Marble Alley Proposal

Buzz Goss's ambitious project known as Marble Alley, outlined in the News Sentinel today, promises to be a major piece of the downtown puzzle, and an answer to several very old questions. The mixed-use project, mostly of new construction, would combine residences, retail space, and perhaps office space in a big empty gap downtown that we've been arguing about for more than a decade. 

Goss, a preservationist architect and developer who's been involved in several successful downtown projects over the last 20 years, many of them in partnership with David Dewhirst, proposes to redevelop the vast asphalt wasteland between the State Street Parking Garage and the older buildings along Summit Hill. Whether it happens or not remains to be seen--it will require many millions in financing, and some unusual cooperation with Knox County government, which owns the property--but it's already more promising for downtown Knoxville than any previous proposal was. 

All the previous proposals for the site--the justice center, the planetarium, the transit center, and before all that, the baseball stadium--had some positive qualities. But they all appraised the site for its size, with little regard for the development patterns of the city around it, for its capacity to wedge in somebody's pet project into it. Goss's plan starts with the site and seeks ways to connect the rest of the city. As it happens, it's roughly between Market Square and the Old City. 

Downtown has some fairly weird problems. The whole thing is barely half a square mile. Many cities have coherent neighborhoods which are bigger than downtown Knoxville. But because of the hilly topography and short-sighted planning of highway projects like Summit Hill Drive, Knoxville's two main evening attractions--the tiny Old City and tiny Market Square--seem more than merely three blocks from each other. When patrons want to go from one to the other--from La Costa to the Crown and Goose, for example--they often drive a car. They may know walking is theoretically possible, but it requires walking down a couple of blocks of big furniture stores and offices closed in the evenings, a walk dull by downtown standards, and after hours, potentially scary to some, just because they're not likely to have much company on that sidewalk. 

If Goss's plan works out, Marble Alley would lead pedestrians from Gay Street through an arcade (in some ways maybe evoking the old Union Terminal bus-station arcade that was there 50 years ago), down steps, and into a pedestrian plaza, a little town within the city. From there, getting to the Old City is just a matter of crossing Summit Hill with the light, at an intersection. 

It may be too much to hope that Goss's plan will end the Old City versus Market Square seesaw of city favor, boom, bust, and resentment, but if it works, has the potential to connect it all and make it all one big busy thing. 

Newcomers might be forgiven for assuming there was never anything there. State Street's vacancy sometimes convinces people that downtown practically ended at Gay Street. But there used to be buildings covering most of the site. Some of them were in the process of being redeveloped when they acquired by eminent domain and demolished for public projects that never happened. Much of the property has been devoted to an underused surface parking lot since.

Goss proposes some grand "Cal Johnson Steps" as part of the project, an homage to the African American entrepreneur, raised to be a slave, who's a rare example of success in the annals of American capitalism, an owner of saloons and racetracks, and finally a philanthropist. He lived, as a very wealthy man, in a nice house on the site Goss is proposing to redevelop. (The house was razed more than 70 years ago.)

The building on State Street that still bears his name, one of the last historic buildings on this once-busy street, is an 1890s clothing factory owned by Johnson, and the last building associated with one of Knoxville's most surprising developers. It's now apparently neglected, used only as a warehouse. It's not part of the project, but we hope adjacent development will make it more likely that the owner will find it profitable to fix it up or sell it. 

Marble Alley's also a historic name relevant to the project, a lane almost indistinguishable now for lack of the buildings that once framed it. He has an appreciation for historic names, and historic ways of development; State Street was once a mixed-use place, where people lived and worked and went out on the town.