At 150, Knoxville's oldest gathering place is new again. And as always, it is the most complicated, controversial, and fascinating four acres in East Tennessee.
by Jack Neely
Market Square is almost exactly 150 years old, and it's brand new. After five years of extravagant promises, false starts, talk of it becoming a heavily wired high-technology office hub ("Digital Crossroads," ca. 1998) or a high-impact retail mall, perhaps domed and air-conditioned ("Renaissance Knoxville," ca. 2000), Market Square seems to be settling into something more modest and familiar: a market square. There's no überlandlord, no rules prohibiting either residents or offices, no enforced agenda, and to many, that's a great relief. In its unheralded sesquicentennial year, Market Square hosts restaurants, residences, shops, and offices, and if things go as expected, it will be home to a lot more of them in 2004 and beyond.
But nothing has ever been simple on Market Square. Though the block is freer than it was under previous plans, it's still part of a complicated five-block development that, if all goes well, will link to downtown's first cineplex—but no earlier than 2006—which is substantially later than many investors were hoping.
As usual, the ifs are critical, and there are serious questions about how everything is going to fall into place over the next three years.
For now, things are looking up on the square. Cleaned, disclosed, and restored, the upper floors' Victorian facades haven't looked this good in a century. A stage, more modern looking and less opaque than the former shed, is nearly finished, allowing several more yards of open space in the center of the square. Some observers say the square itself seems much bigger.
New stores, including Bliss, a trendy home-furnishing boutique, a revamped Earth To Old City (in spite of their now-awkward name, they report business is up in their new location), and, soon, a bookstore, will join several other relatively new retailers. Residences are proceeding apace. Several of the buildings' walk-ups are already occupied residences. Others are soon to follow, most impressively Scott and Bernadette West's 11-apartment development, ready for rental in early 2004.
Existing restaurants, like stalwarts Tomato Head and the Soup Kitchen, report business is up. The aptly named Preservation Pub has been busy well into the night since it opened over a year ago. Monthly First Friday events have drawn hundreds to the square and the adjacent block of Gay Street for receptions and gallery openings.
Although the place isn't even officially open yet—pedestrians still have to walk around construction equipment, step over holes, and brush concrete dust off their shoes—people are coming downtown just to see the place. Naturally, they're curious, after six years of debate, after nearly 12 months of construction, to see what's become of the place. All evening you see people walking on the square. People are looking up at buildings they'd never noticed before.
Whether it can sustain that interest for more than a couple of months depends, many claim, on a major development two blocks away.
In the 30 years since the multi-screen cineplex has been the industry standard, no one has ever built one within five miles of UT, one of the largest college campuses in the Southeast. A movie theater downtown would also be the closest theater to all of South Knoxville and South Knox County, much of East and near-North Knoxville—and even a big chunk of West Knoxville. That a downtown theater would make a living is easy to believe.
Developer Jon Kinsey of the instrumental Kinsey-Probasco team knows something about the success of Chattanooga's Bijou, a cineplex built in a once-bleak section of downtown Chattanooga. Combined with nearby restaurant development, it defied the pessimists to become a success. Kinsey knows about the Bijou intimately; he was mayor of Chattanooga when they built it. He's confident about a downtown Knoxville theater. "We think that it will do, on a per-seat basis, 20 percent better than the one in Chattanooga—mostly because of the tremendous population at UT."
It's planned for the 500 block of Gay Street, first conceived as a way to save the art-deco facade of the beloved S&W Cafeteria. The rub is how, and when, to build it.
David Dewhirst was hardly known for downtown development in 1994 when he bought two adjacent buildings on Market Square. Now he owns about half of the western side of the square, including the old Watson's Department Store space. He has a personal stake in Market Square: his mother lives there. Globetrotting entrepreneur Emily Dewhirst is proprietor of the Nomad Gallery.
For now his buildings in the middle part of the west side of the square aren't as instantly alive with business as some of the others. He is betting his investment on the movie theater, and is frustrated that the cinema's not farther along than it is.
He's not sitting on his hands. Before Christmas, he'll begin building out the second floor of the old Watson's space to be the new home of the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, to be ready for May occupation. The first floors remain empty. "The only thing that has slowed me down is the lack of an anchor tenant," he says. "I have quality regional-to-national tenants ready to commit as soon as we announce the movie theater."
National presence might seem anathema to the local character of Market Square; most of its other businesses are locally owned. "You don't want a square full of them," Dewhirst says, avoiding the word chains. "But you don't want a square absent of them, either. They send the message that we're not just startups, bohemians, adventurers. We're concrete businesses who will get a good return on our money."
