When Downtown Was Dead: A Fond Memory

To an almost incredible degree, downtown’s humming, especially in the evenings. With the new baseball and soccer stadium, renovated and well-used historic theaters with interesting shows, a busy cineplex, several festivals including one that has become internationally famous, several nationally ranked restaurants, several good bars and nightclubs, a bowling alley, a staggering number of new hotels, some of them very fancy, with rooftop bars that seem like scenes in a James Bond movie—and, most importantly, a good independent bookstore—it’s everything I was wishing for back in the late 20th century. It’s all so much fun it’s been written up several times in the national tourist media, which may account for much of the hotel traffic, which in a former era would have been difficult to imagine. If you’re bold enough to eavesdrop, you’ll know that downtown is suddenly lively with people who are talking mostly about how lively downtown is.

To build a dramatic sense of contrast, they often supply an emphatic phrase like “a few years ago, downtown was just dead.”

I hear that, and I rarely oppose overheard opinions. But being a student of history, I naturally yearn to nail down exactly when it was that downtown died. I’ve been working downtown for the better part of 45 years, which may offer me some perspective on the subject. But like everybody, many of my overlapping memories are muddled, which is why I’m grateful for the option of research.

 

I commenced my research project by trying to isolate the period when downtown was dead. Of course, nobody would claim that downtown was dead when it was the neighborhood of most of our regional department stores, as it was at least until 1972, when West Town Mall opened, or 1985, when J.C. Penney’s closed its 50-year-old Gay Street store—or when downtown still hosted the city’s two biggest movie theaters, the Riviera and the Tennessee, which closed in 1976 and 1977. The downtown of my youth was plenty busy, if not always stylish or exciting or particularly sanitary.

So it sounds as if downtown’s death might have occurred sometime after 1977. But perhaps before the opening of Annie’s restaurant and live-jazz venue in 1983.That marked the grand opening of the Old City era, which included a few surprising after-hour shops and the popular bar and nightclub Manhattan’s. By the end of that decade it was roaring with memorable nightclubs, led by Ella Guru’s, where you might see anyone from Garth Brooks to Wynton Marsalis to Adrian Belew to Sun Ra. And Java, which to my memory was our first modern-era coffee shop.

So downtown’s dead spell would seem to be after the big Tennessee stopped showing new movies every night, in 1977, and before Annie’s opened and kick-started the Old City.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that 1977-1983 “dead” period also happened to include an unusual downtown event: a six-month World’s Fair. Which maybe didn’t have the desired rejuvenating effect on downtown that was forecast, but did leave us with three big new hotels and a few dozen upscale residences in the Pembroke and Kendrick Place.

So maybe we should narrow downtown’s death further: say, 1977-1981. It was just during that era that I began my downtown career, working late shifts as a copy boy at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, which was itself a 24-hour institution. Its doors were rarely or never locked, and reporters and editors and typesetters and photographers and occasional celebrities were running in and out of that building all day and all night. (Its rival, the Journal, was in the same building at the corner of Church and State, smaller but with its own hum.)

I’d walk home to my apartment near 11^th Street, sometimes at midnight, sometimes a few hours after that. I got to know the neighborhood pretty well. Even at 4 in the morning, downtown was never absolutely quiet.

Downtown was run down, and there were several spooky empty buildings, but in my memory it was hardly deceased, or really even sleepy. The Tavernette, a small but often crowded and sometimes dramatic poolhall, was on Clinch, a temptation on my way home. Blaufeld’s deli was on Gay Street, and just a few blocks away on the same street, was Harold’s; Harold was there by 4:30 a.m., cutting meat. Comer’s Poolhall (becoming cult-famous in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, released in 1979) was upstairs above one of a few fancy evening restaurants, the Brass Rail, where I once met Lionel Hampton and some of his band mates. Right across the street was the Tennessee, which was no longer showing movies but beginning to host some live shows. At the other end of Gay Street was Regas, with charms well beyond my budget, but I always heard that famous people, congressmen and senators and Vol football heroes could be spotted there, at the tables reserved for them.

