Metro Pulse/Secret History/The Old North

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Notes from a Southern traveler’s East Coast adventure

by Jack Neely

You hear about the Old South, but not the Old North. The North always portrays itself as new. In terms of fashion, morality, technology, and pop culture in general, the North is usually ahead of the rest of the country. Inventor of the automobile, the light bulb, the television; provocateur of punk rock and hip hop and gay marriage. It’s proud of its place on the bright cutting edge of American culture.

But there’s a fascinating paradox that’s hard to ignore, or explain. The prevailing impression the Northeast might leave on a traveling Southerner is how old-fashioned it all is. Over and over, the Southerner encounters images half-remembered from deep childhood, or scenes from a black-and-white movie, of an America presumed to have vanished. Men still wear scarves and long overcoats, and hats with brims. Nightclubs still employ coat-check girls. Newsstands still sell newspapers. And newspaper offices still flash the latest news, as the News-Sentinel did on Gay Street, about 70 years ago. Streets and trestles and buildings and smokestacks and fire escapes are crowded and tangled together, like they used to be in Knoxville, before everything was widened, flattened, opened up, cleaned up.

Some shopkeepers live above their stores, like urban Southerners did a century ago. Northern urbanites buy fruits and vegetables from a greengrocer or an urban farmer’s market, not a supermarket. Modern fast-food chains there are, but not as dominant as they are in the South. Northerners are still loyal to their local delicatessens and diners and time-honored municipal specialties. Order a sandwich in one of these places, and they hand it to you in wax paper, not a styrofoam box. Baseball, America’s oldest major sport, was fading as the Southern pastime before World War II—but it’s still the big thing up there.

Despite their invention of the skyscraper and the fact they were building in the modernist International style before we were, a modern building is more the exception than the rule in a Northeastern downtown. Manhattan, home of the Seagrams Building, is still dominated by two-to-five-story pre-war brick walkups. Inside, stamped-tin ceilings, board-and-batten paneling are unremodeled since the ‘20s or even earlier. If you were shooting a movie based in, say, 1920, it would be much easier to do it in New York or Philadelphia or Hoboken than in Knoxville.

Some bars and restaurants are unimaginably old, like McSorley’s, with its sawdust floor and potbelly stove, unchanged since 1854 except for the addition of a couple of framed pictures. McSorley’s has Manhattan dust older than most of the cinderblock beer joints of the South.

And maybe most conspicuously of all of their old-fashioned habits, Northerners still ride trains. They ride electric trains, as we used to, within the city. They ride bigger passenger trains, as we used to, between cities. Trains come and go on platforms, many of them with pre-war porcelain signs and Victorian-era cast-iron embellishments.

Their trains put them in their cities without cars. Consequently, these people are walkers. Walking is the most old-fashioned thing of all. To Southerners, who used to walk, it’s out of style.

Some of the Northerners’ quaint habits are mere matters of curiosity, but that particular one seems more relevant. We used to walk. There was once a basic Tennessee persona, going back to Davy Crockett, of the lean, sinewy frontiersman who embarrassed the coddled wimps of the city with his stamina.

Things have changed since the days of Knoxville lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo. The founder of Knoxville’s first electric streetcar, in 1890, he went on to organize, in 1904, the first rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River. McAdoo may have been one last example of the sturdy frontier archetype. He lived on West 89th Street, and worked on Wall Street, about 100 blocks away. A thrifty man who wasn’t used to paying for conveyance, the Tennessean often walked. New Yorkers found him remarkable.

With our embrace of the automobile, we’ve modernized that sort of Tennessean out of existence. In the time since, in fact, we’ve swapped hats. Now, New Yorkers are the lean hardy ones, the ones who walk daily; Tennesseans, the chubby, sluggish, modern ones with the shorter life expectancies and the higher health-care bills.

Northerners live an American life that Southerners, for reasons mostly forgotten, abandoned half a century ago. Maybe it was Northern cockiness that preserved their old habits, that tells them, If it’s Northern, it must be good, even if it’s old. The South has been through some bewildering changes in the past 50 years and has perceived reasons to forget its past, erase it wholesale, live in a whole new way, impress the world with our undeniable modernity. But I suspect that somewhere along the way, in our race to seem modern the last 50 years, we threw some worthwhile old-fashioned habits out with the bad ones.