Jack Neely

Some major historical figures seem so elusive they don’t quite seem real, almost as if they lived in a slightly different dimension that only occasionally intersected with ours. Take Lloyd Branson. Maybe Knoxville’s first professional artist, he’s sort of famous.

In our agony about raising money for Knox County schools, we should take just a moment to acknowledge that among urban counties with populations of over 400,000, Knox County is still one of the nation’s basement bargains. I own a ...

The city’s old “Demolition by Neglect” ordinance finally has a mechanism by which it might make a difference: a $100,000 enforcement budget. Jack Neely reports.

Last week, the charitable Aslan Foundation purchased one of Knoxville’s most unusual historic houses. Westwood on Kingston Pike went for $570,000. Aslan is a fairly new foundation instrumental in purchasing wilderness properties to be included in the Legacy Parks project ...

Knoxville’s generally proud of its restaurants, but they rarely get much attention outside the metro area. Well-traveled newcomers I’ve met are often disdainful, claiming they find only one or two that are passably interesting. I should say here, and quickly, ...

Surely one of the biggest surprises of first encountering Knoxville is that this peculiar place, 400 miles from the nearest seashore, and 1,600 miles upstream from any briny water, offers an abundance of marinas. Within an hour’s drive of Knoxville ...

This Saturday, on Market Square, Knox Heritage launches its Historic Downtown Knoxville Walking Tour. It’s a handsome piece of work, a long, pocket-sized booklet with photographs. It’s the closest realization of an amenity I had hopes would be in place ...

In the second installment of our series on Knoxville neighborhoods, photographer Shawn Poynter walks the streets of Vestal to create a wide-ranging portrait of this unique community.

I was there nearly every day of the 1982 World’s Fair. I lived a block and a half away from the western gate, and I worked there, mostly in crowd control. Assignments to monitor unruly lines put me in nearly ...

Suddenly there’s a third, and a fourth, bar on the once-forlorn 400 block of Gay. Things are looking up for that problematic block; 20 years ago it seemed too big and woebegone to revive. The bad news is that the ...

East Tennessee Art & Artists is not a big exhibit, but you can easily kill an hour or so, as I did, just puzzling over it.

This Saturday morning, the Tennessee Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission will unveil a Civil War Trail Marker at Admiral Farragut Park on Northshore Drive. It will honor the renowned historical figure Adm. David Farragut of “Damn the torpedoes!” fame—a figure who’s ...

The Rossini Festival is next weekend, 10 years old now. In my experience with my home town and its festivals, Knoxville Opera’s annual street fair was the first one that clicked on all cylinders: interesting food, good drink, diverse music, ...

On Central Street, at the very foot of Cumberland Avenue, is a plain white cinder-block church. A wooden sign calls it the Romanian Church. Thanks to the scarcity of intervening buildings, you can see it from Gay Street. The building’s ...

Jayne Morgan says she sees a big space between the University of Tennessee’s Clarence Brown company, a nationally recognized professional company with a big budget, and community theater, which is often performed on a volunteer basis. “There are very few ...

Many folks middle age and beyond remember that before the building at Gay and Union was Arby’s, it was Spence Shoes. In fact it was a shoe store, on the ground floor, for more than 40 years, with a tailor, ...

The dozen or so regular diners at Market Square’s Bella Luna got a bit more than they expected Monday night when they went out for Italian right after the big storm. At one crowded table up front, piano master Donald ...

Sundown in the City has been a dilemma on Market Square, but it wouldn’t be even roughly the same thing anywhere else.

John Gunther’s remark in his 1947 best-seller alleging that Knoxville was the ugliest city in America prompted a whole new Dogwood Arts Festival—and a civic insecurity complex. But Knoxville has enjoyed, or endured, several distinct spells of good and bad ...

Walking into the door was like changing channels. Inside that warm room of dark, ancient brick was a friendly, casual scene from one of those dreams where you suddenly see people you knew a long time ago: a dozen people ...

I watched the returns carefully, just because I’m curious about historical resonance. Since the Civil War, East Tennessee has voted differently from the rest of the state. Even within Tennessee’s newfound red-state status are echoes of old divisions.

“Greater Knoxville: Community Research 2012” is the latest attempt by the Cornerstone Foundation, one of Knoxville’s major philanthropic organizations, to make some sense of this perpetually puzzling place. Since the 1990s, Cornerstone has conducted careful studies of metropolitan Knoxville’s wants ...

Everyone’s list of what makes our hometown interesting is different. But when I heard that some folks’ lists of Knoxville’s assets have nothing much on them, I wondered if maybe they’d be interested in borrowing mine.

Jack Neely fills us in on a London crime scene, Knoxville Gray, our almost-superlative statue, and a chronic building-naming dilemma.

