Jack Neely

At this point, with the preservation-fueled revival of downtown bringing people, dollars, and uncustomary positive press to the city, the value of the community’s limited stock of old buildings might seem obvious. But their demolition is still occurring, often without ...

Our recent issue about What Knoxville Needs stirred up an old futuristic dream that won’t die. We talk about it today in the same tones we used in the ’60s when we talked about jet packs and hovercraft and computers.

The year’s only a few days old, but Knoxville has already lost two influential and very different architects.

Finally, we’ve arrived in a gracefully nameable era. For 13 years now, those of us who are accustomed to making sense of our recent past by sorting it into decades with distinct personalities, like the ’20s or the ’50s, haven’t ...

A funny thing about the news: It always rhymes.

One century ago, a dozen different Knoxvillians might give you a dozen different ideas about what constituted a Christmas tradition. There survived a few people old enough to recall when Knoxville hardly celebrated Christmas at all. Until the ’40s—the 1840s—it ...

We take the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, who played their annual Christmas show at the Bijou Theatre Tuesday night, for granted, but National Public Radio just named KJO’s Christmas Time Is Here one of five recommended jazz Christmas albums of the ...

And there’s been a pretty extravagant variety of very local books this year. These are the ones I’ve encountered and, for one reason or another, been impressed with.

They’ve rarely worked together. They didn’t learn cooking together as kids. And the last time the two lived in the same house, 30-something years ago, neither aspired to be any sort of chef. Yet sisters Holly and Peggy Hambright are ...

That anyone named Grimaldi ever lived in 1870s Knoxville might be surprising in itself.

Tuesday night at a public meeting, the city rolled out a long-term plan to fix a problem people have been complaining about since the 20th century: a lack of coherent, informative signage. Jack Neely gives them a look.

Scaling the Lilliputian ramparts of Fort Higley last week, I hardly knew the place. One of the two best-preserved Civil War battlements in Knox County, the little fort’s been half-forgotten in these South Knoxville woods for the last 149 years, ...

No big fan of chain-link fences to begin with, I especially hate to see that fence go up around the Aconda Court building on Cumberland Avenue and what’s now Volunteer Boulevard, and some other historic buildings just behind it, just ...

Saturday I was at work downtown, as I am most Saturdays, catching up on stuff. I’d been half paying attention to the Missouri game on my desk radio, when early in the fourth quarter I went out to get a ...

Here’s my theory, in a nutshell. You’re liberal, I’m liberal. You’re conservative, I’m conservative. We’re probably conservative or liberal about different things. My theory, and I’m sticking to it, is that everybody is both conservative and liberal, maybe even in ...

Yes, we know, East Tennessee is ultra-conservative. But Knoxville has also presented the world with quite a few influential liberals over the years. In fact, several nationally controversial “liberal” institutions, from The New York Times to the United Nations, have ...

One thing Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Green Partisans can agree on is that we’ve all survived presidents we don’t like, presidents we thought were dangerous idiots who’ve wasted our money. Maybe that’s the foundation for a new dialogue.

It’s a school. It’s a controversy. It’s a former voting place that lost its status over what critics claim was a politically based charge about handicap access. This will be the first year in many decades that voters haven’t been ...

You never know what you’ll encounter along Gay Street on a Saturday night.

In the third installment of our series on Knoxville neighborhoods, photographer Shawn Poynter walks the streets of Fort Sanders to create a wide-ranging portrait of this colorful and storied community.

Knoxville’s been agonizing about its identity for a good while. Are we a major educational center, a green-tech energy powerhouse? Or “authentic,” the Just-Folks Capital of the USA?

Longtime cable-TV production studio RIVR Media is bringing a new venture to Knoxville: Nest Features, a movie studio. Led by married filmmakers Paul Harrill and Ashley Maynor, Nest aims to produce four feature-length fiction films over the next two years, ...

This is the time of year that armed Knoxvillians started looking hopefully to the sky. Fall was the season of the passenger-pigeon migration, and that meant good eating for everybody.

On Wednesday, the American Planning Association declared Gay Street one of the Top 10 Great Streets in America.

A few weeks ago in this space, I confessed how all this Asheville downtown retail stuff, as wonderful as it all is—and I don’t deny the wonderfulness of any of it—has the undertone of rubbing our noses in something unpleasant.

