Metro Pulse/Urban Renewal

503 W. Clinch
Each Floor: 900 sq. ft.
$750 - $1,050 per month
Price depends on fit & finish
Contact: Bart Rohrbach
637-0946

by Matt Edens

“Downtown is dead. Who’d want to live all crowded up like that anyway? Bohemians and those crazy ‘smart-growth’ commies, that’s who. I even read something about streetcars in the paper the other day. Streetcars? I tell you this county’s going to hell, what with all them, what do you call it, metrosexuals and everything? At least we’ll never have to put up with any of that nonsense out here in West Knoxville...”

OK, so I don’t really run in those circles, but I’m always a bit curious what someone living the half-acre lot, three-car garage lifestyle out near the Loudon County line makes of what’s going on downtown. Not so much the big boondoggles like the convention center and Universe Knoxville but the fact that there are a growing number of people living in lofts, able to get dinner and a drink without dealing with Kingston Pike traffic. Do they figure it’s some sort of silly trend, that this whole urban living thing will lose its allure now that Sex and the City is in reruns?

If so, I wonder what they make of this Northshore Town Center development—the “new urbanist” pseudo-“downtown” that’s soon to break ground out in the very epicenter of west Knoxville’s gated golf course McMansion megaplex. It’s a little scary when you think about it: “we couldn’t get you to come downtown, so now downtown is coming to get you...”

Of course, it’s not really downtown. You’ll never see a homeless man in Northshore Town Center. I doubt you’ll see any street preachers either, or a really good punk band, or a group of semi-intoxicated folks wandering from street corner to street corner, pausing to read aloud a selection from an novel an award-winning author (or two) wrote about the place. Built at the right scale and density, bricks and mortar can make a place urban. But they don’t make it a city. Only people and time can do that. They’re what give a place richness, flavor and character.

Really cool buildings like this one don’t hurt either. Home to a hole-in-the-wall bar until fairly recently, this building’s bricks and mortar have been here since James Agee was just some kid who liked Chaplin movies. And let me tell you, today this building’s in a hell of a lot better shape than he is. Go see for yourself. It’s currently stripped down to the studs and bare brick inside—solid as a bomb shelter. Unusual too, for a downtown building in the middle of a block, in that it has light on all four sides courtesy of light wells it shares with the buildings on either side. That’s not the only unusual feature in this place, either. The second floor has a real working fireplace, complete with the original tile hearth. Lay a few brick downstairs and you could have another: The old hearth and firebox were ripped out years ago, but the flue is still there. Lease the ground floor and it’d make a great professional office. Lease the upstairs (it has a separate entrance) and you’ve got a great loft. Lease both and you could have one heck of a live-work space (a flight of stairs, how’s that for a morning commute?). The best part is that, even though you’re just leasing you can work with the owners to customize the space.

Which the Northshore developers might be able to deliver too, I don’t know. But can they give you a century’s worth of history and character two blocks from Market Square?