How some of our best-known buildings came into "reuse"
by Jack Neely
Imagine some Knoxville cornet player in a jazz-age band got conked on the head in some nightclub brawl in 1933, and emerged from his coma 70 years later.
After he adjusted to the shock of being extremely old, and to the sad fact that nightclubs of 2003 rarely employ cornet players, he might look around Knoxville and see a lot of familiar sights. Familiar, and yet weirdly different.
The world headquarters of Sterchi Brothers Furniture had somehow turned into an apartment building full of hip young people, with interior-design elements like exposed ductwork that would have seemed, to our cornetist, bizarre, like something out of a moving picture by Fritz Lang.
The Andrew Johnson and Farragut Hotels, which had been Knoxville's two finest hostelries in 1933, were both still there, but they were office buildings. The Andrew Johnson used to employ hot cornet-based jazz bands, but not when it's the headquarters of the county school system.
Somehow even the familiar old school buildings were different. Tyson Junior High's an office building. Park Junior High's an apartment building with a big fence around it. Old Knoxville High's an office building.
The New Sprankle building, the brand-new office building on Union that the cornetist knew as headquarters of Roosevelt's socialist experiment TVA, had turned into something called the Pembroke, a swanky apartment building with a penthouse.
Both train stations were still there. But the Southern station was now much quieter, full of drafting tables, with a receptionist in the middle. It had become a large architectural office. There were architects' offices in the most unlikely places: one in the old Walla-Walla Chewing Gum Factory on Emory Park, even one in the other train station, the L&N. But it had mostly turned into a big restaurant.
The big new post office, the marble building on Main Street that was the pride of Knoxville in 1933 was now mainly a bank.
On the north side, Greystone, Major Camp's spooky old Victorian mansion on Broadway, very old-fashioned even in 1933, was all fixed up. It was a television station. Our convalescent had heard of television, the latest marvel of high technology in 1933, but he didn't expect to find it going on in a big way in an old house where an elderly Union veteran had died years ago.
Maybe it's the head injury, but he's feeling dizzy. Woodruff's Furniture Store now had sidewalk seating, and inside is a legal saloon where they brew their own beer. The Christian Science Church had turned into some kind of crazy late-night dance club. And the Miller's Department Store had morphed into an office building that, inside, looked something like a big-city hotel.
The Market House is clean gone. All the buildings surrounding it were still there, but they were a whole lot cleaner and ritzier than the ones he knew. The dirty old second floors, which he knew as storage rooms and gambling clubs, were all fixed up with curtains and window boxes, even had people living up there.
It's like one of those weird dreams, where everything is familiar, but wildly different.
A visit downtown may have a similar effect on some old-timers who haven't visited in a while. Some of the changes can be bewildering and disorienting. It's hard to blame one elderly businessman of the community who recently told us that he disapproves of the Sterchi project. A building, he said, should be used for the purpose for which it was intended.
However, downtown has survived by changing through the principle of adaptive reuse. The phrase is fairly new to our ears, but it's a simple, and very old, idea. Before it was trendy or mandated by new-urbanist planners, adaptive reuse was often plain practical. There's a Darwinian principle at work here: buildings survive the generations by adapting to new uses.
It's tough to figure what was the first example of using a building for a purpose very different from its original one (it may be better all around if we pass over J.G.M. Ramsey's reported use of an ancient Indian mound in the design of Mecklenburg, his exotic Forks of the River mansion nearly 200 years ago; it burned down during the Civil War.)
Thomas Humes is said to have had a residence in mind when he built his brick building on the corner of Gay and Cumberland in 1816, a rather grand townhouse for him and his family. But Humes died soon after the building was finished, and by 1817 the townhouse was serving as a hotel, a purpose it served for well over a century, much of it as the Lamar House. In 1909 it became the front of the Bijou Theater, an establishment for vaudeville and movies, two forms of entertainment Humes never experienced. Today the Irishman's old townhouse also houses offices and a restaurant/bar.
The municipal building known today as Old City Hall was built in 1848. One of the few antebellum buildings still standing downtown, it served for its first 70-plus years as the "Deaf and Dumb Asylum": it was the now-politically incorrect name for the original Tennessee School for the Deaf. During the Civil War it served as a hospital of sorts, as many buildings did, and after the war it filled in, briefly, as East Tennessee University, the forerunner to UT. It's currently headquarters to the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership.
