwelling on Poplar Street is said to have been extravagantly unusual compared to other Knoxville residences of the time.

Soon after Farragut left for a new home a dozen miles west, much of the area now known as Maplehurst was owned by Connecticut-born physician Dr. Joseph Churchill Strong, who by 1819 was entertaining the prospect of dividing the ridgetop into a planned town called "Williamsburgh." With streets named Rock, Spring, High, and Poplar, it stretched to Second Creek, before the local college had relocated to its hill across that brook. In plans, Williamsburgh was to have its own half-block "meeting house lot" right in the center. The name clung to the area through the late 1800s.

The philanthropic Strong found a use for one corner of Williamsburgh in 1827 when he donated a plot for a Knoxville Female Academy, a stately school for young women. It went up just as East Tennessee College, the former downtown institution not yet known as UT, was establishing itself on the next hill to the west. Until its demolition 60 years later, the Knoxville Female Academy was the area's chief distinction.

Like most of this lane along the bluff during the Victorian era, the western end of Hill Avenue was a stylish place to live. It was home to the likes of Alexander Arthur, the Victorian British tycoon who founded Middlesborough, Kentucky. The neighborhood was also the late-life home of physician-historian J.G.M. Ramsey, who wrote the standard histories of Tennessee used across the state. None of them knew this area as "Maplehurst," and in their day, it wasn't all that different from the rest of residential West Hill Avenue, which was mainly a tree-lined residential street for affluent Knoxvillians.

Down the hill were smaller, more modest residences. On Poplar, near Second Creek, was a working-class neighborhood that would remain predominantly black for generations. From it eventually sprang a small Baptist church called the True Vine.

This area was still considered to be Knoxville's western fringe in 1870, when elderly merchant-prince and former mayor James Hervey Cowan built his mansion here. Cowan called his hilltop estate "River Lawn." Straddling the knob, it afforded an easy view of the river in the days when sternwheelers carried cargo and passengers upstream and down.

Around 1890, the mansion was bought by another prominent Knoxvillian, Edward Jackson Sanford, and his wife Emma Chavannes, a Swiss immigrant. The Union veteran was a prosperous businessman, an executive in Knoxville Woolen Mills, and a partner in the Gay Street pharmacy that became Albers Drugs. Like Strong, Sanford was a Connecticut Yankee who had moved to Knoxville before the war. He renamed the mansion, a gorgeous Italianate brick thing with tall, narrow windows and a central three-story tower, "Maplehurst." A few large maples stand on the property today.

The best known of the dynamic family would be Edward Terry Sanford, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He was a lawyer on his own by the time his father bought Maplehurst, but lived nearby in the same neighborhood, a block to the east. At his home on West Hill Avenue on October 31, 1893, the young lawyer hosted "ye ancient Games of Hallow E'en" at "early candlelight"; it's the first local observance of Halloween of which there's an obvious record.

The Sanfords lived at Maplehurst until after E.J. Sanford's death in 1902. Around 1912, his estate sold the property for development by the vigorous firm of Alex McMillan & Co., which divided his property into 16 lots, one of which was the Sanford mansion, into what became known as Maplehurst Court.

"Maplehurst Park is the only close-in desirable residence property left on the market in this city," McMillan claimed. "It is only five blocks from the post office and yet is on a quiet street, in an excellent neighborhood, with all the advantages of the country.

"The savings in streetcar fare to [a] family of five would amount to more annually than the interest on $2,000, to say nothing of the convenience and saving of time on this property as compared with suburban property."

The implication was that from Maplehurst, you didn't even need a streetcar, never mind an automobile.

McMillan promised that the residents of Maplehurst Court "will enjoy a magnificent view, both up and down the river, which will be forever unobstructible."

The first taker was reportedly Joe Brownlee, an executive at Standard Knitting Mills. In those early days, most Maplehurst households had no particular connection to UT, either as faculty or students. They were executives in Knoxville's leading industries: marble, lumber, and textile mills, with a few wholesalers and railroad men in the mix. Most could have walked to work.

Whether by agreement or accident, everyone who bought into Maplehurst seemed to have interesting and distinct tastes in architecture: Tudor, Mediterranean, even faux-medieval styles, a marble-faced bungalow. McMillan apparently built some of the houses, because the firm was marketing finished houses in Maplehurst in 1918.

However, Maplehurst Court's very first investors—in fact, the people who moved into the grand old Maplehurst mansion itself—were not a social-register family. It was the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. That connection had some historic value, because it was during that tenure, in the 1920s, that one particular Kappa Sig named Estes Kefauver, future U.S. senator and presidential candidate, lived there.

In the 1920s, as a former Maplehurst resident sat on the U.S. Supreme Court, major changes came to the neighborhood.

