If you find yourself ambling on North Gay, as I do when I park free under the highway, you may be in for a start. The familiar building many of us grew up with known as Regas Restaurant suddenly sports, […]
If you find yourself ambling on North Gay, as I do when I park free under the highway, you may be in for a start. The familiar building many of us grew up with known as Regas Restaurant suddenly sports, […]
Jacksonland is a book nobody much expected—perhaps not even, until a couple of years ago, its author, Steve Inskeep. NPR’s morning host is known for his up-to-the-minute reporting of breaking news, his sometimes merciless interviews of presidents and prime ministers, […]
The century-old Christenberry house at 3222 Kingston Pike, near Sequoyah Hills, the subject of several varieties of contention over the last couple of years, no longer exists. It was demolished early Tuesday afternoon, hours before City Council’s expected passage of […]
A month ago I proffered a challenge: to name one instance in which tearing down a building 75 years old or more resulted in something better than the building that was demolished for it. Since it’s Preservation Month, as celebrated by […]
Old newspapers, legal documents, letters, and directories of various sorts are full of mundane detail. More interesting stuff about life in Knoxville more than a century ago is often elusive. Like what people ate. Archaeologists can tell us that people […]
Ali Akbar, or Horace Pittman, as he was previously known, died suddenly in late 2009 at the age of 64. That’s too young to die, but even so he was perhaps 20 years older than most people assumed. He would […]
At a recent public forum, citizens and city leaders discussed the several recommendations of the Urban Land Institute’s short study last October. One of them concerned the urban scholars’ impression that Henley Street was a barrier between downtown and seemingly […]
If it had happened in any month other than April, 1865, they say, it would be the legendary American disaster every school kid knew about. It would be the subject of folksongs and novels and movies. But it was the […]
A city as divided as Knoxville is obliged to be polite. Hence there’s never been a Civil War monument downtown. The monuments on the Knox County Courthouse lawn reflect only the pioneer era and the Spanish-American War. It’s a rare Southern […]