So what’s Knoxville’s oldest restaurant Now? Some years ago, soon after the final closing of the venerable Regas Restaurant, I wrote a column in Metro Pulse pondering the question of what might be its successor as Knoxville’s Oldest. With something […]

Part of the lore of the 1982 World’s Fair, then and now, was that little ol’ Knoxville had the gumption, or arrogance, or naivete, to put on a world’s fair. The Wall Street Journal’s “scruffy little city” moniker, casting doubts on […]

There are some names you see in Knoxville that you don’t see as much in other cities. The name Cansler is one. In Mechanicsville, there’s a Cansler Street, and on University Avenue, a Cansler Building. Off Western is the old […]

The Evolution of Our Oddest Holiday   I had a much more serious subject in mind for this month’s column, but couldn’t find the data I needed in time to complete it. To make a serious point, you need to […]

Some people and things you might have seen one century ago, at Christmastime   It had been a dramatic year, one that had seen perhaps the only racially prompted lynch-mob riot in American history in which the only people injured […]

The doctors and patient who pioneered a new surgery on Gay Street If you browse around 19th-century graveyards as much as we do, and do some quick math, you’ll find an alarming number of untimely deaths of young married women. […]

And the Electrical Wizard of St. Charles Avenue Ayres Hall is a century old this year, and maybe, finally, it’s as old as people always thought it was. Actually, some newcomers, innocent of the challenges of the frontier era, see […]

  A sexual assault, a downtown lynch mob, and a sheriff’s forceful response One century ago this month, an angry crowd gathered on Gay Street at Hill Avenue. Their objective was the old fortress-like jail known as the County Bastille. […]

This is a story of a kid who was scared of a graveyard. It’s also the story of the founder of a major American institution, a cultural leader who changed a whole profession, established a landmark, and introduced a new […]