Metro Pulse/Citybeat

Comment
on this story

Seven Days

Wednesday, Feb. 25
A group of high-profile local Jewish and Christian leaders gather to view The Passion of the Christ at an area movie theater. Several of the clergy leave in disgust when a theater employee inadvertently gives away the ending.

Thursday, Feb. 26
Former UT Vol and current Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis snorts at charges that he was involved with cocaine trafficking.

Friday, Feb. 27
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee calls a proposed renewal of a ban on assault weapons “a waste of regulation.” We certainly wouldn’t want to use up our supply.

Saturday, Feb. 28
A pre-game tussle over equipment devolves into an out-and-out fight by the end of the Tennessee v. Auburn basketball contest at Thompson Boling Arena. Apparently there was some disagreement over which team had more balls.

Sunday, Feb. 29
The UT Lady Vols basketball squad finishes its regular season with an 85-62 drubbing of the LSU Lady Tigers. LSU partisans respond with the standard-issue “Just wait ‘til next year,” until someone reminds them of the date.

Monday, March 1
A handful of Ailor Avenue businesses go on record in the News Sentinel as opposing a new methadone clinic in their neighborhood. A second, smaller group of locals request free samples before they pass judgment.

Tuesday, March 2
A table-topper at a local bar advertises low-carb vodka. The Apocalypse is here.

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:
The sizable bell pictured hangs in the belfry of Elm Street Baptist Church. Located off Oldham Avenue in Old North Knoxville, a plaque on the house of worship boasts: “Where all are encouraged to enter and depart to serve.” Unfortunately, we did not receive a single response to the picture, so we’ll be hanging on to our extremely rare New Knoxville Brewing Company bumper sticker for at least another week. We miss that beer.

Intermission
An inside peek at the transmogrifying Tennessee Theatre

Inside, the old girl looks as if she’s been pillaged. Her famous organ is missing. The elegant chandeliers and heavy curtains are gone. All the seats are gone from the theater, which, with its sloping floor, now resembles a concrete beach. Where the stage is supposed to be is a big dam. Men are mixing concrete here, cutting it there, with circular saws that emit sprays of sparks.

The ornamental walls and ceiling aren’t going anywhere, but for anybody raised in the Tennessee Theatre, this seems almost like a different building. It’s a jazz-age movie palace undergoing the biggest changes in its history, a $20 million expansion/renovation project.

A lot of the work so far has been engineering-heavy grunt work, changing structures in the theater that most of us never saw anyway. Veteran technical director Tim Burns scrapes his shoe across a rough spot in the surface of the lobby’s colorful stone terrazzo where the concession stand used to be. “That gives you an idea of what Coke syrup does for you,” he says. “It eats the floor.” They discovered only as they got into it what had caused the crack across the floor. Most of the theater was built over what most folks know only as the restroom floor—but the front of the lobby was built on fill. In some places, the clay had settled, leaving a six-inch cavity. They’re curing it with a therapy of grout injections.

The renovations are not only counteracting time’s ruinous influence; they’re also undoing seven decades of bad renovations. Planned for silent movies, the Tennessee was still new when, in the early ‘30s, the management pulled out the old wall sconces to replace it with undistinguished acoustic panels. They’ve just pulled down that paneling; and though they’re working only from photographs of what the 1928 sconces looked like—they’ve been missing these 70 years—they’ll replace them with replicas.

In the balcony, which is being re-ramped at a new angle to better aid lines of sight and sound, tons of concrete have been removed, correcting a 1966 “improvement” that most agree was ill-advised. The new one is being rebuilt with a tight network of steel, to be overlaid with wood.

Engineers would be impressed; the main thing the layman notices inside, though, is absence. Much of the theater’s familiar furniture is in storage, and conspicuous accoutrements, like the chandeliers, are off in other cities, undergoing restorations by specialists. The more dramatically obvious work, inside and out, will commence next month. Soon they’ll be putting up scaffolding for Jeff Greene, a national celebrity among theater-interior restorers, to commence cleaning the interior plaster, including its famous oval ceiling, soon to be seen in its full color for the first time since the silent era.

Also in April, we’ll start seeing the cantilever extension over State Street take shape. Despite the Tennessee’s fabulous interior, its backstage has been woefully inadequate for many operas and Broadway-gauge musicals. Burns recalls a showing of Evita, necessarily scaled down to a degree that was “embarrassing.” The new theater will welcome a broad range of extravaganzas.

Some hoped that the expansion might mean a major addition of seating in the theater; however, with everything charted out, it looks as if it will add only 55 seats, bringing the Tennessee’s capacity to an even 1,600: bigger than it’s been since 1966, but a smaller capacity than it had during its first 38 years, when 2,000 theatergoers with lower standards for safety and accessibility squeezed in here.

In several respects, the project is more improvement than restoration. New elevator shafts are in place. The Tennessee never had elevators, but with period-style doors, and styles borrowed from the rest of the theater, “it will look like it’s always been there,” according to Becky Hancock of AC Entertainment, who manages the theater.

