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Market Square Revisited

History hints at the potential of the place

by Jack Neely

By the early 1850s, Knoxville, the half-forgotten frontier capital, was showing signs of turning around after a couple of decades of languishing without a railroad. Though steamboat traffic was problematic at best, what little business there was in Knoxville was concentrated near the river.

With immigration and expectations of a railroad coming in on the north side of town, the city annexed a large area north of Vine Street in 1852; suddenly a cornfield north of Union was beginning to look central to the city's new boundaries.

In 1853, Joseph Mabry, a public-spirited 27-year-old businessman, and his brother-in-law, 32-year-old lawyer William Swan, donated this large, flat area with the proviso that a shelter be built and the place maintained "as a curb market for farmers forever." A long, low market house was built there in January 1854.

A rare 1859 photograph of downtown Knoxville shows a double-arched one-story stable-like structure, similar in style to antebellum market houses in Charleston and elsewhere. Its setting appears almost pastoral, with only a couple of buildings built to face it.

More followed in short order. Among Market Square's earliest tenants were a bowling alley, a newspaper, and more than one saloon. Fed by streets from all sides, the square became the new core of a city growing with bewildering rapidity. In 1867, the city built its municipal offices here on the north end of an expanded square, partly to be closer to the railroad station. Knoxville's government would remain located on the square for over 50 years.

It was a relatively new Market Square that a local boy named Adolph Ochs knew, when he began his career in journalism at the Knoxville Chronicle after the Civil War, a quarter century before he bought, and transformed, a newspaper called the New York Times.

In the 1870s, German immigrant Peter Kern built his bakery on the square's southwest corner; today the three-story brick building remains one of Market Square's most distinguished buildings. It included not only the bakery itself, but a first-floor retail room and, on the second floor, an elegant "ice-cream saloon." Kern's was central to the city's urban life for over 40 years.

Late in the 19th century, Market Square got a reputation for music, much of it performed by farmers down from the mountains, swapping licks on the fiddle. The square eventually hosted fiddling contests.

For Market Square's first 43 years, there was that long, low building in its center. An 1886 bird's-eye drawing of downtown Knoxville shows a one-story market building: long, but only about two-thirds of the square in length, leaving an open space on the north end. It's already dwarfed by the buildings on either side of it, several of which are still there today. At the time, the square was almost a city unto itself, with a little industry, a lot of commerce, and a range of residences, from boarding houses to apartments for affluent bachelors.

In 1897, the city built a large, perhaps overlarge, Market House which covered most of the central public space of the square. Its huge size may have been a challenge to a competing market square on the northern end of Gay Street: the Central Market, which was closer to the railroad station and more convenient to the farmers. The Central Market went out of business soon after Market Square's famous new Market House went up.

In 1900, Knoxville promoters claimed that Market Square was the best food market in the Southern interior. That year, an anonymous Knoxville Journal & Tribune columnist declared that "Market Square is the most democratic place on earth. There, the rich and poor, the white and the black, jostle each other in perfect equality."

In the 20th century, Market Square developed a belovedly disreputable reputation that inspired a variety of artists. James Agee's description of it, ca. 1916, emphasized its mixture of human warmth and creepiness; Cormac McCarthy's multiple descriptions of it in the early 1950s are comparable. The New York Times ran an essay about a stroll through Market Square in 1925, emphasizing its eccentric characters and uninhibited musicians. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson captured a perfect symbol for the square in 1947: a beautiful woman with a stylish hairdo and an eyepatch, looking melancholy as she sits in a beat-up pickup. During the same period, poet Carl Sandburg, retired in North Carolina, was an occasional visitor; he said he liked the square because it was the only place you could find ginseng in a central business district.

It was a surprising place. In the summer of 1954, an RCA scout heard his first of Elvis Presley from an open-minded Market Square record dealer who was amplifying "That's All Right, Mama," out into the square and claimed he had sold thousands of the 78s that summer alone.

The 1950s worried retail promoters, who proposed to raze the whole square to make it a shopping mall, perhaps a covered one. Some focused their sites on the Market House. There had been questions about its safety since the '30s, and some proposed replacing it with a parking garage.

As city fathers debated the merits of the old Market House, a fire broke out in an upper floor in December 1959, gutting the building. A 14-year-old florist's son, a surreptitious smoker, was blamed for the blaze, but its timing aroused suspicions of anti-preservationist terrorism. It was torn down in 1960, and Market Square re-emerged as Market Square Mall, "modernized" with modernist pseudo-facades and concrete mushrooms which sheltered much of the surface.

For the first time, trees were planted on the square. The makeover infuriated some who believed the square could not thrive without a market house; among them was grocer-titan Cas Walker, who closed his Market Square store. He gave the mall five years.

Market Square Mall enjoyed a spell of status as an urban experiment, an example of saving an old public space as a pedestrians-only mall. Though the New Yorker made fun of its piped-in music, events on the square earned positive national press. It was central to the Dogwood Arts Festival in that annual event's brief era of national fame and critical acclaim in the 1960s. Promotional literature about Knoxville in the 1960s and '70s included photos of Market Square Mall. In the '70s, the Tennessee Valley Authority, chose to build its new main headquarters overlooking it.

A photograph of Market Square Mall appears as an ostensibly impressive example of a well-used pedestrian space in the 1977 book, For Pedestrians Only: Planning, Design, and Management of Traffic-Free Zones. Market Square was one of the older examples of pedestrian malls studied in the book. The authors pointed out that Market Square, after 16 years as a pedestrians-only mall, had no street-level vacancies. The co-author was Gianni Longo, more than 20 years before he came to Knoxville to launch the Nine Counties One Vision process.

In the '70s and '80s, downtown suffered a general malaise as the two other "malls" opened in the suburbs, but Market Square remained relatively lively. As all of downtown's movie theaters and most of Gay Street's retail closed, Market Square kept chugging along, a collection of modest merchants and restaurants anchored by Watson's, downtown's last surviving department store. Market Square wasn't a stylish place to live, or to eat dinner, and weekends were often deserted, but on weekdays the street level remained mostly occupied with restaurants, stores, and a few offices.

Its New Frontier styles were fading by 1986, when Knoxvillians were no longer ashamed of Victorian storefronts. A city redesign, light in comparison with what would come later, removed the modernist faux-facades and the concrete toadstools and added a vaguely Victorian farmers' market shed in the middle.

But beginning in the middle '80s, Market Square sustained one blow after another. Massive cutbacks at its mammoth next-door neighbor, TVA, curtailed the lunch business. Whittle Communications closed. Many of the square's buildings were owned by landlords who demonstrated little interest in either keeping them up or selling them, as if they were milking the last pennies they could produce before they actually fell in. A few small places thrived, but the largest presence on the square, old-line Watson's, closed. It was likely a casualty of the decline of department stores all over the nation, but inevitably some blamed Market Square, setting the stage for some titanic efforts to save the place, or exploit it.