A second opinion
by Jack Neely
Back in the 1990s, when the cluster of buildings on the 500 block of Gay Street, including the S&W, was threatened for the Justice Center project, there was an outcry. Some were merely nostalgic, remembering the multi-story cafeteria, its spiral staircase, the private booths, wood-paneled club rooms, and the organist who played popular tunes near the front window. From 1936 to 1982, the S&W was our most conspicuous restaurant.
Other arguments came from architects and architecture professors, many of them too young or too new to town ever to have set foot inside the S&W; they noted that it was one of very few art-deco buildings remaining in Knoxville, that it was perhaps the finest example of a certain kind of Egyptian-influenced art deco in Tennessee. Sign-carrying preservationists demonstrated in front of it; architects made drawings proposing that the Justice Center could be built with a smaller plaza, to save the S&W and the buildings adjacent to it.
Other buildings in the cluster, which date from Victorian era through 1940, have connections to the early development of country music and to the civil-rights struggle of the early 1960's.
The county scotched its plans for a Gay Street justice center. Impressed with the interest in the S&W and other buildings, Knox County spent some thousands of dollars improving their facades and doing some structural work to keep the buildings sound.
The block became the focus of an ambitious plan that seemed calculated, in part, to save these buildings. The S&W's grandiose entrance would become the entrance to the lobby of a movie theater—an authentic version of the now-trendy moderne facades of new movie theaters built around the country of late. Some of the other buildings might be saved also in an attempt to maintain this link in Gay Street's architecturally diverse presence.
In the meantime, folks had scurried away with the portions of S&W's elaborate wood and brass interior—there were rumors of various pieces appearing in West Knoxville projects.
Now the city announces the plans have been revised. Nothing's certain, but it sounds as if the movie-theater project once conceived to save the S&W's famous front may doom it.
At this writing, there's little resistance. Considering that so much is going onto that block, the cineplex and the transit center, erstwhile preservationists shrug, "All we could save is the facades."
A facade can seem an insignificant thing, hardly worth considering. The most beautiful face in the world, detached from the rest of its owner, wouldn't be something you'd care to look at for very long. Some suspect they'd feel the same about the front of a building.
The word facade has two meanings which are very different from each other. In my Webster's Dictionary, the second meaning of facade is "a false, superficial, or artificial appearance..." That definition is useful to those who'd find it easy to dispense with a mere facade.
In defining the first meaning of the word facade, however, Webster's shows a little picture of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Artisans spent decades completing its famous marble front. That's also a facade.
Sure, it's there for show, and many would hold that the Notre Dame is more showy than it needs to be. To stand in front of the Notre Dame is to overhear Americans on bus tours muttering that they could have built the thing a good deal cheaper.
But people wouldn't be coming to town just to look at it. And you have to admit it looks better in the dictionary than a picture of the latest suburban megatabernacle would.
The word facade is defined by the Notre Dame, and the Notre Dame is defined by its facade. It's how we recognize it. That's what a facade is by its first meaning: the greater part of what makes a building distinct. People can love buildings without ever having seen the inside, as the popular furor about the J. Allen Smith house demonstrates.
Among preservationists the new word facadectomy has lately gained some currency as a term of contempt for a preservation job that preserves only the facade. (The nomenclature needs some work: in medicine, the prefix before "ectomy" always indicates the body part being removed, not the one being saved: by facadectomy reasoning, an appendectomy would be cutting out the body to save the appendix.)
People seem to hate the idea, but today, we're seeing some fine examples of functional facadectomies on Market Square. Interiors may change, and change again; the facade is often what holds firm. Even the White House in Washington was the subject of a massive facadectomy in the 1940s: the interior, the roof, the rear, it's all 20th century. Only the outer walls, mainly on the front, are original. But it's still the White House. The facade is what makes it the White House.
The S&W is not the White House, but the interesting shell of it that remains deserves to keep its place on Gay Street, and would serve as a swell entrance to a movie theater. They don't build facades like that anymore.
October 2, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 40
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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