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Can Gay Street suck the life out of downtown?

by Jack Neely

The new, marble-faced history center’s a noble addition to downtown’s landscape; when renovations to the historic part of the building are complete, it’ll be a fine building, inside and out. But for me, at least, it’ll be hard to walk past, and not up, the worn marble steps of the original Market Street entrance to the old Custom House. The main steps to the building that was once Knoxville’s main post office are almost swaybacked by 130 years of shoe leather. I’m getting used to the fact that the official entrance to the building is now the brand-new lobby on Gay Street.

As is a great deal of other worthy stuff these days. In all the seething movement around downtown, as businesses pull up stakes here and new public projects go in there, as buildings get knocked down here and restored for residential use there, it’s hard to avoid one observation. Downtown seems to be coalescing, maybe more than ever before, along one spine. Everybody wants to be on Gay Street.

Most of the exciting new city-promoted large-scale residential development has been along Gay Street: the Sterchi, the Emporium, the Phoenix, others. The renovated Miller’s Building, now home of ImagePoint. Brunswick, the other big corporate organization lured downtown recently, is also on Gay Street. The mayor’s picturing the new cineplex on Gay, too.

And lately, Gay Street has come to seem like the most likely spot for the county’s promised new main library. For the last 33 years, Lawson McGhee Library has been a couple of blocks off Gay, on Church. If done right, the new, larger-than-ever county library could turn out to be the finest building in Knoxville. Knoxville businessmen have convinced current library boosters that such an impressive project should now be on Gay Street. Maybe it should.

They’re all exciting and worthy projects. None of them, by themselves, will hurt anything.

However, as we’ve been talking up Gay Street, large pre-war buildings a block or more east of Gay have been vacated or demolished. Most of South Central, once an urban street jammed with stores and saloons, is now blank backs of parking garages. State Street hasn’t fared much better. A few decades ago, State hosted the turreted Palace Hotel, a clothing factory, fraternal lodges, a nightclub, a chewing-gum factory, a large bus station, a large mining-supply company, a large mine and mill supply company, and an old tavern claimed to be Tennessee’s first capitol. Lately, large buildings on State have been demolished to make way for phantom projects that never materialized. Except for the Presbyterian Church and a couple of small, old apartment buildings, State Street’s almost all parking: much of it serves Gay Street.

The Old City’s hanging on. Long touted as the city’s nightlife center, it still supports several worthy and thriving restaurants and nightclubs. But it doesn’t seem to have the energy it did a decade or more ago; several storefronts down there have been vacant for months.

Something’s gnawing away at downtown on the west side of downtown, too. Market Square’s on the west side of Gay, but only half a block, as close as you can get to Gay Street without being on Gay Street. Still, the feeling among planners was that we couldn’t talk about Market Square renewal unless we could use an extended Krutch Park to plug it more directly into Gay Street. It’s a connection the square didn’t need for its previous 150 years.

A half-block farther off Gay is the Sprankle Building, one of a dwindling number of reminders that downtown used to have big buildings that weren’t on Gay; its tenants evicted for the owner’s vague future plans, it remains in limbo. Two handsome, sound-looking brick buildings at Church and Market, the Cherokee and the Ely, were vacated in the late ‘90s. Old houses along Hill Avenue made Knox Heritage’s Fragile 15 list this year. The large antebellum building at Henley and Summit Hill called “Old City Hall,” better known to historians as the old school for the deaf, is being vacated; its current occupants will soon be working in buildings on Market Square and Gay Street. The future use of the 1848 building is unclear.

The convention center once seemed a commitment to downtown’s west side—but that’s assuming things work out better for it than they’ve been working lately. The 20-square-block region of downtown nearest the convention center has fewer restaurants and other public attractions per block than any other comparable part of the CBID.

Now there’s the prospect of vacating the library space to favor Gay Street. Even if the current Lawson McGhee Library is quickly snapped up for corporate purposes, as some in the county expect—it’s a stout building that seems adaptable—that block between Walnut and Locust will be less lively than it has been for the last 30 years. For much of that period, the library, which draws hundreds every day, has been the liveliest thing downtown. Soon all of its activity may be on Gay Street.

It’s getting easier and easier to imagine our once-broad and rectangular downtown diminishing to one linear thing called Gay Street.

It might not seem such a bad thing. Gay Street has been Knoxville’s busiest commercial street since at least 1850. Though it doesn’t boast the booming regional retail centers it once did, it’s still a prestigious and popular address. Thanks to its tall office buildings, there are more office workers per block on South Gay Street than any other street in the region.

It’s a fine street; I walk it every day. I bank on Gay Street, enjoy its unique restaurants and historic theaters. I’ve spent hours contemplating Gay Street from the brewpub’s sidewalk patio. Several friends live on, and even under, Gay Street, and sometimes I envy them.

But one asphalt line, however thick, doesn’t encourage circulation. It would be more appealing to think of a visit to downtown as a walking around, not a walking back and forth: to the museum the cinema, the library.

Some of Knoxville’s many critics over the years have remarked that one of the city’s esthetic problems was that it had too much packed on Gay Street. (“Gay Street, the shopping center, is old, narrow, and crowded,” remarked Fortune in 1952.)

And heck, it’s not the whole town. At least, it didn’t used to be. A century ago, Knoxville’s tallest building was the Vendome, a turreted apartment building on West Clinch, three blocks off Gay. About 70 years ago, two of the most impressive new buildings downtown were blocks west of Gay: the Medical Arts Building and the Post Office, which are still there, between Walnut and Henley.

Been to downtown Morristown lately? It’s kind of a puzzle. One street, Main Street, known for its double-decker sidewalks, can seem impressively urban on a good day, but only if you’re standing in the middle of it. Back away into the surface-parking areas and cheap suburban-style development that surrounds it, and the illusion fades. You see the backs of buildings that were never meant to be seen. The whole thing seems artificial, like a prop, a token museum replica of a downtown that was plopped into a flattened surburban area. I’d noticed the phenomenon before, but the last time I was there, Morristown’s Main Street seemed unnervingly familiar.

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse