Blue Cat’s Blues

A sudden disappearance in the Old City

I was startled last week, walking down East Jackson Avenue, to perceive a big empty space. It was disorienting at first, and I had to turn around to see where I was. But then I realized that the place many of us knew as Blue Cat’s just wasn’t there anymore. The odd little two-story complex on East Jackson, the nook that hosted a dozen different offbeat nightclubs over the years, was plumb gone.

We’re not used to hearing about demolitions on Jackson Avenue. This is, after all, the Old City: The neighborhood developed as a concept led by preservationists with the premise that we don’t have to tear down anything to make it successful. From the day in 1983 that the popular continental restaurant and jazz club known as Annie’s opened in what had been a railroad coal-storage shack, nobody tore down anything much. The idea was that you use what’s there and make it work, and that’s part of the deal, and part of the charm. The Old City was a big cubist tapestry. You move into it, liven it up in your own way, but you don’t tear anything down. For 35 years, that was how the Old City worked. It had its ups and downs, but generally it became more successful with the years, even as a place to live.

But recently—really just in the last six or seven years—several Old City buildings have vanished. None of them were obvious landmarks, buildings especially notable for their architecture. Most of them were functional, not to say cheap, 20^th century buildings. But they all had interesting histories.

Early last year, erstwhile developers demolished the 1940 Armour meatpacking building. Chicago-based Armour was, for better or worse, one of Knoxville’s first national-business presences, and a pioneer in freight refrigeration, when they set up right there by the railroad tracks in the 1880s. That original building was lost in a major fire, to be replaced by a smaller, utilitarian building rebuilt by Armour in 1940. Armour remained in business there for years until it closed there in the 1970s. The building served in recent years as a nice antique store that was much more pleasant to visit than any packing house.

That building demolished last year was plain, industrial, nothing special, but it evoked the era that East Jackson Avenue was more or less the region’s meatpacking district, as home to several meatpacking factories, including Armour, Swift, and Lay’s. It was an industry that employed over 1,000, and at its height, included a stockyard and several agricultural businesses over on Willow. That 1940 Armour building was the very last remnant of that era.

The developers made vague promises of needing the space for a new construction project. As of this writing, 15 months later, it’s still just an empty space. And now there’s another one just down the sidewalk.

The revival of downtown Knoxville in the last few decades, and to some extent the revival of the city itself, and especially the world’s perception of it, had been a proof that historic preservation works. Most of the excitement—perhaps 80 percent of downtown’s new businesses, almost all the new restaurants that have earned national attention, almost all the Big Ears venues, have arrived in pre-World War II buildings.

The problem with preservation succeeding in attracting businesses and events and customers is that all the hubbub and walking traffic also attracts new developers who maybe don’t get it. They have more conventional business plans in mind, and maybe don’t understand why this disorderly old jumble of a neighborhood succeeded in the first place.

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Blue Cat’s was an oddity even in a neighborhood of oddities. A two-story building built to the sidewalk, but with its entrances on the side, backed by a smaller building behind, forming an open area unlike any other in town, a sort of urban pedestrian courtyard that served two or three businesses.

It would have been hard to call it a beautiful building, mostly cinderblock, and the arched windows in back were probably a modern embellishment. From what I can tell, it was built around 1937, after the railroad-wholesale heyday of Jackson, after the saloon era. It served a lot of practical purposes, as a lumber dealer, then a hardware wholesaler, then a feed store. That little courtyard was apparently a cramped parking area, established before we created generous standards for parking lots. Packards and DeSotos probably wedged themselves in there, maybe gave their chrome bumpers a workout.

In the 1950s, it became a toy factory. First known as Whitie’s Novelties, it was a business that had moved from the older building down the street, the one now known as Jackson Ateliers. They fabricated plastic figurines, and had a machine that made plush toys. One of their major clients was the Tennessee Valley Fair. If you went to the fair in the 1960s and won a stuffed toy at the ring toss, there’s a good chance it was made in that building. The building served as a toymaker for about 30 years, probably longer than anything else.

