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Two unsettling developments on Gay Street

by Jack Neely

The closing of the Bijou is a damn, though we trust temporary, shame. The 95-year-old, 750-seat theater has earned a reputation as the most acoustically perfect theater in the region, and it’s got a deep history not even the Tennessee can touch: Blackstone, Sousa, the Marx Brothers, Anna Pavlova, the Ramones. It’s the most haunted building in East Tennessee: figures in the balcony, a little girl, a gray man in a big hat, a sudden smell of bananas, a firm hand’s grasp on a limb, a light in the dark, a benevolent character named Smiley backstage; even folks who emphatically don’t believe in ghosts make an exception for the Bijou.

A major renovation fixed the only reasons anybody ever complained about the theater, the rest rooms and the air conditioning. I had assumed that the one good thing about the lengthy closing of the Tennessee Theater for renovations, besides the renovations themselves, would be that the absence of a rival would at least temporarily pump up demand for events at the Bijou.

Knoxville’s two historic theaters differ in size and style, but, two blocks away from each other on Gay Street, they have carried on the inevitable rivalry over the years, with the older, smaller Bijou often getting the short end. The two have rarely thrived simultaneously.

About a year ago, the Tennessee shut down cold for an almost-two-year renovation, I was looking for the Bijou to pick up the Tennessee’s ball and run with it.

Take the Tennessee’s popular summer-weekend classic-film series, for example: People are craving it. If it had been able to move down the street, the series would have packed the Bijou on momentum alone. But the Bijou long ago lost its movie screen, so without a major new investment in screen and projector, which are more expensive than you’d think, showing films was out.

Or if the popular big-name music shows for which the Tennessee was well known could somehow slim down for an auditorium half the size. Live music may, in fact, be the Bijou’s best use. It’s a near-perfect place to hear Tony Bennett, or a bluegrass band. But there are practical reasons to emphasize theater: the Bijou reportedly makes more from the theatergoer than the concert attendee.

The Bijou’s recent emphasis on big-time musical theater with big impressive sets can’t easily be shared with a singer or a rock band, anyway. It put its own stage out of commission for weeks at a time. Plus, the Bijou’s management was reportedly on the outs with AC, Knoxville’s chief music promoter, which once kept a steady stream of big-name acts moving through the Bijou’s backstage doors.

The last show I saw at the Bijou, the Fats Waller revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ a few months ago, was excellent, but I’ve rarely been tempted by the Bijou’s selections in recent years, local productions of rootin’-tootin’ Broadway musicals of the sort that have been on film for decades. I think I was already tiring of Mame by the time I was five.

The Bijou drew big-enough crowds to convince me that folks still love rootin’-tootin’ musicals. But theater here is a tough nut to crack. Knoxville is presently a city of big gorillas. In booking live music, the big gorilla is AC. In theater, it’s Clarence Brown.

UT’s thespian gauntlet of student and professional troupes boasts a huge budget, internationally renowned directors, occasional guest stars, astonishing sets, and lots of fresh and surprising ideas. They usually succeed, but when they fail, they fail so grandly you don’t want to miss it. So to compete for the Knoxvillian’s theater dollar, you’ve got to be impressive, make the kind of spectacle people are going to talk about at the tennis court and the grocery and the saloon. That sort of buzz about the Bijou has been rare.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Maybe the custodians of the Bijou should make some deal with UT’s theater troupes. Clarence Brown, the building, is functionally a fine theater, well suited for a variety of productions. Its chief failing for its audience is that it sits there by itself in a bleak modernist sea of inaccessible academic buildings. There’s nothing to do on your way there or on your way back. An occasional show at the Bijou would offer UT theatergoers a rare opportunity to walk from a restaurant to a show—and walk somewhere else to discuss the show over coffee or drinks afterwards. A jaunt to an urban theater might also educate student thespians; most of the theaters they’ll encounter in their careers will be more like the Bijou, an old place on a real street, with sirens and honking horns and a marquee seen by thousands of random passers by.

It wouldn’t be unprecedented; many of the UT Theater Department’s early productions in the 1940s and ‘50s. were staged at the Bijou. There’s some way to work it out.

A Gay Street institution even older than the Bijou is also in question this summer. The standing clock on the sidewalk of the 400 block has been known recently as the Kimball’s Clock. Though it was originally across the street on the next block up, it has stood on Gay Street since the 1890s. On its great iron pedestal was the word HOPE, spelled vertically. In context, it seemed poetic.

In 1900, an anonymous journalist used the ominous tick of the Hope Clock, inaudible in the busy street in the daytime, as the background for a nocturnal description of Gay Street. As I noted in the recent feature about Knoxville’s part in World War I, it was the Hope Clock that everyone looked to at the symbolic moment of the signing of the Armistice, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Photographs of crowds cheering the Armistice on November 11, 1918, are framed to show the Hope Clock in the midst of them, striking 11 O’Clock.

Hope Brothers moved the store, and the clock, to its location on the east side of the 400 block, near Union in the 1920s. Kimball’s took over in the ‘30s. Kimball’s was always very much about clocks of all sizes, and because it advertised their business, their biggest clock out front generally kept perfect time. I set my watch by it. Moreover, those sitting at the brewpub’s sidewalk patio watch it closely. I depend on it to catch the 11:45, the last bus home.

However, Kimball’s closed its store a couple of years ago to concentrate on business out west. I’ve been grateful that they’ve kept the Kimball’s Clock on Gay Street running perfectly.

They’re soon going to finish a new store on Kingston Pike, up on Bearden Hill. And when they do, owner Jim Overbey says, they’re going to remove the clock and set it up out there. Jim’s a nice guy, and was once a big downtown booster, but he seems to have soured on the neighborhood just lately.

It’s his right, of course, to move the clock to the strip mall of his choosing. Though it’s a historic artifact that has been very much part of Knoxville’s history, his company owns it.

But I doubt as many people will see it and pay as close attention to the old Hope/Kimball’s clock, regard it with as much interest or urgency, as they do daily on Gay Street, when boulevardiers on a summer evening keep a wary eye on it, knowing that time flies.

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse