A few bright spots

by Jack Neely

Man, it’s been a discouraging summer. Over this summer we killed a long-promised and much-needed library project, fumbled our most historic theater, misplaced a ballet company, and lost our favorite sidewalk clock. Granted, the clock’s set to reappear on Kingston Pike, at the Bearden jewelry store, and we may catch 40 m.p.h. glimpses of the clock now and then. But I’d better never check my watch by it again, lest I smash my car into the Krispy Kreme.

It has been too easy, this summer, to believe that Knoxville is once again slipping back into its mid-20th-century doldrums: slouching toward Dogpatch.

But whether we deserve it or not, things are happening, here and there, even in the downtown that some are proud they never visit. There’s a well-heeled movement afoot to replace the big iron Hope Clock with a replica. An even more unlikely development is that live noonday radio’s back on Gay Street, and the well-appointed new tourist center seems more popular than it ever was in previous locations. UT’s first downtown gallery is opening at the Emporium, with an exhibit devoted to the colorful urban art of native son Joseph Delaney. Beauford Delaney’s slightly less flamboyant little brother, who died here in 1991, long had a reputation in New York for his street scenes. For Joe, this weekend’s opening is a return to Gay Street, where he worked as a porter at the Farragut Hotel in the 1920s. I doubt there’s ever been a Delaney exhibition closer to the brothers’ birthplace on old East Vine.

And at long last, we’re seeing signs of life on Market Square. Maybe not as many as we’d hoped for, and as quickly as we expected, but several building renovation projects are noisily underway, several restaurant/bars and shops keeping weekend hours, and a few dozen people are actually living on the square. In comfortable apartments, I mean.

Forever Market Square has been busy selling sandwiches on weekday lunch hours. But those of us who work weekends don’t have to struggle to remember Saturday and Sunday afternoons when the historic square, the closest thing the city has to a heart, had a Munch-esque bleakness to it. After banking hours it was often utterly, horribly empty. If you were lucky enough to encounter a fellow human being on the square at noon on any Saturday in the ’90s, he or she might have been the sort of person that would, in an urgent spirit, inform you that TVA was trying to control their intestines.

Today, on a nice Saturday afternoon, you might see 100 or more people ambling outside on the square, sitting at cafe tables and on benches—kids, parents, older folks, some carrying bags with clothes or kitchenware or produce from the successful Saturday farmers’ market that’s been running during the warm months. Even the farmers say they’re doing pretty good business on those days.

But you can’t help noticing that many of these new customers seem to be looking around for something more to do. And it’s hard for downtown boosters not to bemoan one irony. During these reviving days that seem to be bringing many first-time visitors downtown, two vigorous downtown stalwarts that were occasional centers of liveliness in the neighborhood even during the bleak years—the Tennessee Theatre and the Museum of East Tennessee History—are closed for many months for lengthy expansion/renovation projects.

In the days when the square seemed irrelevant to weekend afternoon in Knoxville, the museum and the theater were often the liveliest spots in the neighborhood, the life of an otherwise grim party. Now that the party’s going, they’re not here to enjoy it.

The other day I talked to Cherel Henderson, acting director of the East Tennessee Historical Society. While they still look for a new director to replace the departed Kent Whitworth, veteran staffer Henderson has stepped into the gap.

The whole museum won’t be open for another year, true enough. It seems like a long time to me, too, but there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done about that. However, Cherel tells me the ETHS intends to open two attractions—the much-anticipated “streetscape” exhibit, which will include a restored Knoxville streetcar, and a sample exhibit of some of the museum’s best-known artifacts—will open much sooner, as soon as early 2005.

About the same time, its cross-the-street neighbor, the Tennessee, will open. I dropped in the other day. When it closed early in the summer of last year, January 2005 seemed impossibly distant. It was hard for some of us to be confident we’d be alive to see our grandest theater, ever, reborn. We are, after all, mortal.

Looking at it from the outside, where you can still see through the walls of the unfinished backstage, I thought it might take longer still. But I got a look around in there a few days ago, and am told that things are on track for the place to open in just four more months. Though there’s a whole lot left to do—and there’s some concern that the county’s sudden fiscal crisis will threaten $750,000 of their expected funding, and that that loss could cause a chain-reaction of damage to other credits—theater manager Becky Hancock says they’re on track to finish in January.

They were just taking down the lofty scaffolding; I got to walk around up there, on plywood 40 feet above the floor, to see the fresh repainting job, and touch this ceiling I’ve looked at from far below since the Kennedy administration. It was a complicated business, repainting these irregular gold-on-burnt-orange geometrical designs from 1928, exactly as they were before. Charting them anew required a “self-leveling laser” mounted on the center of the scaffolding, and some other complicated equipment.

The result is that the interior is a good deal brighter than it is in nearly every living memory. Downtown was so sooty in those early days, it’s easy to believe that by the 1930s and ‘40s, by the time Desi Arnaz and Fanny Brice and Glenn Miller performed here, the interior of the Tennessee already had a layer of grime on it. Well, it doesn’t anymore. The recessed oval is more aqua blue than ever. The gold glaze on the aluminum-leaf embellishments is shinier than ever.

I even noticed things I’d hardly noticed before like the five gleaming gold crests above the lobby’s front doors. Previously, they were there if you looked at them, but not so conspicuous that you’d bother to look up. Now you can’t help it. Paul Tickle, the friendly English-born restoration expert who’s been doing the lion’s share of the work on the project, even found new designs in the vestibule ceiling, unseen since they were painted black in some forgotten era, for some forgotten reason.

Some will be taken aback by its fresh new authentic jazz-age appearance, as some were by the suddenly brighter, cheerier version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings when they were restored a few years ago. I don’t doubt that some may even be appalled. But we’ll get used to it. I intend to, anyway.

September 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 37 © 2004 Metro Pulse