Due to its condition, as reported by engineers, the future of the Gay Street Bridge is in question.
The Gay Street Bridge is a Knoxville icon. The steel bridge, designed and constructed by the Youngstown, Ohio, Bridge Co., is the fourth and by far the most durable bridge ever built at that site. Declared by Engineering News of New York to be “as handsome a structure as could built out of steel,” it was credited to Ohio engineer C.E. Fowler, a historian who was working on a collection of artifacts associated with Napoleon. Completed in 1898, the bridge permitted safe crossing to pedestrians and electric streetcars and horses and buggies, over a wild, undammed river where steamboats still carried passengers and freight. The bridge was high enough to allow clearance for sternwheelers’ smokestacks.
It was finished the same year that Cowan Rodgers built, in his bicycle shop, the first automobile ever seen in Knoxville. He took some of his early contraptions across this bridge. By the time automobiles caught on, Rodgers was selling other manufacturers’ cars, including Cadillacs. Because automobiles were generally no heavier than streetcars or the farmers’ wagons that used to cross this bridge to sell in Market Square, the bridge did not groan and complain when we started driving across it.
This Gay Street Bridge is older than our historic theaters, older than all but one of downtown’s historic churches, older than Neyland Stadium. It has a lot of history of its own. When I give walking tours, one of the most dependable jaw-droppers is when I tell people the story of the Wild West outlaw Harvey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry, the most deadly of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, and how in 1903 he escaped from jail, stole the sheriff’s horse, and rode it across that very bridge, never to be seen alive again—at least not by law enforcement.
People love that story. The jail the Kid escaped from is gone, the Bowery saloon he shot up was torn down almost a century ago. But the bridge is still there, for now.
How the Gay Street Bridge may have looked when the outlaw Kid Curry rode across it in 1903. (Dave Parmalee Knoxville Postcard Collection/KHP.)
When the bridge was built, it was a Knox County government project, not a city one. It connected the Knox County Courthouse to South Knox County, the unincorporated wilds so remote it was known to wags as “South America.” This bridge was almost 20 years old by the time the city annexed anything on the south side of the river. At the time, there was no Chapman Highway, no Alcoa Highway. Just some narrow pikes twisting through the woods to Sevierville and Maryville.
Many of those who crossed it in its early days were veterans of both sides of the Civil War. It became a gathering place on Decoration Day, later known as Memorial Day, when survivors of the catastrophic Sultana riverboat explosion of 1865, and family members of the hundreds who didn’t survive, dropped more than 1,000 roses into the river to remember each of the men lost. They apparently did that every year for decades.
Some who crossed this bridge had grown up in slavery. One of those was Ben Maynard, the popular South Knoxville farmer and florist, who organized Negro Building exhibits on Gay Street during the October Festivals.
One of its most frequent travelers was probably elderly “Merchant Prince” Perez Dickinson, who crossed it to get to his model farm, his “Island Home.”
In the 1920s until the completion of the Henley Bridge in early 1932, it was the bridge used by the early federal officials, governors, writers, and conservationist hikers who were contemplating the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Harry Ijams, David Chapman, Annie Davis, Ben Morton, they all knew it well. Arno Cammerer of the National Park Service crossed it more than once.
The bridge was built for a river that often flooded, and was almost half a century old when the Tennessee Valley Authority built Fort Loudoun Dam, slowing the current a bit.
The bridge has played a role in novels by Cormac McCarthy, who set several vivid and much-quoted scenes around it—the title character Suttree lives just beneath it, ca. 1951—and by David Madden, who knew the bridge well as a kid in the 1940s and found it fascinating. He says it was the Gay Street Bridge, not the bridge in his book’s title, that inspired his unconventional but much-praised novel, London Bridge in Plague and Fire.
It has seen activities its builders would not imagine, as when it was one of the most picturesque legs of the old Expo 10,000 footrace, which drew thousands of trotting participants beginning in 1978 and every spring for several decades.
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Of course, all bridges age. When engineers expressed concern for its rusty, twisted bolts, it closed in late 2001 for a major redo. The city paid for 20 percent of the $16 million fix, the rest subsidized by the federal government, with a grant obtained by Congressman Jimmy Duncan, under a Federal Bridge Replacement Program.
When it reopened, almost two and a half years later, Bill Haslam was mayor, and talking a lot about redeveloping the south side.
The Gay Street Bridge in 2023. (Photo by Shawn Poynter for KHP.)
