Comment on this story

Thirteen ways of looking at the J. Allen Smith House

by Jack Neely

I return to this image because it’s impossible to picture. In the spring of 1918, the poet Wallace Stevens took a stroll out Lyons View and described the scene in a letter to his wife. It remains a rarity, this positive description of Knoxville. Positive descriptions of Knoxville by unbiased newcomers in the 20th century are very hard to find.

Though his letter includes some criticisms, it’s overall a flattering assessment of a complicated town. The observations he shared with his wife were incongruous; he found Knoxville a peculiar combination of aspects, rich and poor, black and white, ugly and beautiful, city and country; he finally admitted that, to him, Knoxville and its region was an “uncertainty.” He seemed interested in uncertainties, and in the idea of different perspectives.

Wallace Stevens was a rare man, both lawyer and poet. Lawyers are required to maintain a consistent point of view, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Poets are not. Poets, as Whitman suggested, contain multitudes. Maybe that’s what Stevens was thinking about in late 1917 when, four months before his Knoxville visit, he published a poem which would later become well known. It’s called “Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird.” I’d be a poor imitator of Stevens’ style, but it struck me that there were at least as many ways to look at the late J. Allen Smith house.

1. J. Allen Smith, who built the house and lived there, was a leading industrialist of Knoxville’s boom years; unlike the factories most of his peers built, Smith’s White Lily Flour is still in business today, and nationally respected. Smith was also a philanthropist, a broad-minded and progressive citizen. The architectural distinction of his house is not a recent revelation conjured by troublemakers. The house was one of only two existing residences chosen to represent the best of our architecture in the definitive Knoxville history, Heart of the Valley, published in 1976.

2. The big house on Lyons View wasn’t the only J. Allen Smith house. There were other, older ones, at least four of them. They were all downtown. Each disappeared without conspicuous objection. They are all, today, surface parking lots.

3. Some claim that the back of the J. Allen Smith house was even more beautiful than the front. Most Knoxvillians never got to see the back. I never did. Because it faces the golf course, it is, as it always has been, visible only to members of Cherokee Country Club and their guests.

4. The events we read about in history books, and the achievements of industrialists are not, for the most part, events that happen in private homes. Private homes are places where we sleep and sometimes eat. I have nothing against private homes. I live in one, myself; it’s more than 60 years old, and it was once the home of one of the Everly Brothers’ girlfriends. It’s not nearly as interesting to me as most of the places where I eat lunch downtown.

5. Built on the edge of an existing golf course on a long country road outside of the city limits with no sidewalks and few cross streets, the J. Allen Smith house was unusual in 1916, when most Knoxvillians still lived in neighborhoods with sidewalks and front porches, a stroll from the grocery or pharmacy. The J. Allen Smith house was built on a new paradigm, a non-farm residential house remote from commercial centers and away from walking routes. It depended on the automobile. If it was historic, it was at least partly for this reason: that it was a pioneer in the concept of suburban sprawl. It was a prototype for West Knoxville as it would develop over the next 90 years.

6. Wallace Stevens was an unusual visitor, in that he toured our suburbs on foot. Almost all other journalists and authors who have described Knoxville for the national and international media—from Ernie Pyle in 1935 to Annemarie Schwarzenbach in 1937 to John Gunther in 1945 to Phillip Hamburger in the New Yorker in 1961; Fortune in 1952, the Wall Street Journal in 1980, the Forbes and GQ magazines in 1982—based their descriptions on the center of town. Their descriptions were widely distributed and, usually, profoundly negative. In several cases, private property in public places, poorly maintained, undermined the city’s image.

Throughout all these indignities, the J. Allen Smith house stood proud and lovely out on Lyons View. None of these influential visitors ever saw it.

7. The J. Allen Smith house was not familiar to most visitors, nor to most Knoxvillians. Most who have seen it have seen it only in sidelong glimpses at 40 m.p.h. It wasn’t a building familiar to thousands of Knoxvillians of all classes, like some of the buildings downtown threatened with demolition for parking space. But it was a more beautiful building than they are.

8. The J. Allen Smith house was also a more beautiful building than Cherokee Country Club.

9. The most effective arguments about why private property owners shouldn’t have total control of their property—that the appearance of beautiful buildings or poorly designed developments affects the image of the whole city—are harder to maintain on Lyons View. Still, as it turned out, the fate of historic zoning for the entire city depended on the decision concerning the J. Allen Smith house. Making it the test case for a bold new initiative, when the house is little known to the citizens at large and the opponents are well-funded and saturated with lawyers, may be remembered as a strategic error.

10. Surface parking is the worst fate possible for any historic property. It was the fate of Staub’s Opera House, the Perez Dickinson House, the Old Capitol, Ross Flats, and several handsome houses in Fort Sanders and UT’s campus.

11. A practice putting green is the second worst.

12. People have a choice of what to do with their property. They also have a choice of whether to buy a historic property. It’s not likely that anyone might buy historic property accidentally. It’s easy not to buy historic property. Perhaps one percent of the buildings and houses in Knox County are historic. Hitting them takes careful aim.

13. It is legal, but not admirable, to buy any historic building for the purpose of tearing it down.

December 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 52 © 2004 Metro Pulse