The same year the Tennessee Theatre closed, a strange new business called Approach 13-30 moved into the old Arnstein building, an old department-store building but more recently one of TVA’s former office buildings. They trafficked in colorful printed matter, producing some of the bright magazines I saw in stacks in the student union, but I didn’t pay much attention to them until 1979, when I heard they bought legendary but half-forgotten Esquire Magazine, and were getting in the news for doing impudent and trendy things with it.

That company was growing and evolving into what we would get to know as Whittle Communications, the brash national publisher that would grow constantly through the 1980s, culminating with the completion of the giant Whittle complex in 1991, which brought hundreds of affluent young creatives from all over the country to our old downtown. They came from New York, Chicago, Boston, Montreal, and were accustomed to urban amenities, and to spending lots of money on nightlife. For about 18 years they made the Old City’s new nightclubs seem viable, and packed new restaurants like Tomato Head, which opened in 1990 and immediately raised the standard for what we had come to expect of Market Square. Tomato Head’s opening, and the introduction of the café table to downtown, seems like a watershed. It seems such a common thing now, and a large part of what makes downtown seem lively and friendly in 2025, but before 1990, the sidewalk café had been tried only a couple of times in Knoxville, mainly in token ways along strip-mall parking lots out west.

So Whittle’s predecessors were present during our posited “dead” era, 1977-1981, but maybe not as conspicuous as they would be later.

And it was right in the middle of that prospectively “dead” era, that the Bistro opened, beside the rapidly reviving Bijou Theatre, which after its first ambitious preservationist renovation was beginning to host some big-name acts right about that time, along with Mary Costa’s brand-new opera company. The Bistro was popular to begin with, and never changed much. It’s a downtown landmark, one of the very few places I can take old friends and colleagues and show them a place they recognize, still with regular live jazz, and that Rubenesque nude behind the long bar, the restaurant’s icon. It was already hanging there in 1980.

So maybe we should push the end of the “dead” period back another notch or two, to the pre-Bistro era. So when we regard the dead zone, we’re really talking about the latter part of 1977 up until early 1979.

So I figured 1978 must have been the really dead downtown year, the one people talk about.

But looking closely at 1978, I found that year offered some major exceptions that threaten to kill the rule. It was the year I returned home for a couple of years away in college, and I got to know downtown mainly by the fact that the grandly melancholy old Tennessee was opening occasionally to show old movies. I’d never had many opportunities to see old movies of the Bogart and Flynn and Hepburn era, and found it a fascinating, but pretty lonesome experience. I usually had a row to myself.

One irony hard to ignore is the giant bank building later known as Plaza Tower, the glassy skyscraper completed in November 1978 as the tallest building ever built in East Tennessee. It opened fully occupied with bankers and lawyers offices and a fancy top-floor restaurant, Club LeConte, which became home to several of the clubs that kept men and women busy and stimulated at lunchtime. The second-tallest building in East Tennessee followed it a few years later, right next door.

Also, October, 1978, was Artfest, a multi-day event featuring an experimental film festival followed by a Patricia Neal Film Festival at the Tennessee, with the honoree herself present, and Chet Atkins playing live at the Bijou, followed immediately by the first of several annual festivals called Saturday Night on the Town, kind of like a late-night version of the Rossini Festival, but with more bluegrass and rock ‘n’ roll. An estimated 8,000 attended. Even after it was denied a beer permit.

It happened to be the same weekend as an anti-Apartheid demonstration and a Bama-game pep rally on West Cumberland that resulted in Knoxville’s biggest street riot since 1970: in that one night, 86 people were arrested. I’m lucky I was not one of them. Maybe a riot’s not an ideal sort of center-city gathering, but it doesn’t suggest death.

So should we say it was really just about February to September of 1978 that downtown was dead?

