Extend James White Parkway? Why not get rid of it?
by Jack Neely
In the two months I've been parking free at the Coliseum garage, I've noticed something peculiar.
After I park in the garage, I could wait for the free trolley, but I prefer to walk: And when I do, I cross the old Church Avenue viaduct. The concrete bridge was built in 1937, and for its first three decades, it crossed First Creek and a whole semi-forested neighborhood of shacks where people lived. When I was a kid getting out of church, I'd look over the deco-patterned concrete rail at the kids playing in the creek by the abandoned car, and wonder about their lives.
There had once been a network of streets down there—Kennedy, McKee, Fouche, Welcker Place, Minnow Avenue—which extended downtown to the east with semi-urban residential areas with corner groceries, churches, cafes, beauty parlors, barber shops.
Now, walking from the free-parking experiment, I look over the same railing and wonder about other things. The shacks are long gone, of course, with the people who lived in them. The trees are gone. Even the creek's gone. The biggest and most historic of Knoxville's creeks, the whole reason James White built a city here, is buried in a giant culvert. What's there now is a freeway named after a guy who liked that creek and, 217 years ago, decided to settle down beside it.
The part of James White Parkway that I cross daily is fully nine lanes wide, not counting emergency lanes, and two or three more lanes' worth of asphalt that seems to be there just to allow for the errors of judgment that are inevitable when you're dealing with human beings at high speeds in disorienting situations.
All told, it's probably a dozen lanes' worth of asphalt. Some of them are long, swoopy entrance or exit ramps that look like they were designed for vehicles traveling at jet-fighter speeds.
But look down at this wide expanse of asphalt, at 9:30 on a weekday morning, and count the cars. It's easy. There's one. There's another. If these nine lanes were consolidated into a simple four-lane, it wouldn't be as busy as most sections of Kingston Pike.
That's on weekday mornings. After 7 p.m., when I walk back to my car, there are even fewer cars passing down there. There are rural two-lanes in Alabama that get more traffic at night than these nine mighty lanes that take up a voting ward or two of what used to be East Knoxville.
I'm never one of those people down there. I've tried to be a good sport. I've tried to drive on James White Parkway, and I've tried to like it. But with its blind concrete walls, obscure exits, and disorienting curves, I always felt like a pinball skidding through curved chutes at the whim of some clumsy teenager. It's not easy to avoid James White Parkway, since so many roads seem designed to shovel you into it, but I have learned to.
Others do, too. You hear legends about unsuspecting parkway travelers winding up somewhere altogether different from their original destination. Hundreds of hungry people miss the turnoff to the restaurants of Volunteer Landing—U-turns under Henley Street are so frequent they can be counted in frequency per hour. Surely some of them give up and drive on to somewhere altogether more comprehensible.
Of course, there are some days when this section of James White Parkway does have significant traffic. A few Saturdays in the fall, I'm sure it earns its keep. But how many hundreds of acres of downtown land, how many millions in property value, are we willing to sacrifice to rush thousands of festive people with money out of downtown Knoxville as quickly as possible?
Are we morons? Downtown is bursting at its seams; affluent folks are looking for downtown property to buy but can't find any for sale. But the priority seems to be to surrender huge tracts of land for the sake of getting people the hell out of town.
Why not, instead, give them a reason to stay? What if we were to jackhammer away all those acres of asphalt, replace it with a four-lane called James White Street, and build about 20 blocks of city down there, connect it to the rest of downtown by extending Union, Clinch, and Cumberland, and have a strip, or two or three strips, of shopping and residential development. Exhume First Creek, which might make a swell setting for creekside restaurants. Or whatever: A Walmart would be an improvement. However you use it, a redesign, with real streets and sidewalks, would also enable the elusive pedestrian connection between downtown and Volunteer Landing.
None of that's likely to happen, of course. This is Tennessee, where we build highways whenever and wherever possible and preserve them forever, like cemeteries. With taxpayer-funded perpetual care.
But in the meantime, if I were among the manifold descendants of James White, I would demand they remove my ancestor's name from it. It gives the innocent visitor the impression that Capt. White must have been a big, fat, dumb, wasteful, confusing sort of guy. The sort of guy you do your best to avoid.
September 11, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 37
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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