Jim Long died last weekend, at age 81. As a character in Cormac McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree, he has a place in American literature that may have no precedent.

In recent months, Cruz Contreras—songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and frontman for the Black Lillies—has learned what it’s like to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, record at Sun Studios in Memphis, host a WSM radio show, and see his music videos on ...

If you see a pickup truck driving through your neighborhood, spraying a mist into your yard, you don’t need to count yourself paranoid for wondering what the stuff is, what it’s for, and what it’s likely to do to you.

A few months ago, a filling station on Kingston Pike closed. Filling stations close all the time, and they open all the time. Most of us don’t pay much attention unless we’re on E.

In early December 1932, more than 100 university presidents, deans, athletic directors, and baseball, football, and basketball coaches packed the two big hotels on Gay Street.

Being English, James does say speciality, not specialty. He’s executive director of Ijams Nature Center, and he does have several other interests, but dead birds are right up there

Thursday evenings on the no-smoking floor of Preservation Pub have been right peculiar lately. Live on stage is a sort of four-hour variety show, featuring, last week, film, music videos, music performances, readings, interviews, audience-participation free-verse poetry, and a haiku ...

The non-profit Legacy Parks has been doing important work in preserving Knoxville’s urban wilderness while also opening it to visitors, like at the Seven Islands Wildlife Refuge. But it’s also started a new initiative: to revamp Knoxville as a destination ...

The people at Case Antiques on Sutherland Avenue have interesting jobs, and recently made a surprising discovery. A Chattanooga estate sale turned up a previously unknown painting by Lloyd Branson.

The big news among culinary hipsters in downtown Knoxville is the opening, later this fall, of Tupelo Honey in the historic Kern Building. It seems a worthy tenant of a space that already has a place in Knoxville’s culinary history.

Across the generations, Victorian summers can beckon. The era needed its delights, because it also had horrors.

The couple hundred fans weren’t enough to constitute a Sundown-esque mob scene, but enough to show respect for the quintet on stage, an awfully fine jazz combo, startling to witness even though they’ve been playing free shows on the Square ...

Professor Ebenezer Alexander, 59, erstwhile dean of faculty at the University of North Carolina, had been a quiet fellow who wore a gray mustache and smoked a pipe and was handy with a quotation from a Greek sage.

If it’s a record-breaking summer, you don’t want to miss it. You’re going to want to talk about it someday. Sometimes on a hot day, after spending a morning in an air-conditioned office, I like to experience this famous heat.

Solo is an imprecise term for the work of a small convention of musicians: some from Cassell’s bands the Dismembered Tennesseans (featuring Bright and banjoist Doc Cullis, among others); the Tennessee Sheiks (featuring singer Nancy Brennan Strange and guitarist Don ...

Test your Knoxville knowledge!

On Saturday at noon, as hundreds of people in shorts swarm the stalls of Market Square and defy the glaring sun at the café tables on Gay Street, another, slightly more formal group finds chairs at a long table at ...

The news can make you feel old. Last week’s paper ran big headlines about the reborn Tourism and Sport’s Corp.’s exciting new name, the Knoxville Convention and Visitors Bureau. It seemed a pretty good idea; as much as we all ...

The Faulkners are different. They have been conducting science’s first archaeological excavation of Union Fort Sanders.

The Krystal suddenly boarded up on Cumberland Avenue was no architectural marvel. Its functionalist building had been completely rebuilt, perhaps more than once, in its half-century on the Strip. I won’t argue it was historic. Still, it was a real, ...

Last month in a basement studio in West Knoxville, Lance Owens, the city’s oldest living jazz player—heck, maybe the city’s oldest performing musician, period—laid down tracks for his first album. After 70 years of playing. Jack Neely sits in on ...

He’s the last superintendent of Lakeshore Mental Health Institute on Lyons View, which closes forever on June 30, after operating there, by various other names, since Grover Cleveland’s first term.

By a plan disclosed just this month, as a result of some bureaucratic paperwork, the University of Tennessee intends to demolish three Victorian houses, just like that. The university, whose student body hasn’t grown in decades, wants to awe us ...

Walking to the bus stop, late at night, I meet friendly strangers.

If you look closely, you can find traces of Knoxville’s Civil War forts. Telling what was what requires much scholarship, a good deal of exploration, and some educated guesswork. What we can find in 2012 is a small fraction of ...