Metro Pulse/Cover/Living Downtown

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Downtown: The Abiding Issue
by Barry Henderson

by Jack Mauro

When you don't drive, you make people nervous. When you compound that bit of communism with a—highly logical, under the circumstances—residence downtown, you are a radical freak or a pioneer. And it's all rather funny, because you know you are maybe the most conservative, freak-disliking and generally cowardly person in the county.

What's it like, living downtown in Knoxville? I am asked this a lot. There are other questions I'd much prefer to field. Then I think of the interrogations faced by people like Bill Haslam and Michael Jackson, and I don't feel so put upon.

What's it like, then? All right. Jump aboard Jack's Downtown Ride, and strap your bad self in.

In 1994, I took an apartment at the Willingham Garrets, at Summit Hill and State Street, and stayed there two years. (I've since heard that Peyton Manning himself took my flat thereafter; if it's true, he could not have more painstakingly cared for the floors. Touchdown passes are good throws, but weekly waxing means gloss, baby.)

In those more innocent days, Victor Ashe was only in the fifth decade of his sovereignty and the Holiday Inn Select didn't yet know it was a hovel. The Miller's building was still a big brick spinster and nearly all of Gay Street was, most of the day or night, a two-lane promenade for ghosts. I would walk upon it and sing loudly and badly and, more often than not, like the tree falling in the unpopulated forest, I wasn't crazy because no one heard me. This downtown Knoxville was, the limited expanse between my ears notwithstanding, my world.

I walked to work. To the library. To the Main Avenue post office, then a marble Valhalla of shadows and echoes around two pleasant mailpersons squeezed into a cranny of the east wing. To the bench across from Chris Whittle's Neo-Georgian Orgasm, upon which I scribbled many a note for my first book. To the YMCA, that tiered and decayed Miss Havisham's wedding cake of a gym, where I fought sag and snapped a bone fighting too hard. To Krutch Park, of whose petite glories I have often sung. To the Jackson Avenue Market, where I got an ottoman, a painfully delicate coffee table, this small and impractical desk I will kill before relinquishing, and a few extraordinary prints, real cheap.

Oh—the barbers. I walked to the barber shop on Union. I still do. There is no finer stroll with no better outcome for a man to engage in, and still call himself a man.

What was it like, living here? It was usually quiet, comfortable, uncrowded and convenient. Not unlike suburbia, when suburbia does it right. Had there been an ample grocer, I might never have seen life beyond Henley Street.

In 1998, I moved back to Knoxville, to the Lucerne on West Fifth Avenue. A shuffle to the Patterson Cottage behind, and last year's movin'-on-up-to-the-east-si-iii-ide transfer to the Sterchi, and I have in five years laid out a grid of downtown Knoxville living I can see from my loft window. I do occasionally connect the dots with my fingertip, thinking the Stonehenge-like geometry I sketch in the air will then provide a glimpse into the future, and romance.

I walk to work. To the library. To the...well, you get the picture.

What is it like, living here now? See above, if you please. You may also undo the straps. This ride of mine is pretty tame.

I wish I could jazz up this downtown Knoxville existence, if only on paper. But I can't, because I don't like jazz. And that, I believe, is what people conjure when they think� "downtown," and why my downtown both perplexes and dismays those who live outside of it and wonder. Other people who live downtown go to bars and clubs. People also come downtown from elsewhere to go to bars and clubs. I do not make those places. Music is not to be sneezed at, of course. But, to me, musicians are like poets; they can produce excellent stuff, but I don't want to be in the same room with them.

The music scene here, they tell me, is fabulous and varied. Swell. But a single focus on one element is a self-defeating strategy for a city because, no matter how much loot it indirectly brings into the taverns' registers, it eclipses too much else. The Knoxville fetish for more music strikes me as a rhythmic version of the UT football hoopla. To many a Knoxvillian, the city is far too defined by The Team; to this pilgrim, the city's downtown is far too inextricably associated with who is playing at what bar on Saturday night.

Brush away the orange and white banners and—mirabile visu!—a whole, varied city is uncovered. There is an awful lot of orange, though, and it blinds even the native. Can the non-downtowner, I then wonder, see that inner Knoxville is not exclusively a perpetual and dispersed battle of the bands?

Don't misunderstand: I was young once, too, and saw whatever city I called home through eyes peeled for hot spots. But the world doesn't belong solely to swaying youth. Nor, thankfully, does our downtown. Which is why I still live here. Because, for every gaggle of UT kids on Central, feverishly racing the clock before the pass-out hour tolls, there is a lady in an ancient mink coat walking a dog on Union. For every frat whoop reaching to the Sunday morning dawn, there is a barely perceptible smile from a lone, entranced reader on the steps of the East Tennessee Historical Society. For everyone out, there is someone staying in, and the scales nicely align.

What's it like, living here? Suburbia is called to mind, as before. Downtown Knoxville offers what suburbia should: the space in which to carve out the existence best suited to you. It is not raucous if you are not raucous. It is hollow and boring if your day is tedious. The city is—a la that perfidious third bowl of porridge—just right, in that the single man or woman can shape his or her life within it to suit his or her temperament. You can rent an apartment, eat breakfast at Harold's Deli, hunt through the mostly posthumous pickings strewn throughout the Old City shops, and down gin and tonics to the throb of rockabilly every night. I—dull as mud and nearly maniacally reclusive—can slip on a jacket and cross the whole of downtown diagonally, singing my way to the World's Fair Park and being seen as nuts by very few. I can even go really berserk, walk around the corner and sit with hip people and lattes.

Or I may not. Probably won't, either. Why, I still haven't even made it to the Tomato Head.

But I can, and on foot, in about three minutes. If I choose.