UT was growing, and encroaching. Shields-Watkins Field, later the site of Neyland Stadium was built in 1921, just across the creek from Maplehurst. As suburbanization set in, downtown became less residential, and more business-oriented. Around the corner, the Medical Arts Building and the Post Office went up on blocks that had been the sites of affluent homes.

Church Street Methodist Church, after a fire that destroyed their earlier Church Street sanctuary, built their large stone church on the fringe of Maplehurst, on the site of the old Knoxville Female Academy as well as some residential plots.

Henley Street, which had never been anything but a quiet two-lane, tree-shaded residential street, widened to three times its original width, and was suddenly connected to the biggest bridge across the upper Tennessee. Henley Street became, for the first time in its history, a thoroughfare, a wide, noisy street full of automobile traffic. Suddenly Maplehurst didn't seem downtown anymore.

A fire destroyed much of the Kappa Sig house, a.k.a. Maplehurst, in 1932. Its walls remained standing for a few years, as if perhaps someone was likely to come along and fix it up; but that wasn't to be; wealthy Knoxville was already on its headlong flight to the suburbs. The Kappa Sigs just moved elsewhere on campus, and old Maplehurst was eventually razed and replaced by two dark-brick apartment buildings with a heraldic theme, and a parking lot.

After World War II, cheap apartment buildings began springing up in an arc to the south and west of Maplehurst Court. But except for the people who lived there, the neighborhood was nearly forgotten. When a World's Fair traversed the edges of Maplehurst, some Knoxvillians waiting in the China line were startled to see, up through the trees, old houses they'd never seen before.

"I like the fact that he's trying to keep them," says Dee Canizales of Spillers' intentions toward Maplehurst Park. "He wants to stay within a certain look. The 'Old World charm,' as he calls it."

"We've spent a lot of money systematically going through the neighborhood, evaluating homes with historic potential," says Spillers. "We took the worst building on the property, and it turned out beautiful."

John Montgomery confirms what Spillers says. Though he likes Maplehurst the way it is—his building is one of the few that is not incorporated into the Gameday project—he's impressed by what he's seen so far. "They've taken some of the buildings and fixed them up." He's especially impressed with their work on the three-story brick-and-stucco building already finished with condos. He says it was in especially bad shape.

"They're not preservationists, though," he adds. From inside, the units look as modern as a beachside condo built at Hilton Head last Tuesday.

Right now, Maplehurst Court is on the back burner. "We'll do the Riverfront first," says Canizales. "When it's done, we'll redo the older ones. But if there's interest in one of the older ones before then, we'll go ahead and redo it."

Hill Avenue, which is more or less straight all the way from East Knoxville, takes a sudden unmarked southward turn in Maplehurst, ending in a thicket of kudzu by the old trestle.

Down there are the only likely historic victims of the Gameday project. 834 W. Hill is a pre-war cream-colored stucco building with a tin roof and four full apartments. It was once known as "the Coach House." Nearby is 836 W. Hill, a smaller, stranger building cleaving to its hillside, accessible by a sort of gangplank with iron-pipe railings. It looks like the sort of place that would appeal to a stranded pirate. Through an open door, a scattered deck of cards adds to the effect. Both of the buildings are currently vacant and open. According to plan, neither will still be standing at the end of the year.

"They're not historic," says Canizales. "They're just old apartment buildings."

It's hard to know when the place at 834 West Hill was built, but it was said to be a coach house for the nearby Mead mansion, reportedly built in the 1860s and demolished about a century later. If the Coach House does have 19th-century origins, it may be the oldest building in the Maplehurst area. It was converted into an apartment building around 1932, and has been a short- and long-term living space for a variety of interesting people. City directories indicate that among its original tenants were Ephraim and Marian Rosenzweig; he was one of the first permanent rabbis at Temple Beth El. Other early residents included the regional manager for a tobacco company, an "assistant county home demonstration agent," salesmen and bookkeepers. By the late '40s, it was known as the Hodges Apartments, and home of Irene Hodges Studio. It was not primarily a student residence until the '60s.

A 1981 MPC Maplehurst Redevelopment Study cited it as a building of "High" historic or architectural significance; but when Knox Heritage and the Gameday organization were considering rehabbing the house in 2000, a Tennessee Historical Commission survey declined to bestow historic-register status to it. "They said there was no way to get a historical designation on that," says Spillers, who sounds genuinely regretful. He was told it was because the house, on the other side of Neyland Hills from Maplehurst Court, is cut off from a historic neighborhood; the MPC's Ann Bennett says she was told the house had also been too much altered from its original state to merit the tax credits.

One of the biggest changes wrought by Gameday may be the fact that it will make Maplehurst more accessible, at least to the UT area. The Riverfront Club development will supply an obvious walkway from the Neyland Stadium area to Maplehurst, with steps traversing a steep ravine long traveled mainly by goat-footed students who followed a dirt path up under the trestle.