The seven-story brick building in which we assemble this magazine is known as the Arnstein. It's an office building with a pub located conveniently at the bottom. It has been an office building for about 70 years. It began life a quarter-century before as a large department store, Millers' chief rival.
Speaking of Miller's, Arnstein's old rival is now also an office building itself, restored in an ambitious city project, with a grander interior than the old department store ever had. Did we say Miller's? The other Miller's Building, the one on Henley Street, which was built to be a Rich's in 1954, has served as the UT Conference Center for the last several years. All three of downtown's biggest department store buildings are now occupied as office buildings.
Both the Farragut the Andrew Johnson Buildings have been office buildings as long as many downtowners can remember. But they were both built to be luxury hotels, a purpose they served for most of their histories.
As hotels, department stores, and at least one Sunsphere have been converted into office space, sometimes office buildings go residential, as did the Pembroke, 20 years ago.
The 1920s Sterchi Building, was the headquarters store of a major furniture distributor for nearly 60 years, sat empty for 20 years and then, suddenly, became a trendy apartment building with a youthful reputation. Nearby, the Commerce Building, once retail/wholesale/industrial space, is now upscale residential, as is the adjacent Rebori Building, which began life, ca. 1885, as Knoxville's public library. One of the most daring adaptations is the old six-story glass distributor on the corner of Jackson and Broadway, which after decades of vacancy is being converted into a single-family dwelling.
Adaptive reuse has always been a municipal fact of life, but there's been a particularly feverish spate of architectural transmogrification just lately: aforementioned Sterchi Building, the Miller's Building, and several other Gay Street apartment and condo buildings; and, on Market Square, too many adaptive reuses even to list in this article. Some of the newest uses restore middle-class housing, an original but long-forgotten presence on the Square.
Market Square's nearly 150 years of history could illustrate a textbook on adaptive reuse. The Square's buildings served purposes that were industrial, educational, profitable, residential, illegal, agricultural, musical, supernatural, political, recreational; several buildings on the Square have undergone very different transitions: buildings standing there today have been, in the past, pool halls, movie theaters, boarding houses, butcher shops, saloons, groceries, small factories.
Some buildings somehow go through far-flung odysseys without leaving their own address. The building at 200 East Jackson that now houses Barley's began life 80 years ago as a wholesale grocery firm, did time as a lawn-mower supplier, was then a punk-era avant-garde art gallery, and is now, as it has been for the last several years, a pizza-and-beer parlor with a reputation for bluegrass.
A surprising number of reused buildings retain some hint of their original uses. Of course, a few do so out of necessity, like the 1932 post office building on Main, which still keeps a service window in the back. The Old City's Jackson Ateliers, where Cup-a-Joe is located, was once a shoe factory and warehouse. Its design preserved an original metal shoe chute, still visible in its lobby. Besides the coffee shop, it now houses residences and business firms, including the high-tech communications maverick Atmosphere Pictures.
Some restoration projects are so thorough that even the modern businesses they attract evoke some of the original use of a building. The Candy Factory was nothing of the sort for decades, serving mainly as a warehouse. Today, though mostly devoted to galleries, it houses a small chocolate factory. The 1905 L&N Station nearby hadn't welcomed a passenger train for more than a decade before it became a restaurant centerpiece of the 1982 World's Fair, but now it hosts the headquarters of Knoxville-based Gulf & Ohio Railways. Aspects of a building's original use and character are sometimes known to sneak back and haunt the place in surprising ways.
An elaborate brick Victorian building at the corner of Jackson and Central was for years an Italian ice-cream company and later as an upholstery concern. But in the mid-1980s, it suddenly re-emerged with an original name and purpose no one was old enough to remember. After almost 80 years in the non-saloon trade, the turreted building was Patrick Sullivan's Saloon again, the purpose the building had served in its first couple of decades, bearing the name of the popular Irishman who built the place in the 1880s.
Sometimes echoes of a building's past are plain spooky. After Wayne Blasius and associates set out to renovate the furniture store long and almost exclusively known as the Fowler's Building, roofing work set off an expensive fire. When the roof was repaired, Blasius determined to call his adaptive-reuse project, which mixes, office, residential and, soon, retail, "the Phoenix Building." He came up with a stylistic logo to evoke the mythological bird that rose from its own ashes. Research into the building's past determined that long before it was known as Fowler's, when it was a china company known as Cullen & Newman Queensware, this same ca. 1900 building had a name of its own. Because it had risen from the ashes of the downtown fire of 1897 which was, and remains, the most ruinous fire in Knoxville history, it was called the Phoenix Building. A century ago it even sported a large stone statue of the mythical bird on its roof.
