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Seven Days

Wednesday, Nov. 19
The city's Wrecker Services Commission concludes, following an investigation, that four of the five wrecker companies who contract with the city have been overcharging for towing services. What's the matter with the fifth one? Didn't it get with the program?

Thursday, Nov. 20
Blount County commissioners pass the "God Resolution" going around the state, two days after Knox County Commission withdraws it from consideration and Anderson County Commission passes it. We're beginning to feel like the pedestrian who bumped into a utility pole, and, after feeling his way carefully all around it, declared. "Walled in!"

Friday, Nov. 21
Knoxville holds its Christmas in the City RiverLights boat parade and turns on the lights on 400 Christmas trees that dot the city's skyline. Wait a minute, Thanksgiving isn't until next week.

Saturday, Nov. 22
The Vols beat Vanderbilt, 48-0 in an SEC football game at Neyland Stad...zzzzzzz.

Sunday, Nov. 23
AmSouth Bank's move from downtown to a new headquarters it expects to build on Bearden Hill is publicized in the Sunday edition of the News Sentinel. The free-parking advantage there will not be completely offset by traffic congestion, AmSouth officials predict, following a drive-through of the area at 3:30 a.m. last Tuesday.

Monday, Nov. 24
The Associated Press reports that used-car lots are among the businesses applying to sell tickets in the Tennessee state lottery when it cranks up next year, leading to the question: "Would you buy a lottery ticket from this used-car salesman?"

Tuesday, Nov. 25
Reports surface that a University of Oklahoma business school study shows that TVA would be bankrupt if it were a private business. No kidding? Then why do you suppose it's trying to act like a private business?

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
National Cancer Survivors Day is an annual worldwide event with participants uniting symbolically to demonstrate that life after a cancer diagnosis can be a reality. Yearly throughout the mid-'90's, a local survivors' support group painted individual ceramic tiles, each dedicated to a cancer survivor. They created a mosaic display that can be found at the World's Fair Park underneath the Clinch Avenue bridge. Mothers, fathers, sisters, uncles and many others are honored. Ben Smith of Knoxville was first to recognize the center tile from the 1998 display and he will be receiving a copy of Carol Adrienne's The Purpose of your Life.

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

KNOX COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION
Wednesday, December 3
5 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regular meeting.

Reprieve
A glass house isn't so fragile after all

Things are looking up for Scott Carpenter and wife Peggy Hambright. After spending a year and a half under threat of a highway-department eminent-domain demolition, they can proceed with the renovation of downtown's most unusual building.

Carpenter and Hambright have lived and worked downtown for years, plying their respective trades: Carpenter is a lawyer, a public defender; Hambright is a well-known baker of pies, proprietor of the MagPies bakery. Two years ago this month, they bought the old Southeastern Glass building at the corner of Jackson and Broadway, to live in. Built mostly of poured concrete into the side of the steep bluff on which downtown Knoxville is built, with access to both the freight yards and to the corner of Jackson and Broadway at the viaduct, it's six stories tall, not counting its patio-like roof, each floor different from the one below it, and square corners are rare. "If there are any right angles in the building, there's one," Carpenter says, but he's not even sure about that one. "Most people think it's a triangular building, but it's six-sided."

He explains how they came upon the oddity. "We were looking for a traditional over-and-under," he says, "but we just couldn't find that space downtown. One day we snuck into Southeastern Glass. It wasn't very hard. We were taken with the building with all its uniqueness." It was surprisingly big on the inside, 27,000 square feet, with a sweeping vista of North Knoxville at the top.

He says his wife worked her "wily charm" on the owners, bribing them with pies. They gave in, and sold them the building. (The land on which it sits is owned by the city of Knoxville.)

Built in 1927, it had been standing vacant on the corner since the glass company went out of business in 1968. Much of the interior had been left as it was that last day. Carpenter estimates there were 150 cubic yards of unused glass in various styles.

Considering its three decades of unmolested vacancy, Carpenter and Hambright had no idea there were conflicting designs on the property until after they began their ambitious renovation project. Around June of last year, Carpenter says, "we began seeing TDOT trucks around, and found some telltale orange spots on their building."

"I started poking around." Nobody knew about it, not his neighbors, not the local TDOT office. But in digging around, Carpenter found a disturbing document: a planning report that the Nashville office was doing advance work on a project to straighten and widen the Broadway viaduct. "Very few people have noticed, but it has a 5 percent angle." The widening was to be a very modest two feet, but the combined urban orthodontia, the widening and straightening work, would entail acquiring and demolishing the peculiar building they'd begun to consider home.

Though disheartened, Carpenter and Hambright went ahead with their renovation, replacing the building's broken windows, and proceeding with plans to apply for National Historic Register designation, hoping for the best. But with the future of the building uncertain, Hambright opened her MagPies bakery at another location, on Central Avenue in the Old City.

However, last week Carpenter got some very good news in the form of a packet delivered to his door. The state's historical commission recommended sparing the building, and TDOT acceded. Carpenter says he has gotten strong indications that the building will be added to the Jackson Avenue Redevelopment district, KCDC's pro-historical development, anti-slum initiative of which he approves.