He won't offer many hints about what sort of businesses he's negotiating with, but does allow, "An Applebee's on the square would make me ill. But I'm sorry downtown lost P.F. Chang's to West Knoxville."
Dewhirst thinks the construction delays could have been handled better. "We should never have said 'mid-April.' We should have said, 'pending utility work.'" That story is echoed by Brian Conley, president of Cardinal Construction, contractors for the project. (Conley is also publisher of Metro Pulse.) "We should never have told anybody it would be done by the Dogwood Arts Festival," he says. "The utilities were more antiquated than anybody realized." Worse, schematic drawings of what was beneath the surface turned out to be "approximations at best."
Dewhirst is the only one we spoke with who's not especially unhappy with the eight month delay in construction, ascribed to unexpected utility work and bad weather. "In some respects, since we haven't lined up a movie theater yet, this delay has been a godsend. The embarrassment of opening the square without a plan was eight months shorter than it would have been."
He wants to get the proposed Gay Street cineplex underway as soon as possible. To Dewhirst, that means doing so without the transit center. "On the surface, it sounded like a good idea," says Dewhirst of the idea to exploit federal funding for transit centers to offset part of the public expense of building a cineplex. "But dig down, and it sounds like a really bad idea. There are not a handful of people in Knoxville who understand federal transit money."
Ellen Adcock, city director of administration, vociferously disagrees. She says the city is getting tremendous assistance from Congressman John Duncan's office as well as from TDOT to examine building a facility that would combine parking, a public-transit center, a large daycare, and a cinema. She says the 500 block of Gay Street was identified as the best spot for a transit center in a study 10 years ago. She adds that there's some question about whether it would even be legal to use that block, which was purchased by the county for the abortive Justice Center project, for private purposes. Lawyers are working on it.
Building a theater independent of a transit center should take about two years, Dewhirst says. He believes that adding the transit center to the equation could add another two or three years. Others are more optimistic, revealing some rather extreme differences in perception. Adcock and Deputy Mayor Craig Griffith insist that the mixed-use building would take only about four additional months. And while some suspect the transit money, which would build only a shell, would save only about $1 million, Griffith expects it may be $7-10 million over the whole project, including parking. Considering the fact that no money has yet been allocated for the cinema from any source, that's hard to sneeze at.
But no one expects a theater to reappear on Gay Street before 2006. Dewhirst and others worry about Market Square surviving without its anticipated life support until then.
Kinsey believes the newness of the square will boost its early success; he hopes the theater will come through in time to sustain it beyond the honeymoon period.
"What Knoxville can't stand is another non-success," says Jon Coddington, a UT architecture professor who was a design consultant with Kinsey-Probasco last year. "The delay of the movie theater is problematic. We can't open this thing up and have it be dead."
That's a future phase. Phase II, the construction of the large mixed-use—residential, retail, and parking garage—building in the old Watson's parking lot, half a block from the square, is already in the works. Originally planned to emphasize residential development, with less than 500 parking spaces and 6,000 square feet of retail space, it recently blew up to an 800-car parking garage with only a few token residential units.
Coddington protested what he called "a significant deviation from the master plan," with a parking garage twice what he and others recommended. Though demand for downtown residences remains strong, several apartment buildings and condos have opened to fill that need in the months since the charrette, as demand for commuter and customer parking in this part of downtown has increased somewhat with the opening of ImagePoint in the Miller's Building and the deletion of some parking spaces due to construction.
"You've gotta take care of parking in a downtown," says Kinsey. "There's never too much parking."
"The more parking, the better," agrees Scott Partin, co-owner of the Tomato Head and president of the Market Square District Association. He adds that organic growth of the sort we're seeing on Market Square means an increased demand for short-term parking. Some merchants on the square would like to see free or cheap two-hour parking in the garage, for customers.
Coddington thinks it's important to build a building that's something other than a mere parking garage, with significant retail and residential components. He calls the mega parking garage "that which is convenient, rather than that which is right, in the making of a viable downtown."
As of a meeting last Thursday, KCDC is recommending a compromise in the size of the parking garage: a 650-car lot, with 20 residential units.
When Market Square first opened, it was with the proviso that it be maintained "as a curb market for farmers forever." But 2003 is on track to be the first year since the square first opened in 1854 that farmers have sold no produce on this block: the first year that the square hasn't served its original purpose.