Some adaptations/renovations are more graceful than others. Few remember when the Regas on North Gay was in the bottom of the five-story Watauga Hotel building—but if you stand on the Gay Street side, you can still see its grand entrance. It's just that most of the old hotel is gone. Regas started as a small lunch counter in the big hotel, but the restaurant got larger and larger as the hotel itself practically vanished. Regarded a liability when it was condemned in 1963, the offending floors, constituting most of the old Watauga, were shaved off the top. It was what might be called a radical adaptation.
In some cases, the adaptation quickly overshadows a building's original purpose. The Whittle Building, never wholly completed as the international multi-media center it was planned to be, served as a bright publishing/TV factory for hardly three years; it has already served as the federal courthouse longer than that.
It's likely that most of the buildings downtown have evolved into something other than what they were built to be. Downtown has the highest density of adaptively reused buildings, but they're everywhere, some accomplished more artfully than others.
Major Eldad Cicero Camp's Broadway mansion was converted decades ago to be the headquarters of WATE TV. Major Camp's old carriage house, once used by WATE, is one of Knoxville's newest reuse projects, now housing offices for Knox Heritage and the Center for Neighborhood Development.
A 1940s motel on Kingston Pike near Farragut is now a single-family residence. What was once a single-family residence in Maplehurst is now a small hotel. Cherokee Place, on Sutherland, once a potato-chip factory, has been, for the last 20 years or so, an office park. The Baker-Peters house, the antebellum home of a secessionist surgeon, is a jazz club that carries Dr. Baker's name.
One of the most startling adaptive reuses in the whole city is Bennett Galleries on Kingston Pike, which was for years the Capri Cinema, a big corrugated steel movie house, Knoxville's first cineplex. It took some imagination to re-envision it as an upscale art and furniture gallery.
And, in all quarters of town, there are occupied buildings that used to be schools. The employment of old public schools in new and different ways constitutes a whole subset of reuse.
Like old Knoxville High, Tyson Junior High on Kingston Pike is now an office building. Another old public schools, like Park Jr. in East Knoxville, is now upscale residential, and better known as Park Place. Brownlow, in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood, is being renovated by downtown wunderkind David Dewhirst. The Perkins School in the Marble City area off Sutherland was recently renovated as headquarters for the accounting firm of Pershing Yoakley & Associates. Another, smaller schoolhouse in South Knoxville was recently featured on HGTV as an unusual adaptation into a single-family dwelling.
With so many encouraging examples, it shouldn't have been as surprising as it was to some that the prospective demolition of South High drew impassioned objections.
Adaptive reuse is stirring, even though it's a little more problematic than it once was. A century ago, many new buildings looked roughly alike. A stove factory might not look much different than a haberdashery or a boarding house or a saloon, and building codes for various uses were minimal, and the need for parking varied little between the uses, mainly because it was hardly an issue for any of them.
Modern buildings are often built for distinct uses. Bennett Galleries reuse of the Capri Cinema is more the exception than the rule: businesses more often find it expedient to demolish postwar buildings, even fairly new ones, when they propose a new use for the property.
The exceptions have been multiplying just lately. You wouldn't think a suburban K-Mart or Lowe's would ever serve any purpose besides big-box retail. But recently two Lowe's have been converted into office space: one in West Knoxville for a call center for financial giant Ed South, one in East Knoxville for the headquarters of Comcast, the region's primary cable company.
Always, other buildings, and other uses, are on the horizon.
Adaptive reuse is in the air. Every time a building is vacated, the Fates roll dice about what purpose it will serve next. There are hopeful plans for a new Gay Street library that would leave the 30-year-old Lawson McGhee Library on Church empty; it's being courted by prospective corporate occupants. One of the TVA Towers may be empty soon, and though a radical shift to condos, a giant art gallery, a health club, or mega-church may not be in the cards, it's better to be open-minded. Maybe it can be converted into a giant parking garage.
Adaptive reuse makes sense, of course, and it's not surprising that we've been doing it here for a couple of centuries. But sometimes you can make people mad by bringing it up. It happens every time there's a discussion about finding long-term uses for the convention center.
October 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 43
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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Adaptable Knox