The original Tennessee had a sweeping lobby unblemished by anything as common as a concession stand. The first of several was added around World War II. However, once they get the lobby terrazzo squared away, they’ll fudge a circa-1928 concession stand, terraced into three serving areas on the sloped floor, based on an idea borrowed from the faux balconies on the sides of the interior of the theater.

There’ll be a second concession stand in the basement, between the theater’s elegant restrooms. The women’s room will sacrifice its sitting area to add several more toilets—it’ll now be a 15-holer—and the men’s room will expand: from eight to 11 urinals. In both cases, they’ll preserve most of the original facilities and style of what are generally considered Knoxville’s most ennobling restrooms.

Out front, they’ll bring the box office inside. Not the old box office itself, which will remain on the Gay Street sidewalk for appearances’ sake, perhaps to be used on occasion for minor transactions. But the demands of security and electronic sales make it essential to move its function into the building. It’ll take up about a fifth of the old airlock, blocking the southernmost double door, unused in recent years.

Much of the work now underway will never be seen by most patrons. Few know the bowels of this place, like the old ushers’ shower room. It’s unclear when the last usher showered here, but it’s still intact, under the main floor. “Ushers were almost like a fraternity,” says Burns. In an adjacent recreation room, they played pool and lifted weights. In the new configuration, the old shower room will be consigned to storage. “We expect our staff to shower before they come to work,” deadpans Hancock.

The cramped, narrow backstage area of cell-like dressing rooms previously covered 2,200 square feet of up-and-down space; the new backstage will be about 10,000 feet with hospitality rooms, wet bars, a food-prep room, and twice as many toilets. Some areas beneath the seats look brand new, like a modern office building. Part of the newly acquired space is along Clinch Avenue, in areas until recently occupied by a couple of businesses, which have relocated elsewhere downtown.

They have their base funding in place, from a complicated combination of public and private sources; some of their historic-preservation funding offers strong inducements to have the whole project completed by January 2005. They’ll keep the streetfront facades intact, even though some of this will be dressing space; the windows will be there, but fitted with translucent glass. “SHiPO wants activity visible from the street,” Burns says. He often refers to SHiPO as the arbiter of what’s kosher about renovating a 76-year-old building and what’s not: it’s the State Historic Preservation Office.

Hancock is not quite sure how to respond to congratulations that they’ve collected all the $20 million they need. “That’s just the base project,” she says.

There’s a good deal more that they want to do, projects that would be more easily done now—with the place torn apart—than later. They want to rebuild the marquee out front and buy some audio-visual equipment, and build some balcony restrooms.

Most importantly, and most expensively, they want to buy a custom-made orchestra shell; there’s $125,000 for it in the base project, but they still need $675,000. There’s a plea, and a display picture of the proposed shell in the show window of the Farragut Building, across the street from the Tennessee. Though the orchestra could jury-rig some sort of a reflective screen, it would be an inferior solution. Their pleas sound urgent. “It can’t wait until September,” says Hancock.

“I’m very eager to be done with this,” adds Hancock. “I’d much prefer to operate a theater than raise funds.”

— Jack Neely

Back to Its Roots
Market Square’s returning marketplace

Open air vending will return to downtown May 8 with the upstart Market Square Market. The marketplace, organized by the Market Square District Association, will be held on the second Saturday of each month through November and feature fresh produce and baked goods with arts and crafts presented by regional merchants. Other Saturdays in the month will feature produce only.

The organizing committee’s mantra is “high quality and variety.” All items must be made or grown by the participating vendors. While there is an application process to participate, it is only to ensure diversity, says committee representative Charlotte Tolley.

“The applications for farmers are just for information; it’s not a ‘weeding out’ process,” she says. “However, we do have an idea for a certain number of artists. We don’t have a definite number, but we want a variety. It’s an artisan focus, but we don’t want to have all paintings or all pottery.” The only groups that have been specifically contacted or targeted are organic, pesticide-free farms and local artists’ guilds.

The market held on the second Saturday of each month will have an event atmosphere with live music to accompany the more extensive offerings. Organizers insist that the musicians featured will be low key, unobtrusive and serve as a backdrop to the activities. “We know what it should look like,” says committee head Scott Schimmel. “We’re trying to do the best job we can, and get the right people down here. We not trying to reinvent anything.”

Response has been positive from everyone involved thus far, Tolley says, adding that local farmers have been particularly enthusiastic. “The general consensus is that they have been looking for a downtown market, and now they have one.” Vendors have been off the square during its redevelopment, but a marketplace is how it originated 150 years ago.

The city of Knoxville has been extremely cooperative in working with the Market Square Market, Schimmel says. “They want to see more and more activity down here. They’ve asked us to be open to the idea of extending the market into December.”

The committee is soliciting sponsorships and plans to promote the event through newsletters reporting what types of produce will be available. Applications are currently available at Tomato Head and Bliss on Market Square or by emailing a request to [email protected].

—Clint Casey