Looking north on Walnut from St. John’s Cathedral to Second Presbyterian Church, circa 1910. (Alec Riedl Knoxville Postcard Collection/KHP.)
If you’ve walked by the Walnut during the past year (perhaps looking for Yassin’s Falafel House, which is temporarily at Marble City Food Hall on Depot) the building is once again going through another renovation, a big one, down to the studs. Relatively soon it will re-open, not as an office building, but a 91-room hotel. And Yassins is expected to move back into its old spot.
Bruce McCarty, a prolific architect, already had a strong connection across the street at Lawson McGhee Library. It’s one of his best-known designs. After moving from a 1917 stone-clad building north of Market Square, the new downtown library, built in a concrete modernist design, opened here in 1971. Deeper into the past, Second Presbyterian Church, a Gothic stone, spired, building that you can also see in the above postcard, stood here between 1907 and 1957. Over the decades, that church has moved around Knoxville quite a bit, originally being on the corner of Market Street and Union in two iterations. It’s now on Kingston Pike near Neyland Drive.
Another church once stood across from the library where the Hilton Hotel is today, Church Street United Methodist. It was a rather ornate stone building that suffered a devasting fire in 1928. But it kept the name of its original street when it moved to Henley Street overlooking the Tennessee River, re-envisaged as a Gothic Revival structure designed by John Russell Pope and Knoxville’s Charlie Barber.
Church Street Methodist, circa 1920 (left) and Lawson McGgee Library and the Walnut Building (right) with a view north along Walnut Street in 1979. (McClung Historical Collection/Knoxville History Project).
Diagonally across from the library, on the northeast corner of Walnut and W. Church, where the surface parking lot is today, stood what some have called an “architectural gem.” Known as Ross Flats, after Martin L. Ross, the property’s landlord, it occupied the space for about 80 years. Described in a 1973 Knoxville News-Sentinel newspaper article, around the time of its pending demolition: “The architectural delights extend on up to the tiptop, to the fanciful roofline, a dentil for the turret, a stylized leaf set in a dormer, Dutch Gables, and swirls and curlicues and flourishes done in bas relief.” There is even a circular window low down near the sidewalk. I can imagine some artistic types living here. And it’s worth pondering what its future may have been if Knox Heritage, founded in the year after it was torn down, could have preserved it.
Ross Flats, on the northeast corner of Walnut and W. Church, circa 1931. Today it’s a park lot for St. John’s Episcopal. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Just north of where Ross Flats stood is the headquarters of the YWCA, which has been there for more than a century. Leaders of the YWCA purchased the home of physician Dr. John Brown in 1913 and used it for programming. Then, after World War I, the residential facility opened the Blue Triangle Tea Room (named after the Y’s logo) that generated funds while serving as a social spot, before embarking on a campaign to build a new headquarters there. Designed by Knoxville architect Charles Barber, the YWCA has just completed a major makeover of the building.
Across the street from the YW, on the southwest corner of Walnut and Clinch, you can find a small historic plaque put there by Knox Heritage a few years ago that marks the location of the private Cumberland Club that began in 1893. Unlike the Blue Triangle Tea Room, one wouldn’t have heard the soft tinkling of China cups and saucers here, for the Cumberland was an exclusive men’s club. Members elected banker W. S. Shields as the club’s first president, the same man who almost 20 years later would have his name on the Shields-Watkins football field at UT, now Neyland Stadium.
That plaque informs us that in 1915 the Rotary Club of Knoxville formed at the Cumberland, with Col. David Chapman, a wholesale pharmaceutical executive and leader of the movement to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, serving as first club president. A quarter of a century later, a group of 16 local physicians purchased the building, added four new stories on to the existing two floors, and it became known as the Doctors Building. It seems that physicians of one kind and another prevailed around this intersection for years. Years later it was demolished and today, that corner is just a practical, yet unappealing parking garage, but it does boast a new colorful mural.
An early 1900s postcard of the Cumberland Club, and the YWCA building on Gay Street on Walnut Street that looks like a brick canyon during the 1920s. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Modern day views of the parking garage and the newly renovated YWCA. (KHP.)