The ostensible reason for the irony was construction. But the only persistent and dependable farmer who sold on the square in recent years—Sherrill Perkins, who could be found on the square three days a week for the last 20 years or so—has retired, with no heir apparent. There were a couple other farmers who sometimes set up modest tables on Fridays and might be persuaded to return. But it's clear that farmers and produce aren't central to this latest iteration of Market Square. No one's against them—if you ask, all the members of the Kinsey-Probasco team say they'd like farmers to return to the square—but they seem not to be a priority.
"The great thing about the square is that it's flexible," says Kinsey. "To the extent there's demand and desire for [a farmer's market], it can serve that purpose."
"There's nothing to preclude using the stage area as a place for farmers to set up," says Mike Fowler of Ross/Fowler, lead architect on the project. "The farmer's market has to fit into the mix of everything else on the square."
Some, including some farmers, talk of the era of the downtown farmer's market as a thing of the past. Many practical farmers think of the ideal modern farmers' market as a big flat area with easy, convenient, free parking for both suppliers and customers, not the sort of place they're likely to find in any downtown. Architect Bill Ambrose supported a proposal to build a large market place on top of the projected parking garage at Wall and Walnut, and is disappointed it didn't go anywhere.
Produce sales on Market Square itself may be revived in the future, perhaps through Saturday market days, a proposal being considered by the Market Square District Association, to begin as early as spring. Though its emphasis seems to be on showcasing the work of local artisans, Partin says he'd like to see farmers be part of the weekly event.
Before he retired, Perkins opined that farmers would never return to the square as it has been re-envisioned: mainly, he said, because it had no public restroom.
Public restrooms were left out of the square to leave it unencumbered by enclosed buildings. Developers deny earlier assumptions that bathrooms were omitted because they were seen as a magnet for unstylish sorts. Regardless of public restrooms, Fowler says, "the homeless are there and will be there."
He adds, "there's a great sentiment for restrooms, probably accessed from Wall Avenue, as part of the parking garage."
"Public bathrooms will come," affirms Kinsey. "The location is not determined yet, but they will be incorporated into the area."
Architect Mike Fowler admits he envies the Tennessee Theatre renovators around the corner. "I wish we had a fence, like they do," he says. The ungainly stages of the lengthy theater renovations will remain a mystery to critics. We can't see the Tennessee Theatre till it's finished.
By contrast, Market Square has been laid open for daily inspection by one and all. We've seen every stage of its renovation. The mud, the workers, the heavy equipment, the broken sidewalks, the mistakes, the busted water mains and gas lines, the trees that didn't take, the holes, dug, filled, and redug. Every development has been reviewed and criticized, in on-line groups, around water coolers, in downtown pubs.
Fowler's a little taken aback by the criticism, especially considering that the square's design was vetted in public, both in City Council meetings and in a rare (for Knoxville) charrette, a two-day public forum during which the 150 citizens who showed up were invited to help design the square. At the standing-room-only meeting in the old Watson's space, the pertinent aspects of the square's design were subjects of vigorous discussion, from whether or not Krutch Park should have fencing to whether to allow automobile traffic on Market Square.
"We listened carefully to what people told us, and we did almost all of it," he says.
Some are impressed. Bill Ambrose is an architect who knows the square as well as anybody, even though he's not a member of the design team. He's had his office on the square since 1971, the salad days of "Market Square Mall." He admits he has concerns about the corollary development, especially the prospect of retail on Gay Street, as recommended in the Gibbs Report. But he likes the looks of the square. "It's more attractive, I think," Ambrose says. "I miss Mr. Perkins, but I don't miss the shed."
Jon Coddington, who has been a critic of some Knoxville projects, and of some aspects of this one, stands in the middle of the square and gestures toward the new development on the east side. "This is actually terrific," he says. "All of a sudden, in the storefronts, some life. Things are happening, and it could be something which is visible and dynamic."
Scott West, who owns Preservation Pub and the relocated and revamped Earth to Old City, both open on the square, may be the most extravagant. "The golden age of Market Square is upon us," he says. "Over the next few weeks we'll see the square transform into the hot spot of Knoxville."
The square's new image is creating a stir. Elaine Graham, whose 21 years as proprietor of the Soup Kitchen makes her the square's longest-term restaurateur, is optimistic and says she has already seen an upward bump in business, some of it from customers who came by just to see the new construction. Weekend before last, a camera crew from the national WB Network was on hand, taking pictures of the block. The crew's producer remarked that she's like to move to Market Square.
Among the new square's many critics, though, the most common complaint is the sheer volume of concrete involved. "It's blinding," says one startled Market Square landowner.
Some on the design team agree. "There's too much concrete, to be honest with you," says Dewhirst. "That we have to deal with."
"I think everybody in the team agrees that we made a mistake with the color of the concrete," says Goss. That color, if you haven't noticed, is white.
