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A few recent observations about East Tennessee’s most complicated couple of acres

by Jack Neely

The motley band of 60-odd scholars who met at the Radisson last month were both elderly and punkishly young, and had driven, flown, or thumbed in from most corners of the English-speaking world, from England to Australia. They met on the downtown hotel’s second floor, mostly behind closed doors. Much of what they were discussing, about prostitution, suicide, and one man’s amorous interest in summer fruit, might have alarmed the hotel’s other guests.

They were the members of the Cormac McCarthy Society, and they were in town to celebrate the silver anniversary of the publication of one unusual, complex, and darkly comic novel called Suttree. A young scholar from the University of Wales presented a thick paper on the subject of “East Tennessee Exceptionalism,” with Parson Brownlow as his chief for-instance. An Air Force officer just back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan discussed a little-known McCarthy play about a stonemason called The Stonemason. A noted Faulkner scholar from the University of Southern Mississippi spoke on the strengths and weaknesses of that often-made comparison.

A New York filmmaker gave an hour-and-a-half long discourse called “Suttree’s War of the Worlds: High Noon in Knoxville” that concerned, among many other subjects, the issue of whether a passing pedestrian on the Gay Street Bridge could tell without stopping whether a dead man’s wristwatch was running.

The Knoxville-raised namesake of the society, the famously reclusive Cormac, known by his first name to society members who have never even seen him, was not present.

On the finale, the seven-hour literary pub crawl known as the Suttree Stagger, some remarked on Market Square’s new granite inscriptions, one of them McCarthy’s description of the square in 1951. Some attendees had been told that Knoxville did not embrace Suttree. And it’s true that some don’t, as some Dubliners don’t embrace Dubliners. It’s a fair comparison, I think.

When workers removed the bland gray paint from a brick wall on Wall Avenue a few weeks ago, a mysterious sign appeared. This building that many remember as Butler Shoes is now known as Lerner Lofts. It’s now being restored as upscale condos, with a rooftop patio that looks appealing from down here on the sidewalk. Most of the condos are already sold.

Anyway, they took the paint off, and there in the brick is a very large word. Passersby have scrutinized it, as if perhaps it’s a puzzling message from God. In green-and-white cursive is the initial letter P. After that, you’re on your own. I wanted to think it was Polski, and that it had once been the side of a cottage pickle factory. But the more I looked at it, the more it looked like there were two Ls: P-O-L-L, ending, maybe, with a high-backed letter: Pollard? Pollux? Pollock?

At the library I learned from the city directory that this painting’s probably not a Jackson Pollock. A century ago, the building was a pharmacy. In the 1920s and early ‘30s was the United Cigar Store. Then it was Pollock’s Shoes.

Pollock’s was in the building from about 1935 to 1955. I gather Pollock’s was a small regional chain. There was a Pollock’s in Asheville during the same era. But it hasn’t been here since before Elvis fretted about his blue suede shoes.

Advertising pays. It often outlasts memory.

Market Square is reviving, but slowly. There’s more retail activity on the square than I’ve seen in over 20 years, to say nothing of the quality of it, which is somewhat different than what most of us recall. The square after 6 p.m. is livelier than it has been at any time in my 40-year memory, though it only takes four dinner restaurants or bars, plus a couple of shops that keep evening hours, to make it so.

The main problem, which people have been complaining about for a year now, is the dang concrete. The very arrival of that cheap, suburban-style surface was a sore disappointment to those who had been promised earth-toned paving stones, but the city’s engineering department put its wing-tipped feet down. It had to be concrete. Anything else would be unsafe, inconvenient, and, worst of all, expensive.

There have been a couple of attempts to ameliorate its blinding whiteness by buffing the surface to bring out the aggregate, with barely noticeable results. A dozen well-attended beer parties have had a salutary effect on the place; it’s slightly less blindingly white than it was last winter. It may require a few more years of spillage, pigeon excrement, wet leaves, and repellent behavior to make it look truly venerable.

Few are willing to wait a few decades, though. It needs a patina of some sort, pronto. There’s an effort to give it some sort of a stain, perhaps to reflect the old brick of the square, but the quotes for something like that, as much as $100,000, have been discouraging. One tenant has proposed letting classrooms paint it, in patchwork fashion.

The most promising solution I’ve heard came from my friend Mark Schimmenti, who’s back in town after a couple of years directing Nashville’s Urban Design Center. He suggested we might perhaps expedite the process by hosting the square’s first National Tobacco-Spitting Contest. That would supply earth tones, cheap.

Speaking of unusual parties on Market Square, I learned from a CBS News story just a few months ago who was originally responsible for what is, predictably, the biggest party in America each holiday season: the New Year’s Eve party on Times Square. The genius behind the event was former Knoxvillian Adolph Ochs. He was, when that party started, the publisher of the New York Times. Ochs more or less framed that intersection as “Times Square,” and publicized his place, and his paper, with this huge holiday bash. Perhaps inspired by his memories of how Knoxville celebrated nearly everything in his youth, Ochs celebrated the holiday with an annual fireworks show. But then, New York banned fireworks in town. So he turned to the astonishing technological marvel of his age, electricity, and mounted a giant ball studded with Mr. Edison’s bulbs, and then found a way to make it drop without actually killing anybody.

It’s hard not to consider the irony that Knoxville, which has always celebrated New Year’s Eve either with private parties or expensive ticketed hotel bashes, never has public observances of the new year. When Knoxville gets its first whiff that Holidays are afoot, we catch a chill and shut the city down cold for three weeks.

It also crossed my mind that Adolph Ochs, originator of the Times Square party, started his career in journalism at the office of the old Knoxville Chronicle, on our Market Square.

Note to the City of Knoxville: Nobody owns this idea. If you try something different this year, feel free to say it was yours.

November 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 45 © 2004 Metro Pulse