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A new theory about the mysterious crimson disks of Gay Street

by Jack Neely

Downtown used to be speckled with red dots. You may remember. There was a flaming rash of them up and down the street. They were all over the upper windows of the older brick buildings, especially on Market and Gay Streets. In my memory there were maybe 100 of them on Gay Street alone, round red dots, painted in lipstick crimson, every one of them on an upper floor. Each was about the size of a paper plate. Some perfectly round, some a little lopsided.

Every 12-year-old boy in town knew what the red dots signified. Or, at least, he was certain enough to repeat the story with confidence.

Walking around downtown without parents was a heady thing when you were 12. We’d come out of a movie at the Tennessee, or the Hobby Shop, and point up to upper floors of the older buildings: You know what those red dots mean?

“Duh,” we’d respond. “Who doesn’t. They’re whorehouses.” It made sense. Some cities had red-light districts, but Knoxville was different in lots of ways. Knoxville had a red-dot district.

My friends and I developed various postulates based on the dots and what the various ones might signify. I always figured the ones with the bright, perfectly round red dots were the respectable, clean madames, the ones you probably couldn’t tell were whores even if they were sitting at the next stool over at Todd and Armistead’s. The ones that might be nice to curious 12-year-old boys.

The ones that were misshapen were the domiciles of the cheap whores, the ones who had smeared lipstick and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. They had given up on life and didn’t care what kind of shape their damn dot was in.

Sometimes a window with a red dot on it would be open, and there’d be curtains blowing around inside, and I’d stop on the sidewalk and gawk, and hope to catch a glimpse of something inside.

We puzzled about the origin of the shape and color. One theory was that the round red dots were meant to make men think of the aureola of a woman’s breast. Others thought the lipstick color had something to do with it. I won’t go into all the theories I recall.

Observing that liquor stores in South Carolina are marked with red dots of very similar size and shape, one friend speculated that the pie-sized red dot had been appropriated to become an international symbol for vice, for dangerous grown-up things kids weren’t ready to know about.

For about 30 years, that was as far as my researches got.

Today, almost all the red dots are gone. They’ve dwindled over the years, as buildings are renovated and windows replaced. I know of only one building that still shows red dots: the old, elaborately arched building on Gay near Union, most recently home to Kimball’s Jewelers. Built in the 1890s, it was originally the headquarters of a shoe wholesaler. The building has been vacant for a year or two, and the lower part is being renovated to be a martini bar. It looks like it’s been a very long time since anyone paid much attention to the upper windows.

As of this writing, the third and fourth floors of that building have dirty windows which still show perfectly round red dots. The fifth floor has a red dot, too, but it’s really more of a rectangular blob.

A year or two ago, a caller mentioned the red dots. I answered in my knowing, conspiratorial voice, the same voice I use when people call wanting to talk about bootleggers or old burlesque houses. I was surprised, though, that the lady had never heard that the red-dot rooms were whorehouses. She said she’d heard a different story. She said they had something to do with access for the fire department.

This was news to me. It was one of the few theories never posited among the sixth-graders I knew who understood nearly everything.

The other evening I was walking through Krutch Park when I ran into my friend Jack Lewis. He was a fireman himself for 26 years, retiring as captain. Lewis is a modest man, but acknowledges what is most likely a provable fact, that he knows more about the history of the Knoxville Fire Department than anybody else alive. “It’s not that I’m smarter than anybody else,” he says. “It’s just that I’ve been around so long, and I’ve been interested in the fire department ever since I was a little kid.”

I mentioned the dots, and found out Captain Lewis knows something about them. He isn’t absolutely sure when the red dots were painted. He knows it was well before 1960, when he joined the department. He thinks they materialized as the result of a fire-department policy commenced by the 1920s. Lewis thinks he remembers seeing a mention of them in the papers of fireman Samuel Beckett Boyd, the well-known fire chief who died of a heart attack while fighting a fire on Church Avenue in 1929. If not Boyd, Lewis says, it was Boyd’s successor as fire chief, Cal Johnson. (That’s Calvin Morgan Johnson, not Cal F. Johnson, the former slave and saloonkeeper.)

Lewis says the red-dot system was mainly a way to deal with false alarms, especially the primitive sprinkler systems that would sometimes go off during a sudden change in temperature. Lewis says many downtown buildings had them even in the early 20th century. Even if there wasn’t a fire, firemen were in charge of shutting them off. Firemen kept wedges in assorted sizes to stop the water flow.

The problem was that, to do it, they had to get in. For years, they just smashed their way in, as they would to attend to any fire. Naturally, there were complaints.

“People got tired of breaking their windows out,” Lewis says. They could save a window by painting a red dot on it; that meant the window was unlatched and offered access to the troublesome sprinklers.

I don’t know whether all the buildings that were equipped with sprinklers had red dots in the windows, or just those buildings that were perpetual problems.

I’m not surprised it went out of style, and I wouldn’t expect David Dewhirst, who’s currently renovating the last red-dot building downtown, to preserve them for posterity. Big red dots aren’t the sort of thing you would necessarily want to keep on your windows. Especially when there are kids down on the sidewalk getting the wrong idea.

October 7, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 41 © 2004 Metro Pulse