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Of faux aeroplanes and faux parking nightmares

by Jack Neely

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about earnest efforts to preserve the circa 1930 Aeroplane Service Station on Clinton Highway. It belongs on any short list of Knox County buildings that are architecturally unique. The amount of reader interest gives me the impression the effort has strong potential.

This time I want to be sure to mention the website of the group that’s trying to save the plane: powellairplane.org. It includes several interesting historical photos of the place, including a shot of it during its brief career as a gyrocopter.

Libby Morgan, who grew up in Powell and used to ride her horse near the airplane, remembers the Nickle family fondly. She says Mr. Nickle told her he opened the airplane filling station in 1929, and claimed it was the only place to get a Coke between Clinton and Knoxville.

A couple of readers had a more recent memory of the plane, recalling when it was a drug-paraphernalia shop. Mike Hatmaker of LaFollette thinks it was around 1980, and the name of the place was the “Flying Head Shoppe.” He estimates that it lasted about 10 days.

Pilot and aviation historian Bob Davis found a couple of interesting newspaper clips about the aeroplane from its earliest era. A Knoxville Journal article implies the unusual building was built in 1931, the year the article appeared, though several sources say it was a little earlier. The article goes on to discuss Clinton Pike as part of the famous Dixie Highway from the Midwest to the Deep South.

Davis also found a wonderful ad from the summer of 1936, advertising the “Aeroplane Service Station...and Tea Room.” The Tea Room was a separate building of conventional design which made the most of its proximity to this architectural oddity, offering barbecue, fried chicken, steaks, and beer. (If it did serve tea, it didn’t advertise the fact openly.)

“This popular eating place will soar to new heights of popularity under the management of Mr. Bradshaw,” reads the ad. “The food, the service, and everything have been improved and it’s the place to take your friends day or night!”

It goes on, “You’ll Enjoy the Out-of-City, Carefree Atmosphere.” This spot, barely beyond city limits today and crowded by commercial development, was four miles from Knoxville in 1936.

That building’s gone, and Clinton Highway’s no longer carefree. If you don’t speed, somebody’s pickup grill is going to dominate your rear view. But to me this old ad emphasizes the potential for the airplane to be the sort of place we can all drop in when we want to get out of town, if only barely out of town: Maybe a drive-through coffee shop with a couple of tables inside.

I’m grateful that cinema scholars were too polite to mention a grievous error in that piece. The Aeroplane was once outfitted with an extra rotor on top to make it look like a gyrocopter, or “autogyro,” as it’s known in the 1934 movie I mentioned, It Happened One Night. Only it wasn’t, as I stated, Clark Gable who flew the thing to his wedding, but his nemesis, the pompous King Westley. Gable got around mostly in a bus and a stolen Ford.

I got lots of personal messages in agreement with my parking essay last month, in which I made the case that downtown’s “parking nightmare” is, if not altogether fictional, exaggerated. Many downtowners know that. But the first two letters we received for publication were sharply critical: one claimed I’d ruined the convenient, cheap parking by telling the public about it; another who claimed the convenient, cheap parking didn’t exist at all.

The complaints gave me just enough of a shadow of a doubt to go down there at lunchtime three weekdays to double check.

It’s still true. Even after I spilled the beans, there are still scores of cheap, metered parking spaces that go begging all day. On Church Avenue alone, within a three-minute amble of the busiest part of Gay Street, there are typically a dozen spaces sitting there empty and lonesome, the two-hour spaces where you park for 50 cents an hour. More 50-cent/hour spots on State Street, one block from Gay, empty all day.

Sure enough, most of the even cheaper, the extraordinarily cheap 10-hour spaces, which are 15 cents an hour, were taken. But for those who insist on those rates, there are typically 20 or 30 of them open down along Central. With rates like that, it’s not surprising that some of the more expensive lots you pass on your short walk to Gay Street look like miniature asphalt prairies. The surface lot at State and Church, one block from Gay, is usually half empty, with more than 50 spaces available. At three bucks a day, it’s cheaper than you’ll be able to park in most downtowns in North America. But I’ve never in my life had to pay that much in downtown Knoxville.

A hundred or so cheap parking-meter spots staying empty on a typical weekday is hardly a guarantee that parking will never be a problem downtown, though, and plans in the works to add more city-sponsored parking garages can only help retailers. I’m also all for any retail-voucher systems the shops and parking garages can work out. My challenge was mainly aimed at commuters and customers who continue to insist they don’t come downtown because it’s impossible to park there. That’s just silly.

The handicapped have their own issues, of course, and residents have understandably higher standards for convenience. In that regard there’s a problem brewing at the north end of Gay Street, where the highest concentration of residential development has been. The 85-year-old Gay Street Viaduct is about to be closed to be replaced with a modern, higher-arching bridge.

There are several reasons to mourn that. As viaducts go, it’s a historic one. In the days of whistlestop tours, people crowded this viaduct to see celebrities arrive on the train below. When William Jennings Bryan’s funeral train ran underneath it in the summer of ‘25, the viaduct was loaded with thousands of mourners standing in the hot sun for only a glimpse of the black-draped car that held the populist hero’s coffin.

The proposed replacement, designed to accommodate double-decker freight trains underneath, will block the visibility of Regas and the rest of North Gay Street, and that’s a pity.

But the most immediate, practical effect is that demolition of the old viaduct will take away 53 of the cheap, convenient parking places I was talking about. That’s all due to happen in September, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for it in the offing.

Anyway, I’ll keep track of it, and I’ll let you know if parking downtown ever gets difficult. If unfamiliarity is the problem, education is the answer, and I agree that the city should sponsor some sort of a detailed and periodically updated guide to all downtown parking, with prices. One reader suggested that maybe Metro Pulse should do that, as a service. I’ll bring it up.

July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30 © 2004 Metro Pulse