While we weren’t looking, Tennessee does seem to have become dyed in the wool as a “red state,” a state that votes Republican in presidential races every four years. For most of its history, Tennessee was never subjected to the ...

East Tennessee PBS confirms that public television’s national Music Voyager travel series episodes about Tennessee, which is apparently already running in some parts of the country, will air here on Thursdays in April at 8:30 p.m.

If the Zouave Grand Military Ball at Spiro’s Hall wasn’t the social event of the season, it was the liveliest thing afoot on the evening of Washington’s Birthday.

A PBS show partly about Knoxville music may air in several national markets weeks before we get to see it here.

For years, I told people I’d been inside a Walmart only once in my life, offering my vivid memory of that huge place with the friendly greeters and an unbelievable amount of well-organized stuff. It was on Chapman Highway, on ...

Last year, the University of Tennessee chose not to level Clarence Brown Theatre, as planned. Still in the UT bulldozer’s long-range sights is the Carousel Theatre, which sits separately, like Clarence Brown’s big garden shed.

Central Street is Knoxville’s defining axis. All addresses in the county from here to Farragut are numbered from it. Few blocks suggest its role as the spine of a metropolitan county of more than 400,000 people. It seems altogether too ...

Knoxville is the birthplace of Atlantic Records' first big star, who was one of the founders of rock ’n’ roll. Granville McGhee’s name is not as recognizable as that of Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley or Howlin’ Wolf—but as Stick ...

Rocky Wynder’s long career linked the era of tent vaudeville and black speakeasies to a time of upscale-restaurant jazz nights in a reborn downtown. He began his career before rock ’n’ roll, and dabbled with R&B, but always favored jazz, ...

I’ve been enjoying Bill Landry’s book, Appalachian Tales & Heartland Adventures. It chronicles the back story of the long-running WBIR series of anecdotal stories about backwoods crafts, sports, cuisine. I have only one complaint about the book. Landry spells possum ...

Folks have been asking me what I think of Gloria Ray, and especially whether she earns her annual compensation, which is slightly larger than that of the president of the United States.

You can’t help but notice that the Bearden area has gotten a little flatter in recent months. Near Kroger and Starbucks, an old motel building vanished. Its name, Biltmore Court, has an odd connection to some painted words barely visible ...

The announcement that a major development involving the Florida-based Publix grocery chain and international retail Godzilla Walmart would be lumbering toward central Knoxville was startling news in itself. But this 211,000-square-foot development is proposed for the foot of Cumberland Avenue, ...

In history, no city’s judged just by how amused and trendy and well-fed its citizens are. If people of the future are at all interested in learning about the Knoxville of 2012, well, it probably won’t be for the tonnage ...

Hudson K may intimidate the weak. It’s not just that Christina Horn is an especially talented vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. Standing at her keyboards, she wields her ice-blonde persona like a stiletto, as if maybe she’d kill you if doing ...

Knoxville is starting the new year with a new mayor, so we thought we’d ask Madeline Rogero what she has planned for the first year of her administration. Jack Neely chats with her about south-side development, city-county consolidation, and—shhhh!—Agenda 21.

Here are Mayor Rogero’s off-the-cuff thoughts on some perennial questions facing Knoxville.

For our first issue of the year, we asked a random sampling of Knoxville personalities a timely question: Do you have any predictions for Knoxville in 2012?

Everything sounds better if you rhyme it.

Christmas’ days of bloody mayhem, of drunken riots and fiery explosions and destructive pranks, were mostly behind it. The Knoxville Christmas was settling down a little. Since the closing of the saloons four years ago, Christmas had become almost eerily ...

Eulogies are easier to write when they’re about people you’ve met only once or twice. A limited perspective focuses the mind, challenges you to find out what you can discern from that glimpse. With someone you’ve seen and talked to ...

Chances are only a few Knoxvillians were even awake the next morning when 92 miners reported for work before dawn to begin working with picks and mules at the Knoxville Iron Company’s Cross Mountain Mine, about 30 miles northwest of ...

Maybe you’ve never heard of Johnson University. Until early this year, it went by the name Johnson Bible College. Even by that name, it’s a mystery to most Knoxvillians, though it’s been right here for the last 118 years. It’s ...

Some sort of faith-based education is available in every part of the country, but something makes Johnson University distinctive: Its campus.

Johnson University exists in a border territory between old mainline churches, which require ministers to acquire graduate degrees from seminaries, and some modern evangelical churches that don’t require much formal education at all.

The capacity crowd that turned out for the TEDx lecture night at the Square Room a couple of weeks ago was a small revelation to me. The idea that people would buy tickets to hear ideas is not a new ...