He's gotten strong interest from an existing retail business that may move into the ground floor next year. The second floor under Broadway seems a likely studio for six-to-10 artists, and he's considering commercial and residential development for the rest of the building—except for the top floor, which he and Hambright are reserving as their own living space.

For now, MagPies will remain in the Old City. "She's settled in," Carpenter says. "It's working so well." It's not the over-and-under setup they had in mind, but it's only about three blocks from their prospective home.

Of course, there remains the dilemma of what to do with the hundreds of sheets of glass, much of it cut and colored in now-unusual styles that the business had on hand when it closed in 1968. They'll use some on the building that stored them for the last 35 years. Downtown renovators have expressed interest in using some of it. Carpenter expects they may throw a glass-sale party to dispose of whatever remains.

—Jack Neely

Time, Date, Place
Seven minutes roaming: no charge

"Times Too Tight To Fight and We're Never Face to Face"
—Daryl Hall And John Oates, "Method of Modern Love"

So, it's Sunday, after 7 p.m., downtown:

It is evening. I determine to take a walk downtown, where I live. I know I will stare at the mutilated remains of what was pretty little Krutch Park and what will eventually be kick-ass and expanded Krutch Park, and I will get the blues. But I hadn't left my flat in two days except to sun on the roof. Which doesn't count. And an early evening walk will do me good, or keep me sane, or something.

7:24 I summon the elevator from the sixth floor. It is already on its way down, bearing a young man in dark glasses and flared jeans. I enter the car.

7:25 The young man is talking on his cell phone. I look straight ahead, as one does. If the ride is especially long, one examines with deep fascination one's fingernails. But floor six to street level is not a lengthy ride. Not to them Sterchi high-speed elevators, certainly. Yet at this brief time I become aware that half of the conversation being conducted a few feet away from me is of a drastic nature. The young man says something like, "OK. So then I guess I'll say goodbye." Ordinary goodbyes are not so heralded. There is weight to his tone, and he is pausing momentously between his words.

7:26 "Hmph," I think. "Young people," I think. "Bah," I think. The young man terminates his call as the elevator stops and the doors part. I decide to hang back a moment. I dislike the puppy dog aspect of directly following anyone down the hall to the foyer. But I do step out of the box.

7:26 still. There, straight ahead of recently-on-the-loose young man and myself, is a young woman in low-rise jeans. She is holding a cell phone and staring at it in a dumbfounded way. Until she sees the man and his flared jeans coming toward her. She says, "So, that's it?" The young man doesn't reply. He accelerates his walk to a healthy trot and passes her. I begin to make my own way out, although from a discreet distance.

7:27 It appears that the young woman is not accepting of either the young man's terminating of their relationship, or of his flying like a bat out of hell past her, or of both. She pursues like an avenging Fury of Grecian myth. This gal, I think, has spunk. Or a disorder.

7:27 lingering. The young man has broken into a genuine sprint just before reaching the building doors. The young woman is hot on his tail. Both, I see, are still carrying in their hands the instruments of her misery and his dubious freedom. Their cell phones.

7:28 The young man has made it to the street. For the moment he is gone from my view. The young woman barrels through the two sets of lobby doors with a force to rival that which fueled Sigourney Weaver in the last thirty minutes of Aliens. I have in my time seen doors opened with drunken vigor and virulent rage. I have heard hinges snap and walls reverberate like canons. But I don't think I've ever seen action quite like this. From a slim young woman in low-rise jeans, no less.

7:30 I think how happy I am that youth is a memory. I serenely walk out of the building onto Gay Street in the wake of the Fury. I am gentle with the doors. I tend to ignore the living and nurture the insensate.

7:30 ticking away. A quick scan to the left and the right reveals neither the young woman nor the young man. "Egad," I think. "Such passion!" I think. "How f—ked up," I think. I turn to the left and begin crossing Gay. There is a bellow or a scream, feminine in gender and ursine in power. I look to the right; the young man is somehow nearly past the viaduct, racing as though to catch the best Happy Hour in the Universe at Regas. The young woman is lagging far behind. I am disappointed. I had expected better from her, after the doors.

7:31 I am on the sidewalk just past Harold's Deli. It looks like the episode, or what I will ever witness of it, is done. The young couple could go on forever, like pi. Then there is another bellow. Against my better judgment, I turn to see. The young woman has decided to stop chasing. She has instead chosen to lie down in the center of the viaduct bridge, for a sacrifice to love or madness, an offering in low-rise jeans to Gay Street traffic, I think of Anna Karenina on the train tracks. All right, the scenarios are somewhat different. But the young woman is lying on the tracks, in a sense. If about 25 feet above them. Traffic on Gay Street being virtually non-existent on Sunday, nothing happens. The drama is done; the curtain falls. I suspect the young woman has gotten up and dusted herself off by now, as I presume the young man has stopped running. But I like to think otherwise. We need more myth in our cellular world.

—Jack Mauro