We hope you enjoy this monthly sampler from Knoxville History Project’s "Knoxville Shoebox" collection. We are always on the lookout for old family and personal pictures--especially when there’s something distinctly Knoxvillian about them. Our goal is to help fill in the many gaps in the photographic record of our city’s past.
If you have interesting old photographs of your own, from any era, we’d love to hear from you. You show us the photograph, we copy it and give the original back to you. We preserve and archive the image and make it available for researchers of the future, always crediting your contribution. Sharing is easy—and we’ll do our best to make your images immortal!
Please contact Paul James at the Knoxville History Project at (865) 337-7723 or paul@knoxhistoryproject.org. Learn more at knoxvillehistoryproject.org/knoxville-shoebox/
Gay Street at W. Church, 1950s
Two clocks register 5:05 in the afternoon looking south on Gay Street towards W. Church Avenue one damp day around 1950. At the intersection on the left, the Blue Circle Café was an affordable eating place. The building still stands today, currently vacant after many years as a florist shop. On this side of W. Church, the Knoxville Utility Board has built the curved steel corner of its streamlined modernist building (it stood there only for about 13 years, until an even more modernist facelift in the ‘60s; it’s now part of the skeleton of the re-modernized Tombras Group building). Across Gay Street, long-standing Knoxville florist Baum’s is in the old Mercantile building, torn down decades ago. The Andrew Johnson Hotel, in the background, was still the tallest building in East Tennessee, with a restaurant and ballroom and hundreds of guests daily. Shared by Martha Jane McDowell.
YMCA on Commerce Avenue
The ornate YMCA building stands on the corner of State Street and Commerce Avenue in this early 1900s postcard. Built in 1889 as the Palace Hotel, it originally featured 63 bedrooms and boasted a sumptuous “bridal chamber” with frescoed ceilings, chandeliers, and relatively new inventions: an elevator and electric lights. It was a hotel for 14 years before the YMCA bought it in 1903, using it as its main facility until the Y’s current building at Clinch and Locust was built in 1929. With a simplified architectural style that removed the cupola, the building later served as office space and inexpensive apartments, its original purpose forgotten by most. It was torn down in 1975 after suffering major damage in a fatal fire. Shared by Alec Riedl.
Fire Fighters Memorial
The nomadic Knoxville Firefighters Memorial, erected in 1905, originally stood on Main Street outside the Knox County Courthouse before moving to Emory Park, adjacent to Fire Station No. 3. After that firehall was closed in the 1940s, the memorial moved to a spot in front of City Hall at the intersection of Western and Henley Street (now Lincoln Memorial University’s law school). When it went on display there, a new electric lantern was fabricated and added to the fireman’s right hand. The statue now stands in front of the Fire Department on Summit Hill Drive. Shared by Cindy and Mark Proteau.
Market Square, ca. 1950
This is a rare color view of the northeastern corner of Market Square in the 1940s. Bowers Army Surplus was based at 36 Market Square on the northeastern corner at Wall Avenue. Before Bowers, the four-story building housed several department stores, including S.H. George’s and Woods and Taylor. One of the building's entrances still has the mosaic tile on the floor from the latter. The building in dark shadow to the right is the north end of the old City Hall, which was torn down with the attached market house in 1960. Shared by the Barbara W. Bernstein Archives of the Jewish Community of Knoxville and East Tennessee.
The Knoxville History Project is an educational nonprofit with a mission to research, preserve and promote the history and culture of Knoxville. KHP gives talks and presentations (in-person and on Zoom), creates books, and engages the public online through stories, oral history conversations, driving tours and much more.
Please help us connect more Knoxvillians and visitors to the history of the city by making a donation to support the work of the Knoxville History Project at knoxvillehistoryproject.org/khp-donations/