The grand reopening was an especially grand occasion for me, at least. The new version of the bridge included a new feature planned to be coherent with downtown’s revival: broad, protected sidewalks that made it easy to walk across. At the time, I was working for Metro Pulse, then in the Burwell Building on Gay Street, just about five blocks from the bridge. At lunchtime, I often found myself wandering over toward the restored bridge, just to behold it, and then mounting it and crossing it.
Halfway across, the world opens wide. Downtown, we’re used to big things hovering above and around us. But out over the river, you can see long distances in all directions, up river and down, watch birds flying at your level, and boats as they pass beneath.
Standing in the middle, it’s almost like the first day at the beach. Whatever was bothering me suddenly seemed less of a burden, and more manageable. It’s a big, beautiful world.
But while I was enjoying the revery, I couldn’t avoid one reality that this bridge, like most tall bridges, has been a settings for suicide. Dozens of mortals have seen their last of life on Earth on this bridge before climbing over those same steel railings. Suicides tend to get a mention in the news; you can look them up.
What you can’t look up are the people who walked out here in a gloomy mood and experienced what I experienced, enjoyed the fact that there were still some thrills in this life, and walked back, perhaps with a new perspective. I don’t know, but I bet there were more of those than those who went over.
When I took my own distinctly non-suicidal walks across that bridge, I sometimes ambled over to Chapman Highway, where I took a risk crossing that busy street of drivers on their way to the interstate to go to the old Smoky Mountain Market for a hot dog or tamale, or to the Disk Exchange, or to a very good Mexican restaurant where they didn’t speak English at all, but served Mexican Cokes.
Most often, I just walked to the south end of the bridge and then just walked back.
The Gay Street Bridge in 2023. (Photo by Shawn Poynter for KHP.)
There was never much to keep me. In 2004, I thought it was just a matter of time before a café or brewpub or taco stand opened over there at the south end, to greet people who enjoyed walking across the bridge. Especially with the Haslam emphasis on south-side development, that intersection seemed key to the whole success of the thing. Just improving the bridge for pedestrians, I thought, would work wonders, kind of like the phenomenon of the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga. When they improved that 1890s bridge it for pedestrians, so many enjoyed the long walk over that the act itself seemed to invent a neighborhood called Frazier Avenue, which suddenly bloomed with cafes and sushi places and art galleries and toy stores.
But that never happened here. At the end of the bridge was a dysfunctional three-way split. On the right, along Blount Avenue, are sidewalks for pedestrians, but nothing of interest to them: just a corporate office building and some private apartments. On the left are two one-way streets, the bifurcated strands of Sevier Avenue. The first one you come to is especially treacherous for walking, a blind wooded curve with no sidewalks at all. In the two decades since, it has not changed. There’s a lot more going on Sevier Avenue now, but it’s all over a hill and half a mile beyond, not within tempting sight of the bridge-crosser.
Over the years I’ve taken a couple of walking tours from Gay Street to Sevier Avenue. It’s possible to get there, if you know the way, but that intersection makes it pretty awkward. You don’t expect to see a spot that bad in a modern downtown. It’s like a bad fork up in the hills, in some county that’s too poor to do anything about it.
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Some of the news stories have emphasized how old the Gay Street Bridge is, compared to other bridges in Tennessee. The only one older that spans this particular river is that Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, which is a few years older (and much longer). But it became a pedestrian-only bridge a couple of decades ago, and, as I mentioned, it has become a tourist attraction just for that. Every day, people like to walk and run across it.
But compare the bridge to other traffic-bearing bridges in the world. Not counting railroad and pedestrians-only bridges, of London’s automobile bridges over the Thames, 10 are substantially older than the Gay Street Bridge. One dates back to 1777, one to 1828. And they still bear the weight of Land Rovers and Jaguars.
New York’s famous Brooklyn Bridge is 15 years older than the Gay Street Bridge. They’re not talking about tearing it down anytime soon.
I’m not an engineer—but as father, son, grandson, and nephew of engineers, I’ve learned to pay attention to engineers. At the time of the 2001-2004 rehab of the Gay Street Bridge, the TDOT project engineer remarked that the refurbished bridge was stronger than ever. “Taken care of,” he said, “I don’t see why it wouldn’t last another 100 years.”
That is, this engineer who had closely studied the bridge for a couple of years believed the Gay Street Bridge would last into the 22nd Century.
Now, apparently, there’s another opinion. Maybe we didn’t take care of it. Maybe we did something terribly wrong. But I hope we can find an engineer who will tell us it’s not too late to make it right.
by Jack Neely
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