But when you think about that era, you have to acknowledge that there was still a lot of old-time downtown retail then. J.C. Penney’s still had a very big store on Gay Street. Woodruff’s was still selling several floors of new and stylish furniture on the same block. Miller’s Department Store had previously run two big downtown department stores, but still had the one, big modernist one on Henley. Several smaller shops sold dresses or suits. Several places sold dress shoes. At the Athletic House, you could buy baseball mitts or fishing rods or cheap Chuck Taylor tennis shoes.  There were in fact lots of little specialty shops tucked in here and there, the rare-coin shop, the Hobby Shop, the radio and electronics shop, the cluttered but expansive record shop, and lots and lots of fascinating second-hand shops that for me doubled as lunchtime museums of culture.

And beyond retail, there were still some downtown factories then. A generation of us will always miss the aroma of JFG’s fragrant coffee-roasting operation on Jackson. White Lily was still making the best flour in the world at its century-old plant on North Central, as well as the Lay’s Packing Co. and a couple of glassworks. You saw the workers when their shifts changed. Sterchi Brothers, one of America’s biggest furniture chains, still had its headquarters downtown.

And in remembering downtown in 1978, I don’t know why we shouldn’t count the Civic Auditorium and Coliseum, a six-minute walk from Gay, where there was always a lot going on. Just during that hypothetically downtown-moribund year of 1978, you could see Heart, Aerosmith, Johnny Mathis, Engelbert Humperdinck, Blue Oyster Cult, Liberace, Ted Nugent, Parliament/Funkadelic, Neil Sedaka, Robert Palmer, Arthur Fiedler, Harry Chapin, and the 22-year-old Reba McEntire, plus regular concerts by the KSO, and occasionally Ringling Brothers, the Royal Lipizzan Stallions, and the traveling version of Oh! Calcutta!, its globally infamous nude scenes picketed outside. That’s just a sample of what you might encounter in one downtown building in that very odd year.

It’s an easy bet that though downtown in 1978 might not have seemed as fresh and clever as it can seem on a good weekend in 2025, there were more consumer goods bought and sold in downtown Knoxville in 1978, when it was dead, than today.

The Tennessee Valley Authority still kept its national headquarters in downtown Knoxville, with, pre-Reagan, more than 3,000 employees who all tended to get hungry at the same time. About 20 lunch spots competed for their noontime business. We knew them because they always wore their IDs visibly, even when they were ordering a steamed deli sandwich. We may not think of TVA as an exciting thing, as we walk past the always-locked doors of their big blank modern building still occupied now by just a few hundred employees. But in the late 20^th century, TVA’s multi-state headquarters was mostly open to the public, with several unique amenities, including a very interesting technological museum, a public library staffed with friendly librarians who knew what they were doing, and a very unusual aerial photography service—you could go in their shop and purchase a high-quality aerial photograph, suitable for framing, of anywhere in the valley.

The elegant art-deco S&W Cafeteria was still there in 1978, still serving three meals a day. And believe it or not, though the Farragut Hotel had recently closed, to be renovated for office space, the legendary Andrew Johnson Hotel—the tallest building in East Tennessee before Plaza Tower—was still open then, as a hotel. And get this: Delta Airlines had a ticket office on Gay Street.

And I mentioned the News-Sentinel. Up until 1992, Knoxville had two daily newspaper offices, the Journal and the News-Sentinel, they both had hundreds of employees, and they were both downtown, competing for stories and readership, with their giant printing presses churning away almost nonstop, and down in the garage trucks were idling, ready to carry the papers across the region.

Newspaper offices had always been downtown, ever since 1792. But the Journal closed in 1992, and in 2002, the News-Sentinel moved out of downtown, to a big warehouse-looking building a lonely hill west of Mechanicsville, but closer to the interstate exits.

So maybe we should forget 1978, or any other plausible date of death. At any given time, some things are up as others are down, but downtown Knoxville was always probably the most interesting and economically and culturally diverse and active half-square-mile in East Tennessee. If it seemed dead to some people, maybe it was just in comparison to the big empty buildings suggesting what it had been before.

