Jack Neely

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 ...

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.