There had been strong sentiment in favor of paving stones of brick, stone, or some earthier material on the square and in Krutch Park, but it was overruled by the city's engineering department, who insisted that concrete would be easier to work with in the future. Long-term maintenance was the main issue; they may also have been persuaded by a lawsuit filed by a pedestrian injured after tripping on a dislodged sidewalk brick on Market Street.
The concrete doesn't much bother major owners Scott and Bernadette West. Bernadette, who's a professional flight attendant, does a good deal of global traveling and has observed that some of her favorite squares in Europe are paved with concrete. Most are confident that it won't be nearly as bright white by the time they're finished treating it: scraping and sealing it. "It's a little early to judge the product," says Kinsey. First of all, it's not finished. The concrete will be treated in several different ways to bring out the texture and expose the aggregate, take out the whiteness." He says it will look noticeably different in a few months. He adds that much has yet to be added, including plantings, fountains, and furniture.
"When it's all finished up," says Fowler, "I think, people will be pleased."
Concrete is also part of plans to keep the square open to the idea of automobile traffic. "Always having options is good," says Coddington. "One of the things we have to be careful of is constricting future generations' use of the space." He seems sanguine about the idea of automobile traffic in the future. "People and cars can coexist. One of the nice things about cars is that they show a place is inhabited." Others, like Buzz Goss, praise the square as the only pedestrians-only urban area in Knoxville. Some shopkeepers would like automobile traffic to increase visibility, but others are thriving without it.
The no-cars faction seems to have won the day, but the design allows for a hypothetical lane of traffic and a sidewalk on each side. "We wanted it to be as flexible as possible," says Kinsey. "There was some conversation about whether traffic should be allowed back on the square. The concrete surface will be able to sustain that."
The square footage of concrete in redesigned Krutch Park has flabbergasted some observers, who liken the new concrete version of the once-lush pocket sanctuary to a miniature theme park.
Fowler protests that the concrete paths follow the footprint of the previous pavement. It was always paved, he says, albeit with brick. "We respected the lines of pavement already there," he says. He says the only paved areas that have been added are the additional access to Market Street.
Of the complainants, he says, "I think they're jumping to a conclusion without seeing the plantings and the street furniture on it." The newly acquired annex to Gay Street, already planted with grass and substantial trees, will give Krutch Park more green space than it has ever had.
The city will have several hundred new feet of green space in what has been for years a plain surface parking lot. Coddington is disappointed the city didn't come up with some way to deal with the high blank walls of the AmSouth and the old Holston Bank building; the two tall buildings front Gay Street with nothing on their sides, and the park appears to be at the bottom of a narrow brick canyon. "This gap doesn't do anything to contribute to the life of the city," he says.
Fowler says the trees will grow up to mask the blankness to some respect, but Coddington would rather see small shops or cafes built into the sides of the two buildings.
The most contentious issue a year ago was that of the trees. At the south end of the square were six full, mature sawtooth oaks, a little taller than the square's buildings. Planted a little asymmetrically in some forgotten administration, some on the design team thought they fouled the sight lines along Market Street.
The Tree Board insisted on preserving the oaks, and the city acceded, while insisting on pruning them to minimize them as obstacles to lines of vision.
"I don't think they're a problem," says Fowler. "We designers are sometimes focused a little too much on geometry. They're beloved, good trees. I personally think they look a lot better than they did before we pruned them." Nevertheless, he expects they'll be replaced someday, perhaps in their dotage, with more symmetrical replacements.
Several other smaller trees were removed and replaced with a double row of sugar maples.
Some expected that the square's new stage, with its four tall lights, would be more—or less—impressive than it is. A Farragut professional who's a frequent downtown patron notes that it looks something like the entrance to a suburban mall, perhaps the one at Turkey Creek—a perception that he finds ironic, considering downtowners' habitual condescension toward suburban designs.
Some claim the four light towers over the stage are unnecessarily grandiose; predictably, they've been called phallic.
Coddington, who generally likes the square's design, says, "I think they need to be much higher. One of the problems of Market Square is that it's hidden. We need to give it a dimension that's larger than the square itself," with lights visible from other blocks. These are no taller than the buildings of the square.
Some have made fun of the flying-saucer lamp design, which seems a little proto-space-age art deco. Fowler calls it neo-traditional. "It gives a sense of scale, and a little bit of detail. We wanted to find something complimentary to the architecture of the square and to the contemporary buildings in the background. We didn't want it to be too gigantic and overbearing."