Or maybe it was just a vague feeling people had. When people talk about a downtown being dead, I suspect they’re recalling a deficiency of entertainment, variety of restaurants, and opportunities for late-night carousing. Despite about half a dozen good dinner restaurants I can remember, plus Comer’s and a few other low-profile bars, downtown in 1978 was indeed less obviously lively after 8 p.m. than it is in 2025.

And, generally, it was less obviously lively on Saturdays. They used to say you could fire a shotgun down Gay Street on a Saturday and not hit anybody. Maybe that was true, sometimes, though you might need to aim carefully on the 100 block, where Harold’s was. From 1948 until 2005 it was always packed on Saturday mornings and afternoons, especially for the long breakfast. Chairs were so close together that if you leaned back, you’d be in someone’s lap. You might see anyone there, old, young, banker, artist, Jew, Gentile, Druid. If you didn’t know everybody, you liked everybody anyway, at least while they were sitting at Harold’s, and by 11 a.m. you would have caught up on all the latest news and gossip. I know of no place comparable today. The memory of Harold’s suggests room for growth. But I’m not sure how you’d set out to plan to create a place like that. It just has to happen.  (I’ve recently heard reports from Dublin to Manhattan that these distinctive old institutions are disappearing everywhere. It could be that we now prefer our restaurants to be temporary. If so, that’s a pity.)

So, I’m not sure there was ever a moment when downtown’s heart wasn’t beating, however arrhythmically. When people say it was “dead,” they may just mean it wasn’t a place you’d expect to impress a Saturday-night date, some nights at the various auditoriums excepted. And I get that. They mean dead sort of metaphorically.

But here’s the biggest irony: while downtown in its party dress seems livelier today, the old neighborhood may be less important, in a practical sense, than it was when it was dead.

I have a fond memory that seems both puzzling and relevant. There was a time, 20-40 years ago, that I used to brag that I rarely had to buy postage stamps, because I paid all my bills in person. Everybody who was important enough in my life that I owed them money was downtown.

My auto and home-insurance offices were downtown; I could pay my bills and, when I needed to, talk to someone who knew about my policies.

KUB had always been downtown, and in 2000 our public utility company moved with some fanfare to the freshly renovated Miller’s Building. They opened a new rear entrance so we could get there directly from Market Square. I’d pay my bill in person just to have an official reason to walk into that grand edifice, with its enabling atrium, and instantly get a receipt.

My mortgage bank was downtown, as was the other banks where we had student-loan payments. Once a year I could renew my AAA membership in person, and pick up a few maps while I was there.

The biggest post office in East Tennessee was downtown, and it kept very long hours, up until midnight. They didn’t always have the fancy old-fashioned teller windows open, but you could ring a bell at 11:30 p.m. and somebody would show up to take your package. You could pay your taxes there at midnight, as I did on foot or on bicycle, once right after attending La Nozze di Figaro.

So when it was time to pay bills, once a month, I would pick an hour on a Friday morning and walk from one place to another. I liked it, not just because I could save a stamp—I knew the postal clerks, and liked to give them business—but that I could see and talk to the people whose salaries I was helping pay. They always seemed happy to see me. Often they’d give me a cookie or a sucker. Paying bills in late-century Knoxville was just fun. It was Sesame Street for grownups.

Today, somehow, it doesn’t work anymore. A few years after its grand opening, KUB quietly closed their customer-service office in their marquee building, keeping only administrative offices. The utility still keeps a dozen service centers in town where you can meet somebody who works for KUB in person, but none of them are downtown. In fact, as I didn’t realize until I tried to show it to a visitor recently, that grand Millers’ Building , with its stylish elevators and its airy atrium that greeted us on the holidays with madrigal singers in the mezzanine 25 years ago, is now locked every day, accessible only if you have a key card. I’m sure there were reasons for that.

