A fond farewell to our longtime home

by Jack Neely

For practical reasons, Metro Pulse is leaving the Arnstein Building. The paper moved into this space almost exactly 10 years ago. It was just a biweekly in 1994, and I was just a freelance columnist, a laid-off magazine hack trying to piece together an unlikely living from scribbling gigs. Metro Pulse was my cheapest client, but my most amusing one, so when they had a little Christmas party here that December, I came by. Several staff members, those who didn’t have dependents, celebrated the holiday and the new digs by stepping out of the window, high above Market Street, and, just for laughs, treading upon the narrow, decorative Edwardian balcony.

A few months later, I unexpectedly found myself with a battered old wooden desk of my own here on the third floor of the Arnstein, and even a telephone. And, later on, after I’d worked here long enough that they’d begun to trust me, I got a computer and a filing cabinet and a swell view of Market Square.

Materializing on the third floor of the Arnstein was a fairly weird coincidence. There may be a thousand floors of office space in downtown Knoxville, and somehow I’d already worked on this one.

In the ‘80s, this same Arnstein Building had been the international headquarters of Whittle Communications, at the time that the company controlled several magazines, the best known of which was Esquire. For a couple of years, working late doing clerical work for a lawyer in a towering office building nearby, I looked down at the Arnstein, at these people in lighted windows who from a distance appeared to be playing with large, colorful pictures.

I hated them. “That ain’t workin,” I thought. I applied and applied again. In 1987, when Whittle finally gave in, they put me right here on the third floor. Though we soon moved the editorial offices to the Andrew Johnson, the Arnstein, at 505 Market Street, remained the official mailing address for two dozen Whittle magazines for years afterward.

So in 1995, eight years after I’d last worked on the third floor of the Arnstein, here I was again. For a decade after Whittle went out of business, I’d get mail addressed to long-gone colleagues. A couple of times I got mail addressed to Jack Neely, the Whittle editor who’d worked on this floor a decade earlier.

There’s plenty weird about this building. The elevator’s always been a little askew, sometimes rising to floors you don’t punch, sometimes opening as if to admit a late passenger. When the ghost enters the elevator car, I address him as “Max.”

Built in 1905, the Arnstein Building was the first steel-frame building built in Knoxville, a seven-story “skyscraper.” Its builder was Max Arnstein, the German-born Jewish entrepreneur who’d lived in New York before moving South to stay with his South Carolina friend, tycoon-statesman Bernard Baruch. The story goes that a blizzard stranded Arnstein and Baruch’s Uncle Herman in 1888 Knoxville; they liked the lay of the place, and decided to give Knoxville a go. Young Arnstein went into retail, made a success of it, and built a landmark.

It was an impressively modern building. But there’s some mystery surrounding the circumstances of its construction; its foundation was the site of the graveyard of the original Second Presbyterian Church. The cemetery contained, among many others, the grave of Gen. William Sanders, the young Union officer killed during the Confederate siege in 1863. He was buried here secretly at midnight, to keep from upsetting his men, who believed the reports that he was recovering.

Today, building on a graveyard is sacrilege. Arnstein may have been able to pull some strings by promising this business-minded town something more marketable than a cemetery. In any case, it was an especially gorgeous building; in speeches on the square, Mayor Sam Heiskell used to point the Arnstein out to visitors as irrefutable proof that Knoxville was a prosperous and progressive city.

He never mentioned the graves. Considering that Gen. Sanders’ name’s on a mammoth hospital chain, it’s funny that we lost track of his grave, but it was missing for half a century, until someone found him stowed in the National Cemetery in Chattanooga. I don’t know what became of all the others. I’ve only occasionally been to the basement of the Arnstein, but I’m told it’s sometimes an unsettling place to tarry.

As a department store, Arnstein’s concentrated on the mezzanine-layered first three floors, maintained a lively rivalry with Miller’s, which was then about the same size, wider but not quite as tall, barely a block away. By some accounts, Arnstein’s was the swankier of the two joints, a place where ladies could find French lingerie.

In its upper floors, the Arnstein building housed physicians and dentists and music teachers. Much of the National Conservation Exposition of 1913 was planned on the top floor.

At 70, Max Arnstein retired. It was 1928, a good year to cash out. He and his wife, Lalla, moved to New York, where they had friends, including New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, but they didn’t turn their backs on Knoxville, where Max had lived for 40 years. For a time, he kept an office in this building. They founded the Arnstein Jewish Community Center, which still bears their name.

He died in New York in 1961, about six months after his 102nd birthday.

Anyway, a few years after Arnstein’s closed, TVA took over the building for offices and used it for more than 40 years. I’m told TVA used the display windows on this often-crowded Market Square corner—Preacher’s Corner, as it’s still known—to tout their latest projects.

The Arnstein, which is still mostly occupied, home of MacLeod’s, AC Entertainment, architects and lawyers’ offices, will remain. And we’re not going far, just a diagonal block to the Burwell Building, which, as it happens, is where Metro Pulse was based in 1993. It would be impossible to do this work anywhere but downtown.

We’ll miss this lovely old place and its swell views of Market Square, which, some claim, have given us fixations.

December 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 50 © 2004 Metro Pulse