Goss, who takes some credit for the design first discussed in the charrette, likes the fact that the flying-saucer design mirrors the tall lights in World's Fair Park, about four blocks away. (It's another Ross/Fowler project.)
Others protest that the pillars are too thick, or that the flying saucers clash with the Victorian style of the black iron streetlamps along the walkways. "I don't want to get into that conversation," says Fowler.
Goss, a friend of Dewhirst's and perhaps the leading renovation architect downtown in the last few years, is in charge of the facades. One of Dewhirst's buildings—the only one in which the facade had to be rebuilt—includes a subtle "pun," as Buzz calls it. Dewhirst is a big Vols fan, and Goss incorporated a two-story T, with collegiate seraphs, into the cast stone. You don't notice it at first, but when you do, there it is.
Probably the oddest reconstruction is the Wests' redo of the four-story building at the square's northeast corner, a building which was fenced off as structurally dangerous a couple of years ago. It's fixed, but it also has four metal plates featuring cartoon caricatures. They're three members of the West clan, Scott, Bernadette, and Rosemarie, plus Frank Gencay, the immigrant from Turkey who once owned most of this side of the square and was blamed for its deterioration. West says they were inspired by cathedral gargoyles to mount "scary visages of ourselves" to ward off evil. He expects to call it the "Gargoyle Building" and to establish a grocery there, with apartments upstairs.
In spite of those eccentricities, some observers have been irked by the homogeneity of the lower levels of the square's newer facades: lightly smoked glass in anodized-aluminum frames. They're not integrated with the more-ornate brick upper floors. Though the style doesn't seem to bother most of the merchants, one downtown artist objects to it strongly, calling it "mallified."
A few downtowners are disappointed at the plainness of the ground-floor renovations and the fact that they're not integrated with the upper-floor designs. Ann Bennett, the historical-renovation expert at the Metropolitan Planning Commission, defends Goss's work, affirming that federal historical standards discourage developers from trying to build phony-historical fronts.
With a larger budget, Goss admits, he might have chosen to use wood or other materials on some. "I felt it was my responsibility to get the most out of taxpayer dollars. To do that, we needed some consistency." He adds that the storefronts will be sturdier than some other styles and will require less long-term maintenance.
When crews began peeling back the 20th-century facades, they found little trace of the original facades. "I thought they'd find the old cast-iron columns, at least," Bennett says. With only one exception, they didn't even find those pillars, which were a near-universal feature of buildings of their era. Bennett hypothesizes that they may have been torn out in the 1960 redo.
Coddington, who's an expert in urban design and what makes a downtown feel lively, thinks the work looks pretty good in general, but he's a little concerned about the smoked glass. "Clear glass shows activity," he says. "Transparency is fundamental at the street level. What's there is better than mirrored glass, but not as good as it should be."
In any case, the new look characterizes only a little more than half the square, and in some cases, as new owners and tenants move in, may not be permanent.
At this writing, the square's not done yet. If there have been no complaints about the fountains yet, it's probably just because they're not yet installed. The waterworks will consist of wall-like fountains on Gay Street and in the middle of the square, plus a new, improved waterfall at Krutch Park.
Historical plaques will be installed in the center of the square, with quotations from James Agee, Cormac McCarthy, and Parson W.G. Brownlow, who all had their own perspectives on the place. As do many today.
During an interview in the middle of the square one morning, a local insurance man in his 60s strode by, angry at the mayor for spending "$8 million on a big sidewalk."
When the incident is mentioned to Kinsey, he seemed surprised, and protested the project's importance. Then he paused for a moment and mentioned that Chattanooga was spending $121 million on a riverside park.
Downtowners are a contentious bunch. Never mind taxpayers in general or the thousands of patrons of the square: if we were just to assemble all the square's landowners, we'd have a full range of opinions about the homeless, automobiles, pigeons, and the charms of concrete.
All the criticism has been disheartening to some civic boosters, but it may be an encouraging sign. Renovations of the past seemed to spark much less conversation, and fewer opinions, than than this one has. Except for the big issue of removing the old Market House, there was little outcry on record, no vigorous aesthetic deconstruction of the concrete mushrooms when they were installed. Consider the sawtooth oaks threatened last year: looking through the newspaper files and city documents, researchers were unable to determine with certainty when they were planted—nor could they learn what happened to the sycamore trees that were there to begin with. Looking at the record, you get the impression that in the '60s and '70s no one much cared one way or the other about such matters as what sort of trees would be planted where; they very clearly do now. Market Square has always been a place that tolerated a diversity of opinions. It's fitting, and maybe inevitable, that the old place should be provoking a diversity of opinions in the 21st century.
November 6, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 45
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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