Braden's, RIP

The closing of Braden's, the biggest furniture company in the downtown area, is something to mourn. If you've never been there, take this last chance. As an inheritor of several generations' worth of family furniture from centuries past, I'v had few opportunities to shop for actual new furniture. But walking through Braden's a couple of years ago, looking for a proper chair, was a revelation. The place was huge, and artfully arranged in interior scenes; it made me think of a Hollywood sound stage where you could shoot 100 different movies simultaneously. An Agatha Christie mystery there, a Desperate Housewives episode there, a re-enactment of the Allied conference at Potsdam there. It's a real furniture gallery. Even for schoes like me who know nothing about interior decorating, it's a fun place just to walk through.

Explaining the closing, the owner said something about his customers having moved farther and farther west. Maybe so, but the Turkey Creek area is still much lower in population density than areas nearer to town, and always will be. West Knox is known for affluence, but there are statistically more affluent people living within five miles of this old Braden's than there have ever been. Even if you don't count the several hundred very affluent sorts who've moved downtown proper in the last few years, Fourth and Gill and Old North are much more populated and more affluent than they were 20 years ago, and even Sequoyah Hills has grown some. It's not surprising that some newer upscale furniture places, like Bliss Home on Market Square, have thrived. Granted, it's tiny compared to Braden's.

I don't doubt, though, that the Turkey Creek store, which I've never visited, has more high-volume retail potential than this old site. The old Braden's site has a particular problem, in a very awkward location. It's not downtown exactly, nor on a strip mall visible and easily accessible from a high-traffic road. It's on the fringe of Mechanicsville, kind of between the hard-to-find Middle Earth of the Valarium and the Western Avenue Viaduct, which of course has nothing actually on it. And many Knoxvillians never drive on Western Avenue at all, therefore never see Braden's.

You have to figure out how to get to Braden's, and it may take more than one pass. Even though I've been to Braden's a couple of times, as I write this I'm not sure I could tell a stranger how to get there. At some point you can see there's a Braden's over there somewhere. And to my knowledge, no one but me has ever walked from downtown to Braden's.

Americans are used to driving a little faster than we used to, and we need things to be big and obvious. Suburbanites in particular have gotten used to jetliner-style driving, with minimal sharp turns, and we tend to think in terms of big parking lots and obvious buildings fronts, especially for the most practical shopping trips. That retail phenomenon may count double for furniture, which requires big trucks for deliveries. In the mid-20th century, people used to walk off a Gay Street sidewalk to buy furniture, confident the store would be able to deliver it. These days, often, people like the idea of picking things up themselves, or at least picture how the furniture company truck is going to handle it, and that's probably easier to contemplate on a strip mall.

If you want to support something different, you can, but it takes some effort.

Swapping an unusually interesting furniture gallery for another unspecified "warehouse" won't do downtown any favors, but it might require a depressive personality to see it as a symptom.