They didn’t have a whole lot of drop-in customers, so the cramped little parking lot sufficed for the staff.

Later, when the Old City revived its old nocturnal reputation, and downtown started having fun again, the odd little complex took on a whole different reputation, without tearing down any walls.

That little parking lot became a pedestrian courtyard from which you could access the big auditorium-sized room on the ground, or the back restaurant space, or go upstairs via an outdoor staircase to the bar that was also an interior balcony. On a good night, 20 years ago, it could feel like another city, a nook in the French Quarter or perhaps Greenwich Village in the ‘20s.

In 1991, the big part of it became home to the cutely named Ace of Clubs, and that began a quarter-century as a generator of nightclubs, no two of them alike. The big two-story room was a small auditorium that could accommodate a couple hundred. It had an upstairs balcony bar that sometimes seemed to have a different thing going on. The smaller building in back was more intimate, more like a restaurant. But the complex made room for multiple concepts, often two or three at the same time.

They had names that reflected their personalities. City Slickers was a country-music club. The Big Easy was a restaurant/club with a New Orleans theme, and a crab boil every Friday. The Black Sheep Café was a cool jazz club, competing with Lucille’s around the corner for the live-jazz crowd. Ebi served sushi and sake. Neptune was an attempt to revive the spirit of the Mercury Theatre, the Market Square rock ‘n’ roll nightclub. The Last Chance was reputedly a strip club, and if so, the only one I’ve ever heard of in downtown history; I gather it was nudged out of business by the city, and I heard about it only after it closed. Some of the greatest names in Knoxville nightclub history were contained in that building: Tonic, Fiction, NV, the Bowery. Most of them lasted for at least a couple of years, longer than the Last Chance, but not forever. All of them have their own stories, several of brushes with national relevance. On its way to alt-rock stardom, Superdrag made some recordings at Neptune.

But the best known of them, and probably the longest-lived, was Blue Cats. It opened in 2001, and was associated with Ashley Capps, who by that time was planning the first-ever Bonnaroo.

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Usually historians find it most urgent to learn about people who came before us. We specialize in the dead. But if we live long enough, and are open-minded and honest enough to consider it, we might admit that people younger than we are also do interesting things that deserve to be remembered.

Blue Cats’ history mainly pertained to people younger than me. When I went there, 20 years ago, I was a middle-aged father of two, and one of the oldest people in the room. I went there mainly when friends of mine, like Scott Miller or R.B. Morris, were performing.

A few were figures from my own youth: Dickey Betts, the Allman Brothers’ lead guitarist who died last month, performed there, as did Outlaw country favorite David Allan Coe. Bill Frisell, jazz guitarist who’s become a stalwart attraction of Big Ears, performed there, too, as did the Atlanta duo the Indigo Girls.

Other visitors to Blue Cats include Old Crow Medicine Show, Cowboy Junkies, Yo La Tengo, Leftover Salmon, Umphree’s McGee, all with national or international credentials. Some local bands, like Royal Bangs, on their way to national music festivals and late-night talk show appearances, played there early in their careers.

Some were there right before they hit it big. A few remember when John Mayer who was a skinny Atlanta kid just becoming the singer-songwriter icon of the X Generation when he performed in that building in 2001, for $10.  In recent years, he has played Madison Square Garden for around $100 per ticket.

Four months later at humble Blue Cat’s, 22-year-old pianist and singer Norah Jones played on the same stage, for just $8. Her debut album, Come Away with Me, was released just a few weeks later; a major critical and popular success, reaching #1 on the Billboard charts and winning five Grammys.

All that happened there. I’m sure hundreds of others have their own memories. They’ll have to do because that’s all we have left of that odd cluster of buildings that could surprise us on a good night.

 

 

Some knowledgeable observers are confident that it was the last of the Old City demolitions, and maybe something worthwhile will be built those uncustomarily empty spaces on Jackson. But what people build new is rarely if ever as interesting as what they do with old buildings. They seem to stretch our imagination and insist that our lives be memorable.

By Jack Neely