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My annual optimistic column

by Jack Neely

I’ve been grousing a good deal lately, and I’m not saying there’s not a lot more to grouse about. But it’s May, and the other day I saw a chain of kids gathered around the Market Square bell, chanting ring-around-the-rosie. This week I feel obliged to find some good and praise it, as our friend Mr. Haley used to say.

In all the condemnation of the convention center’s extravagant uselessness, which may or may not ever be resolved, let’s remember that the pricey Ashe-administration project does leave us with one swell public amenity: a lovely park in a critically important place. Its two large lawns are proving useful for a variety of warm-weather events, but maybe just as important is that fact that the park makes it easier than ever to walk between UT and downtown. Though the intersection at Clinch Avenue is especially dysfunctional for bicycles, for pedestrians the once problematic town-gown trek is now a paradisiacal stroll past waterfalls, a mysterious geyser, and an imposing bronze statue of Comrade Sergei Rachmaninoff.

It still seems a little too roundabout to make itself perfectly obvious as a route to anywhere but itself. On a walk through there during a sunny lunch hour last week, I encountered only about a dozen others; I’m not sure how many actually use it to get between downtown and UT. But some do. When a UT professor friend of mine walked through the park to get to the brewpub, he said it was the first time in his 25 years in town that Knoxville seemed to him like a city.

That other, more controversial park seems to be mellowing after its harsh debut. By the way, if you can’t pronounce Krutch, just call it “that park near Market Square”: the German Krutch family obligingly removed their umlaut for our typesetting convenience, but I’m not sure they’d be happily remembered as a homonym for adaptive equipment.

Whatever you call it, it’s looking better, and will look better still, as the original one did, as things grow big and lush, and as they get the mechanical mountain stream working again. I still don’t understand the necessity of the concrete substitution, and I can’t say I like it better without the fences. When I attended the open design forums sponsored by Kinsey Probasco back in June, 2002, the overwhelming opinion expressed by the 100-plus downtowners present was to remove them. It was almost frightening, the popular groundswell, like stepping into an anti-fencist revolution. People cheered like Berliners cheering on President Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these fences!”

The vehemence surprised me then. Though I’ve worked right across the street from Krutch Park for years, I had never heard a whispered objection to the fences. But they came down. And now the anti-fencite Jabobins seem to have evaporated. Now all most folks say when they talk about the new Krutch Park is how much they miss the fences.

Go figure. I liked Krutch Park then, and I like it now. I do miss the secret-garden intimacy of the old place, and I doubt the new one is peculiar enough to catch the attention of travel-book writers, as the old one was. But it’s hard to deny that it must work on some level. I’d be willing to bet that more people use the park today than did two years ago. As I write this, there are about 40 people out on the park, sitting, lunching, ambling through. People I don’t even recognize.

The other day, I encountered a young woman in the park. She had a couple of chairs, a table, and an old-fashioned typewriter. She was offering to type and send letters, for free. All you had to do is sit there in the extra chair and dictate. She said she’d had dozens of takers: she’d written apologies, love letters, lots of letters to mothers. I think it was a performance-art project of some sort, but the fact that Krutch Park attracted her gave it a point for authenticity.

The Third Creek Bike Trail’s link to Volunteer Landing, south of Tyson Park, makes the trail a real alternative route from downtown all the way to Bearden. It was completed about a decade ago but has been closed for most of the period since. First, because of improvements to the highway bridge above Tyson Park; then, for over a year, for completion of the controversial Ag Campus bridge project; then again for further improvements to the highway bridge over Tyson Park.

Last year, it closed again. But this time, for once, it closed to improve itself. The city replaced a flood-weakened bike-pedestrian bridge over Third Creek. Now, with a new steel bridge that looks like it may stay put, it’s all open. The bike trail is once again the best way to see the pockets of wildness that still thrive in the middle of town, where ducks and geese and rabbits and turtles tarry. For lots of folks, it’s also a charming way to get to work.

Speaking of bridges, the Gay Street one turned out better than we had any right to expect it would. Several years ago, there were dark insinuations that the 1897 steel span was just too old and had to be torn down. The decision to save it spoiled one of my favorite sarcastic columns, in which I wondered why European bridges tend to last so many centuries longer than American ones. There’s something that rankles a columnist a little bit when public officials unexpectedly make the right decision, because it robs us of the opportunity to ridicule them for making the wrong one.

But Congressman Duncan found the money somewhere, and there it is; it looks great, and its new, barely artful pedestrians barriers make it something a good deal nicer than your typical chunk of East Tennessee infrastructure. I crossed it on foot the other day at lunchtime for no particular reason. I was a little surprised there were a couple of dozen other people doing the same thing, and from the looks on their faces, not one of them was grumpy. There’s something about crossing a river that makes people nicer.

I stopped in the middle and watched boats going underneath. People do have a troubling tendency to jump off this bridge. But we don’t have records of how many people walked out here with every good intention of jumping, and experienced something that changed their minds. Up here, on foot, the river seems bigger. Life seems a little bigger, too.

It would be better if there were some secure crosswalks on the south side—and maybe a pretzel stand or something. And it’s too bad it wasn’t open in time for the 100th anniversary of the escape of outlaw Kid Curry, upon a stolen horse across this same bridge in 1903. It should have been a gala occasion. But it’ll be there for the 101st, late next month. It would make a fine excuse for a 5K, I think. The Kid Curry Hurry.

I suspect I’ll make a habit of this new stroll to South Knoxville. There are some days, I think, when you just need to cross a river.

May 13, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 20 © 2004 Metro Pulse