Except for KUB’s surviving after-hours brass-flap courtesy slot on Union Avenue, which I still use monthly, and the courthouse, where I get my car license renewed, there’s hardly anybody downtown that I ever owe money to. About 20 years ago, my bank’s mortgage office moved out west, and told me they’d no longer accept my payments downtown. My insurance company moved out west—and then were bought by a big corporation, whereupon they moved much farther out west, by the interstate. I’ve never been there. Meanwhile, of course, everybody’s going “paperless.” Which makes it all sound nice. By becoming corporate credit-card consumers, and forsaking our friends at the teller windows, we’re at least saving trees. (That’s true—right?) Can we visit the trees we’re saving?

A lot of this exodus happened just as downtown was getting attention for its revival. So I eat and drink downtown, go to shows, find new books, and do most of my gift-shopping downtown—but most of the practical business of staying alive and solvent is a drive out in the strip malls.

When downtown was dead, it was East Tennessee’s banking center. You could say it still is, but my mother’s bank, a major national institution, closed its last downtown office in 2021. Not because it’s suffering; it still maintains several handy full-service locations in Knoxville, just none of them downtown. Before downtown’s revival, there was no such thing as a bank that didn’t have a presence downtown, most typically a regional headquarters, with presidents and vice presidents upstairs.

Lawyers have always been part of the fabric of downtown, useful not just for legal advice, but for continuity. They’re the storytellers, the multi-decade witnesses to downtowns ups and downs. Restaurateurs, musicians, politicians seem to come and go, eventually vanishing. You’d keep seeing lawyers on the sidewalk, always with a story to tell, until you read their obituaries. But that’s changing.

I’m fortunate that I haven’t often needed to consult an attorney, but the few times that’s happened before about 2005, they’ve been in downtown offices. No longer. My one-time tax attorney moved to the northern suburbs; my two-time car-wreck attorney moved out west.

It used to be that almost all lawyers had offices downtown, within walking distance of the courthouse and clerks. Some still do, but a scan of city directories proves that most lawyers in 2025 have their main offices in the suburbs, far from downtown. Are they as well known raconteurs out at the strip centers as they were downtown?

All this not to mention doctors’ offices, which were abundant in the Medical Arts Building and elsewhere downtown for most of the 20^th century. When I broke my arm in a fall on an icy Gay Street sidewalk in 1998, there were several doctors I could walk to, and, ultimately, a hospital just across the Gay Street Bridge, via the sidewalk, which is where I ended up. From the moment I fell, I didn’t even leave downtown until I was recovering from surgery.

Where would you go with a broken arm in our new and improved downtown? I don’t even know, but I bet you’ll need to find a car. And somebody to drive it for you.

About 15 years ago, my downtown dentist moved west, too. As late as the 1990s, there were several competing optometrists and eyeglass shops downtown. Every one of them has either moved out of downtown, or, in one case, shifted its business model to the perhaps more lucrative bar business.  As you may recall, downtown optometry offered one big advantage. With dilated eyes, you could walk to your home or office or favorite café or public library—and not straight to your car, as you tend to in any strip mall, whether you can see well enough to drive or not.

Our venerable auto club, AAA, long a stalwart on Fifth Avenue, has closed its eye-catchingly modernist building, built not long ago on a location where they’ve thrived for decades, and concentrated all its business in suburban locations miles away from downtown.

That slow stampede out of an ostensibly reviving downtown has also applied to insurance agents, realtors, financial planners, accountants. (After many years downtown, our business accountant recently settled happily in South Knoxville. At this writing, my personal tax accountant still has her office downtown, as does my pharmacist; I’m grateful to both rarities.)  Even as downtown gets more and more fun, the stuff we actually need seems to be heading to the suburbs, maybe even faster than it was in the postwar era.

When downtown was dead, you could also buy less expensive things than doctors and lawyers, too. Need a pair of shoelaces, or a watch battery, or a crescent wrench, or a dress shirt, or a stapler, or a toner cartridge, or a carving knife, or a light bulb, or a fan belt, or some shoe repair, where do you go? Maybe there are places I don’t know about now, but when downtown was dead, the purveyors of all those things were obvious, and there were several retailers competing for your business.

