Comment on this story 2004 Historic Parkridge Home Tour Sunday, Oct. 10 1 - 6 p.m. Tour begins at Caswell Park on Winona Street $8 advance, $10 day of tour Call 521-6233 for tickets/info

Parkridge potential on parade

by Matt Edens

I’ve spent the last couple of columns touting the fact that homes in Fourth and Gill are now selling for $90 a square foot or more—comparable to prices in West Knoxville’s 37909 and 37923 zip codes (and downtown lofts are selling for what would be respectable prices in the tony enclaves of 37919 and 37922). And they are selling. That lovely Victorian on Eleanor that I featured last month for a little over $200K? It’s already under contract—a word-of-mouth sale to an out-of-town professional who was sniffing around for something in the neighborhood. That’s not all that unusual a phenomenon. Just last week someone posted a message to a neighborhood listserve entitled: “Looking for a Victorian House in your beautiful neighborhood!” And such inquires are becoming commonplace.

That homes in the inner city are suddenly selling for West Knoxville prices might seem remarkable to some. But even more remarkable is the perseverance of people in the neighborhood who brought the transformation to fruition. You can walk down Luttrell Street today and ooh and ahh at all the pretty houses, but it took an awful lot of hard work by a lot of individual homeowners to make that transformation happen.

To learn more, check out this Sunday’s Historic Parkridge Home Tour. Just across I-40 from Fourth and Gill, where the process is still ongoing and the prices a good bit lower, the tour offers a great ground-floor glimpse of urban revitalization. Starting from the new softball complex at Caswell Park (which is itself a pretty good example of revitalization), the tour takes you through 10 different homes in various stages of restoration. It also highlights the work of not just individual homeowners, but also of non-profit agencies like Knox Housing Partnership and Knox Heritage working to bootstrap neighborhoods back to viability while boosting the city’s tax base in the process.

The 10 homes open Sunday range from a condominium in Park Place, to rambling Victorians, to small two-bedroom cottages, which should also give you a sense of the variety of housing center-city neighborhoods like Parkridge have to offer. Some are in the throes of renovation, others fully restored (or as much as any old house can be—it seems there’s always something to be done). One, which was gutted down to the studs when it was on last year’s tour, is now fully renovated and ready to move in. Literally, the young family who recently purchased it from Knox Housing Partnership postponed their move to make time for the tour. And at least three are among the many homes in the neighborhood originally designed by Victorian Mail Order architect George Barber. One, the house in the photograph, is the home Barber built for himself in 1889 (it’s also the boyhood home of Barber and McMurray founder Charles Barber).

Oh, and another is, well, mine...

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