Among Maplehurst's thriving eccentricities is actually a legacy of the World's Fair: what claims to be Knoxville's only bed and breakfast. The Maplehurst Inn is at 800 West Hill, and except for the real-estate office, it's the only business in Maplehurst. The place, which originally opened under previous ownership to serve World's Fair visitors, has made a living in the intimate-hostelry business for more than 20 years.

The rough-stone-block front, a latter-day addition to a ca. 1915 brick house, isn't particularly inviting, but if you do step in, a sign beside an electric buzzer says, "Please Ring For Inn Keeper." The guy who's likely to show up is Sonny Harben, who runs the place with his wife Becky and an assistant. The amiable Air Force veteran grew up in Knoxville and attended UT, but like a lot of students, "I didn't know this place existed." He joined the Air Force; based in Charleston, he flew C-141s. He was later a pilot for Eastern.

He and his wife bought the place about five years ago and remodeled it, opening some of the rooms up into common parlors and dining rooms for the guests. Today there are 11 rooms, including a swanky, Jacuzzi-equipped penthouse, each so different from the next that each has its own name. Some of them sound like airplanes: the Golden Angel, the King Ivory, the Double Rose. The Congressional Suite is so named because it's former Congressman Bob Clement's favorite room. They run $79 to $149; Sonny says they're forgiving about multiple occupancy. Breakfast, usually a sausage-egg casserole reputed to be the finest breakfast in town, comes with the deal. It's served buffet-style, down the tight spiral staircase in sunny hillside dining rooms that don't look like a basement.

This was the old Brownlee house, one of the first houses built as part of the Maplehurst Court development. "There were eight bed and breakfasts during the fair," Harben says. "Now we're down to one." (Another, Maple Grove, is just outside of the city limits on Westland; the St. Oliver, on Union Avenue, has some things in common with Maplehurst Inn, but calls itself a hotel.)

On a recent Thursday morning, he can show most of the rooms, because most of them are empty. But by evening, he's expecting seven to be occupied.

"We go from zero to full," Harben says. "We tend to be half-full to full on the weekend." He estimates that he averages about 30 percent occupancy, which adds up to maybe 1,200 room-nights a year. He does much of his promotion via his sites on the Internet (a Google search suggests that Harben's business is one of the world's best-known establishments associated with the word Maplehurst), but he sounds like he'd like to have more business. "People don't think of it.

"People want to get away from the kids for a day. Anniversaries, special occasions, Baby-I-Love-You. And Ladies Nights Out." He's acquainted with some groups of girlfriends, sometimes as many as 10, who spend a night or two here.

"About 70 percent of my business travelers are ladies," he says. They take the time to find places like this. "Businessmen just tell their secretaries, 'Get a room in Knoxville.'"

Bob Clement isn't necessarily the biggest VIP who ever stayed there. He says one Ohio woman returned to it for the 50th anniversary of her wedding. She had been a Brownlee, returning to the house where she was born, seventy-something years before.

There seem to be half a dozen opinions about the Gameday project. Some, like Sonny Harben, don't think it'll change anything much. Some are convinced that it will ruin what makes the place different.

On a recent Monday morning, downtown restaurant worker Dan Anderson is sitting out under a tree, chatting with Jim Kenny, the superintendent of the Kristopher. "It's the best place to live in Knoxville," says Anderson. "I like the community feeling, I like how old it is. It's got a lot of character."

About Gameday, he says, "I really don't like the idea at all. It seems like it could take away a lot of the historic character of the neighborhood."

"It's gonna be a lot of rich folks coming in here," Kenny puts in. "It'll drive prices up. Nobody else will be able to afford it."

"It's not that cheap to live here now," adds Anderson, "but it's pretty affordable."

Other neighbors' reactions range from ambivalent to guardedly optimistic.

"The nice thing is, it'll still be quiet, and have a lot of parking," says Markert. "The sad thing is, it'll be kind of sterile. It won't have a neighborhood feeling."

"It's not like the feeling of a neighborhood when you've got people checking in and checking out."

The big question, of course, is who will be living here—and how much living will they be doing here. Canizales expects the Gameday developments won't make a big net difference in the size of Maplehurst's population, but might increase it a little. Gameday may also make the place a little quieter, because it will be less student-oriented, because their luxury buildings aren't aimed at the student population. All the new construction would seem to add to the population of Maplehurst, but if Gameday does turn out to have mainly a seasonal appeal, Maplehurst may be even quieter than it is today.

Maplehurst is guarded about change, as it always has been, and to date no one knows how the place will look five or 10 years from now, and what changes, good and bad, are to come. But one change is undeniable. Maplehurst has been found out.
 

May 29, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 22
© 2003 Metro Pulse