(Today’s article is by guest writer Paul James of the Knoxville History Project.)
Walk along Walnut Avenue between Summit Hill Drive and Union Avenue today and you’ll find that it’s a relatively unremarkable spot compared to Market Square, just a few yards away. In fact, the only items of note are the new colorful mural entitled “Better Together” on the Langley Building and the new fencing around the parking lot behind the Daylight Building, which houses the likes of Union Ave Books, Mahlo’s Coffee, and J.C. Holdway. There’s going to be a new hotel going up in that slender spot behind that fence so Walnut is soon going to become a little livelier.
About where that fence is now was once the home of one of the city’s respected couples: Peter and Henrietta Kern. It was here on Walnut Street that they lived within spitting distance of the hustle and bustle of their retail emporium on the southwest corner of Market and Union. Henrietta was a self-professed homebody, so one can imagine a cozy family life here on this spot.
As German immigrants, the Kerns came here separately. Both moved to the U.S. to escape the political chaos in Europe of the late 1840s. The couple married here in 1864 during the Civil War, and he became a successful baker. Like many (including me, a Brit, who came here in 1999 and didn’t expect to like it), they planned to stay a short time in Knoxville but ultimately decided to stay. What they also brought with them was a fondness for sharing their German Christmas traditions. Henrietta Kern died in her house on Walnut just one week before her favorite holiday in 1900.
We still see the name Kern around downtown in the Kern Building that houses Tupelo Honey and the Oliver Hotel, and in the back, accessible through alley, the Peter Kern Library, a pseudo-secret speakeasy. The recently opened Kern’s Bakery food hall on Chapman Highway also carries their family name, the location of a later Kern’s bakery.
One sound you would have heard regularly during the late 19th century on Walnut was the sound of children. The Kern’s had 11 of their own, and their direct neighbor to the south would have been the old Knoxville Girls High School, built there in 1886, right on the corner of Union Avenue.
With most people then living in or around downtown, girls (later boys studied there too) would have traipsed up and down past the Kern residence all week long.
Hollywood director Clarence Brown, who grew up in North Knoxville, fondly remembered his time at the school he attended as it transitioned into Knoxville High School. The old building informed a few scenes in his motion picture, “Ah, Wilderness,” shot in 1935.
The current Daylight Building was built on that corner in the 1920s, then unusual for its many windows and skylights.
You can see a fascinating glimpse of life on the street during the very same year that Brown completed his movie. Right about where the Kern’s home once stood you can see two men standing outside the George Loo Hand Laundry. One of them might be looking into the palm of his hand for the right change to pay for his laundry ticket. After all, it cost 9 ½ cents back then at Loo’s to get a clean shirt.
Born in San Francisco, George Loo, somehow ended up in Knoxville and during the 1920s ran one or two laundry shops on Western Avenue and Market Street, advertising his “thrift laundry,” and claiming that all clothes must be “carefully laundered by hand.” At the time, he was one of about three dozen people of Chinese extraction living in Knoxville in the 1930s. He and his family lived above his laundry when it was around the corner from here on Western Avenue (and later above another laundry on Market Street) and owned at least one rather curious dog.
Tuny, a “bob-tail brown Fox Terrier,” often wandered up and down these streets, often following a local policeman, an Officer Jones, accompanying him all day on his daily beat. After Jones switched districts, Loo’s pooch disappeared too, only to show up a few days later at the police headquarters on Market Square, sniffing everyone’s feet until he finally became reunited with his favorite patrolman. On hearing about the dog’s antics, Loo quipped, “Tuny don’t care who he likes,” so presumably the dog went home as well.
Not too much else is known about George Loo. He was here until he sold up in 1958 and then may have left town.
Next to Loo’s Laundry in the photo appears to be a bar of some kind. In the photo it’s offering Old South Beer, a short-lived ale brewed by the Southwestern Brewing Company, only in the 1930s.
Then next to that is Greenlee’s bicycle shop on the corner of Walnut and Western. Since about 1899, Greenlee’s was a downtown fixture. It first started out on Gay Street before moving to Walnut and then later relocated again out on Broadway in North Knoxville. In fact, after more than a century in business, it stopped selling and repairing bikes a couple of years ago (it still services lawn mowers, if you have the need).
Back in the 1930s and ‘40s, with a Western Union branch just around the corner on Union Avenue, with its team of two-wheeled messenger boys almost constantly cycling around town, Greenlee’s was a lively spot.
According to the late Conrad Majors (the last owner), Greenlee’s proved to be quite a popular lunchtime gathering spot. He claimed that his grandparents, who ran the shop, gave away cookies and cakes, which attracted some notable performers from the WNOX studio on the 100 block of Gay Street, who would walk the few blocks to hang out over lunch. The talented guitarist, and later influential Nashville producer, Chet Atkins, was one low-key celebrity.
Travelling circuses including Barnum and Bailey’s liked that corner to advertise incoming shows and regularly gave Conrad’s grandparents’ free tickets for hanging large promotional posters in their upstairs windows. Young Conrad remembered going there regularly, including one time when he was able to see the legendary gorilla Gargantua, billed by Barnum & Bailey sensationally as “The World’s Most Terrifying Living Creature” due to its “menacing expression” as a result of a drunken sailor throwing acid on its face when it was young.
So, all in all, even a quiet stretch of road has a few stories to tell. I hope the new hotel and its guests breathe some new life into this quiet section of Walnut.
You can read more about Greenlee’s and Conrad Major’s explorations around downtown as a young boy in an oral history conversation he had with this author in 2019 at https://knoxvillehistoryproject.org/conrad-majors-greenlees-bicycles-oral-history-conversation/. For more on the shop and Conrad, check out this InsideofKnoxville article from 2014.