And back when downtown was dead, there were still a couple of regular groceries downtown, including one supermarket, and another, J’s Mega Mart, that a New Yorker might call an unusually large bodega. I’m sure there were things they didn’t sell, but I can’t name one with confidence. Our newly vibrant downtown seems to prefer mainly expensive snack-forward convenience stores.

We know, or at least have plausible theories, about what happened to newsstands, places you could review the news of the world and perhaps find someone to talk about it. When you heard a friend got mentioned in a national magazine, you could go down and pick up a copy. Even if you never patronized them, newsstands were proof that there were more than consumers in this city, there were also people curious about the world. They were urban nerve centers.

Remember bus stations? When downtown was dead, Trailways and Greyhound both did a 24-hour business, a few blocks away from each other. When Greyhound quietly abandoned its station at Central and Magnolia about five years ago, it was the unheralded end of a 165-year period when you could catch a ride in downtown Knoxville to anywhere in the nation. You could also use them for shipping and sending money by wire. Or just to get a quick sandwich and a cup of coffee. They had newsstands, too.

Meanwhile, our innovative “intermodal” transit station, with staffed luncheonette and connections to interstate transportation, was promised to be much more than just the downtown bus stop, but with the intransigence of corporate Greyhound and the apparent failure of the MegaBus, which still works for a few dozen cities, left it not much more than that.

Of course, all of those are different stories, signs of the times. Part of it’s just the tale of the decline of brick and mortar retail in the face of Amazon, Craigslist, and the digital era that makes it possible to buy things without touching them first or talking to a person. We apparently like it that way. Part of it’s the ever-expanding corporatization of America. Everybody tries to make a profit, but a restauranteur or a newspaper publisher will likely keep a break-even business going until he or she can’t. A publicly traded corporation will not. Part of it’s the hypersecurity of the post-9/11 world that’s locking doors once kept open. Al Qaeda gave us license to stop welcoming strangers.

And of course, everything’s temporary, including ourselves, and our lacks. It was about 20 years ago that Arthur Seymour, the old Republican lawyer who never stepped outside without his fedora, was regretting the abysmal lack of ice-cream parlors in 21^st-century Knoxville.  Now there are several. Some things come back.

Some things remain. The physical state, local, and federal courts are still remarkably close to where they were 200 years ago. The mayors’ offices and most city and county administrative offices are still downtown, and will probably stay there. Our two best public libraries, Lawson McGhee and the McClung Collection, are still downtown, and I’m glad of that.

While we weren’t looking, though, we lost our police department. For the first 170 years of the history of KPD, it was always headquartered downtown. If you have to pay a traffic ticket, or turn in a lost wallet, or interview an officer, or report a car break-in while the fingerprints are still fresh—and in the last 45 years, I’ve done all those things—you could do it on foot. KPD’s new HQ, on North Knoxville’s Oak Hill, isn’t very far, and it may offer some practical advantages, in terms of space and security, but it’s not downtown. In 2025, when there are more people downtown at night than any time in memory, where do you find a police officer? I remember when it was important to establish a staffed satellite “precinct” office on UT’s campus. Now there’s not even one downtown.

The police department, the newspaper, utility tellers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, optometrists, these are among the many services that snuck away from downtown—just as we were distracted by how exciting downtown was getting to be.

The Chamber of Commerce has always been located downtown since its first inception. Now, 20 years after it planted itself very deliberately on Market Square, with an unusual and innovative complex, with the idea that this ancient center of commerce would be relevant to commerce in the future, the Chamber of Commerce has announced it will be selling its big building and moving soon. They haven’t suggested a new location, or indicated that it will necessarily be downtown.

The things downtown got to replace all those practical things were things I used to dream of. And I’m going to a baseball game tonight. But I didn’t expect that I’d miss all that mundane stuff. Be careful what you wish for.

By Jack Neely