The red brick building just north of the garage is known as the Althea. Constructed in 1912, Althea Apartments included, with no real surprise, more doctors’ offices. One physician who had an office here proved to be Howard A. Ijams, the oldest of three boys born to parents who would have been well known in the city in the late 1800s. His father, Joseph Ijams, was hired in 1866 to be the new superintendent of the Tennessee School for the Deaf after the campus served as a military hospital during the Civil War and badly needed repair. Howard’s mother, Mary, also worked at the school, but his youngest brother, Harry, is the most well-known of the Ijams family—he’s the commercial artist and naturalist who established a farm and semi-private bird sanctuary in South Knoxville that forms the historic heart of the now public park, Ijams Nature Center.
Howard Ijams should be known to local sports fans at least, because he played on the very first UT football team in the fall of 1891. A short stocky guy, barely 5 feet tall, Ijams played as the team’s first quarterback, and in 1893 served as captain on occasion. But in 1923, at age 29, he was killed when his car was struck by a streetcar on Magnolia Avenue. Only the day before had he learned of his promotion to the rank of major in the 117th Infantry of the National Guard of Tennessee. He is buried in Old Gray Cemetery.
Dr. Howard Ijams, and as a student and athlete with the UT Football Team in 1892. (McClung Historical Collection.)
On the east side of Walnut today, between Clinch and Union, is just a surface parking lot. But in years past, this stretch of downtown appears to have looked like a brick canyon. The former tall Acuff building, named after another physician, Dr. Herbert Acuff, contained offices with hotel rooms on the upper floors. The man who helped build it, and also held his own office there, was Dr. Benjamin Franklin Young, the benefactor and namesake of Young High School in South Knoxville. In the 1920s, the durable architectural firm Barber & McMurray moved here from Gay Street. After a restoration in the mid-1930s, the Acuff became known as the Belleview.
Just north of the Acuff in the early 1900s, in a building known as Navarre Flats that extended most of the way up to Union, for a while there happened to be a Turkish Bath run by Raymond and Delia Lovell. The couple named their business Battle Creek Sanitarium after Battle Creek, Michigan, the town where Raymond moved to as a teenager after his parents divorced in the 1880s. There, he worked in a local sanitarium founded by brothers John Harvey and W.K. Kellogg, who invented Kellogg’s cornflakes.
After a short time, the Lovell’s Turkish baths moved a block away to Union Avenue, just to the west of where the Daylight Building is today. And in the following decades, the Lovells established several other spas and vegetarian cafés, which sound incredibly forward-thinking for the times. They also had connections with the Seventh Day Adventist church and the Layman Foundation. The latter would establish Little Creek Sanitarium that still exists off Northshore Drive near Ebenezer Road (close to Little Creek is a Seventh Day Adventist church alongside Old Grace Cemetery.)
Local businessman and owner B.H. Sprankle, renovated Navarre Flats and leased it to a new company under the guise of the Park Hotel in 1930. When it opened, ads boasted its “refined, home-like atmosphere” was located “in the heart of the business district, but away from the noise.” Presumably they were referring to the hustle and bustle of the busy traffic and crowded sidewalks of Gay Street and Market Square. That might be a good reason why doctors preferred to have their offices and clinics in this part of town and why it was once a popular residential district as well. However, over the years the reputation of the Park Hotel wouldn’t live up to its initial billing. Historian Jack Neely once wrote that the Park “wasn’t considered one of the better hotels in town; it had reputation as a magnet for vice, especially bootlegging and prostitution.”
Another historian, Ronald Allen, wrote that prior to the 1982 World’s Fair, hotel management hoped to capitalize on the huge numbers of tourists flooding into the city looking for a place to stay. The building was “painted and spruced up, making it look a bit (but perhaps not that much) more presentable.”
Those efforts yielded few results, as the demand for accommodation by out-of-town fairgoers fell far short of expectations and many risk-takers lost money on their investments. The hotel was torn down over 20 years ago.
Note: Thanks to Kevin Bogle, a historian and archivist at the McClung Historical Collection, for his research on the Lovells. You can read his full account of their Turkish and electro baths here.
“Ghost Walking” is my own take on life on the city’s streets in bygone times; how these streets and their buildings have changed through the years, and how through old pictures and stories we can glimpse the echoes of people’s past lives and particular events. Some of the photos featured in this series are included in Downtown Knoxville that I co-authored with Jack Neely, and part of the popular “Images of America” range. If you’re looking for spooky ghost stories, please allow me to direct you to historian Laura Still’s book, A Haunted History of Knoxville, and her “Shadow Side” walking tours. Laura has been leading historic walking tours for years and she also generously donates a portion from most of her tours to the Knoxville History Project. Learn more at Knoxville Walking Tours.
Leave a reply