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Points in an unlikely comparison

by Jack Neely

Standing at the bar at McSorley’s Old Ale House in the East Village one Tuesday afternoon early this year, I was half-listening to the conversation among the middle-aged New Yorkers and the sardonic bartender, when I heard a couple of familiar names. “Bernard King—You know, he used to play with Ernie Grunfeld.”

Basketball’s dynamic duo were New Yorkers and, once, as the UT Vols’ “Ernie and Bernie Show,” Knoxvillians. It was my entry into the conversation. It turned out that one of the gentlemen at the bar, a rotund fellow who’s said to be the house expert on popular music, lived in Knoxville about 30 years ago. He flunked out of UT as a graduate student in education, but bears us no grudges. “It’s a nice town,” he says.

From the Rockefeller Center plaza that night, I heard the strains of a good bluegrass band. More than in any other Northern city, I think, more even than in some Southern cities, the Knoxvillian can feel at home in New York. Granted, Knoxville and New York comparisons are improbable. New York is about 150 years older than Knoxville. Today it’s more than 40 times bigger. But there’s always been a spiritual conduit between the two; neither would be exactly what it is today without the other.

On prominent display in a front window of Coliseum Books, on West 42nd, I saw a book of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry. I overheard mention of Chad Pennington, the Webbie now a star in Manhattan, quarterback of the Jets. Beauford Delaney’s famous portraits and New York scenes sell for high prices in Manhattan galleries. Actor/singer John Cullum, an Island Homeboy and a regular at the Bijou half a century ago, starred in Urinetown, one of Broadway’s biggest non-revival hits of this century so far. It had just closed, but posters for it were everywhere.

You may see no trace of Knoxvillians in Philadelphia or Detroit or, for that matter, Birmingham—but we’re all over New York.

If not for Knoxvillians, William Gibbs McAdoo, pioneer of Knoxville’s first electric streetcar system, later founder of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, wouldn’t have built that first subway tunnel under the Hudson River in 1904. Granted, New Yorkers might have gotten around to building one themselves. But he was the first.

James Agee was a consummate New Yorker, with an office in the Chrysler Building and a regular table at the Stork Club. He died a New York death, a heart attack in the back seat of a taxi cab. I hear that a poker game he started in the ’50s is still going on up there somewhere. Today there’s a large framed photograph of Agee at Chumley’s, one of the Village’s great old bars. (Of course, there’s also a smaller one of famous Knoxville-hater John Gunther.)

More than anyone else, you see Adolph Ochs. The Knoxville-raised newspaperman re-invented the New York Times, borrowing its motto from Blaufeld’s old Gay Street cigar stand: “All the seegars that are fit to smoke.” Part of 43rd Street is renamed for Ochs, who’s honored with an oversized bronze bust in the Times’ lobby.

The guy who began his career on Knoxville’s Market Square is also the guy who created Times Square, and commenced the tradition of the New Year’s Eve party there. The ball-dropping was his idea, after the NYPD nixed his earlier fireworks bashes.

We may be proud of how well they all did up there, but with each one who made the big time, we also sustained a loss. We’ve sacrificed some of our best and brightest in obeisance to the Big Apple. Some of our finest are up there right now.

Sometimes we send stuff instead of people. Over the years, several buildings in New York have been fronted with pink Tennessee marble from the Knoxville area. When Grand Central Station was renovated, they were careful to repair the marble floors with the genuine pink East Tennessee marble with which it was built.

And for years, most of New York’s distinctive porcelain-on-steel subway signs have been manufactured in Knoxville. You can see them in a warehouse in Forks of the River, ready for shipment.

The aluminum of the World Trade Center came from Alcoa, Tenn. They say a load of it slipped off a construction barge 35 years ago, and it’s still there on the bottom of the Hudson River.

Of course, the influence has flowed the other way, too. Reading old newspapers, you get the impression that Knoxvillians of a century ago were more familiar with New York than they were with the Smoky Mountains.

Many were, in fact—and there was a simple reason. Before paved roads, New York was easier to get to. Before there were good roads to the Smokies, several trains a day left downtown Knoxville for New York. New York hotels advertised in Knoxville newspapers. The social page listed socialites’ latest trips to the big city; some spent summers up there. A century ago, the Knoxville Journal & Tribune advertised that it was available at a Manhattan newsstand, the one at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I’d be willing to bet that in 1904, more Knoxvillians had seen Herald Square than had seen Cades Cove.

It’s not surprising that there was some cultural swapping. By then, Coney Island Dogs were the rage in downtown Knoxville. The Old City establishment known as Manhattan’s is an old name; the Manhattan Cafe was open in that location in the 1920s.

Knoxville’s Broadway was originally called Broad Street; the name shifted as New York’s Broadway became glamorously famous. As early as the 1880s, South Central was better known as “the Bowery” for its unbecoming resemblance to the street by that name in lower Manhattan.

I once found an article suggesting that Fort Sanders’ numbered streets, instituted in the 1890s, was a deliberate attempt to seem Manhattanish. New York’s Fifth Avenue was once Manhattan’s most stylish address. Our Fifth Avenue, on the north side of downtown, crosses Broadway, just like the one in New York. It was, 80 or 90 years ago, one of Knoxville’s most stylish addresses. Its name didn’t necessarily come by a natural evolution. There were some other numbered avenues emanating from no particular baseline on the north side; you might begin to suspect they were installed just to give us a numerical excuse for a Fifth Avenue. The regal Christian Church that still stands on Fifth is said to have been patterned after a Manhattan Presbyterian church designed by Stanford White.

A few months ago, I was riding a late bus, and on Cumberland Avenue a skinny man in a ball cap and an addled frame of mind got on and picked up a stray newspaper from the front bench. “The New York Times,” he said with contempt. “Shit. Why do people read The New York Times? This is Knoxville, not New York.”

Well, I thought, but carefully didn’t say, it’s a complicated issue.

August 26, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 35 © 2004 Metro Pulse