Down on the 800 block of Gay Street it’s generally a lot quieter than a couple of blocks farther north. With the quiet end of a federal building on one side, and a towering office tower (still the tallest building in East Tennessee) on the other, it’s up to the Bijou Theatre and the Bistro next door to thoroughly liven up the place, particularly in the evening.
Yet, this section of Gay was once right in the heart of the old rough-and tumble frontier town, right around the corner from the courthouse. A town that became more sophisticated with the march of time. There are still a few echoes of past lives here if you know where to look.
Completed around 1817, the Lamar House is the old street-facing part of the Bijou Theatre, including its lobby and offices as well as the Bistro. It’s one of downtown’s oldest existing buildings. The theatre, added as part of an extension on the back, opened much later in 1909.
The caption of one classic archival photograph describes the “Presentation of [the] banner to the McKinney Guards” in front of the Lamar House on June 10, 1876.
That day, almost 150 years ago, the McKinney Guards (aka McKinney Rifles) were accompanied to a flag presentation by two other military groups: Dickinson’s Light Guard and the O’Conner Zouaves. In the wake of the end of the Civil War, citizen soldiery was popular, evidenced by an abundance of public military parades, flag demonstrations, and grand balls. Where better to hold them than on Gay Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, and at one of its grandest buildings, the Lamar House.
Those military regiments were named after prominent Knoxville men, including Col. Perez Dickinson, a wealthy Massachusetts-raised merchant, banker, and cousin of poet Dickinson; Maj. Thomas O’Conner, head of the Mechanics Bank, a couple of blocks up on Gay Street; and Sam McKinney, an editor and co-owner of the Knoxville Daily Tribune. That same newspaper described the scene on Gay Street:
The stand was erected in front of the Lamar House, and was tastefully decorated with the national bunting, entwined with evergreen. Soon after, Messrs. Dickinson, McKinney, and the Judges of the Supreme Court arrived in carriages and took seats on the platform.
“The ladies thronged the windows and balconies of the Lamar House while the streets were crowded with spectators, always drawn out by a military display.”
Following the ceremony, flags of all three regiments were hung in the Lamar Room ballroom, but a few days later, somebody slashed the Zouaves’ flag. Outrage ensued but the culprit was never caught. It seems there’s never a dull moment in any era.
(By the way, that name “Zouaves” refers to a French light infantry regiment with billowing pantaloons as part of their uniform, named after a French tribe in Algeria. No photos exist of them here, but they may have made a curious sight.)
For some time this 1876 photograph was misidentified as the day when U.S. President Rutherford Hayes visited Knoxville, but he came a year later. After a brief stop at the Lamar House, Hayes, accompanied by a group of local dignitaries, drove out in open carriages to Perez Dickinson’s Island Home working farm in South Knoxville (where the Tennessee School for the Deaf is today). But it must have taken some effort to first get the presidential party across the river when there was no bridge. Ferrymen must have been eager to earn their business that day.
Why was there no bridge across the river here in 1876? The Union army bridge, built in 1864, lasted only three years at the most. A torrential downpour, over the best part of a week in 1867, washed away the bridge and it would be another six years before a replacement could be completed. In the spring of 1875, a tornado tore the second bridge to pieces so Hayes could not have been driven over a bridge. There simply were no other bridges here.
Luckily for us, today we have other bridge options even when one bridge goes down.
Looking still deeper into it, this photograph also offers a nice snapshot of this block, the western side anyway, just two blocks from the river.
In the 1850s, on this block, you could buy a cigar or a watch or loaf of bread, get your hair cut, get your shoes or boots mended, or even step up to the bar at the Phoenix Saloon. And two doors down from the Lamar House, you could find photographer T.M. Smiley’s “Daguerrean Rooms.” A decade later he updated the name to Smiley’s Premium Photographic Gallery. If that sounds rather impressive for the times, descriptions of his business, courtesy of Smiley’s own ads in 1866, suggest that it very much was a fascinating place to step into. If you had money to spend, and most of course didn’t, you could take your pick from the photographic options of the day (Ambrotypes and Daguerreotypes, Stereoscopic Groups), and if you felt particularly flush (or fancied getting into debt) you might plumb for a large photograph, even up to life size, colored in oil for $20-$30—somewhere in the range of $775-$1,155 today.
Smiley wasn’t around to take the McKinney Guards’ photograph, though. Born in Vermont, he began studying medicine, but ill health forced a move to a warmer climate where he took up photography and he ended up in Knoxville for the last 20 years of his life. He died in 1866 at the age of 62. Although there is a small clutch of his photographic portraits, only two of Smiley’s landscapes exist.
A perhaps even more remarkable photograph is a four-part panorama from 1865, later annotated with numbers and descriptions courtesy of one John S. Van Gilder (likely the son of the former Knoxville mayor of the same name). The photograph, taken by Smiley’s competitor up the street, T.M. Schleier, captures the town, including this block, from a far different perspective—across the river—around the end of the Civil War.
The Lamar House is identified by number 47. All of the other buildings, except Blount Mansion, are all gone. But it’s fascinating to see the old Courthouse (across Main Street from the one today), and to the north, little has been built beyond First Presbyterian church, itself later rebuilt.
There’s no bridge on this photo because the old military bridge never connected to Gay Street—it basically aligned with State Street, and is almost hidden in the trees on panoramic panel #4. You can view all four sections on the McClung Historical Collection here.
While Knoxvillians were waiting for a new bridge, something very special was built across the street from the Lamar House in 1872: Staub’s Opera House.
Owned and operated by Peter Staub, a Swiss immigrant who later became a two-time mayor, his new venue was described when it opened as a “beautiful temple of art.” A genuine wonder of the Victorian era, Staub’s hosted concerts, plays, operas, and lectures. It could comfortably seat 1,400 people. Many more would often stand at the back.
Remarkably, in the 1880s, Staub’s began a series of music festivals that featured events at other venues across town, in some ways appearing in our modern rearview mirror like our own Big Ears Festival. The theatre thrived for decades until it was renamed the Lyric in the 1920s. It was torn down in 1956 to make way for a construction project that failed to materialize.
Stand on the southeast corner of Gay and Cumberland today and you’ll notice a historic plaque about Staub’s on the side of the Plaza Tower (a 1978 building that a story all to its self), just a few steps away one of the Knoxville History Project’s Downtown Art Wraps (graphically wrapped traffic boxes) depicting a brightly colored painting of the opera house, circa 1897, painted by Russell Briscoe in 1974, who remembered it.
I’ve noticed that this art wrap looks particularly fetching from inside the Bistro—it’s a cool view watching a jazz band there from a table near the bar with the miniature version of Staub’s visible through the window on the sidewalk across the street. (Full disclosure, I have a fondness for these art wraps. I actually coordinate them for KHP, and we’ve actually installed 40 of them throughout the CBID.)
To wrap up, as it were, here’s a view looking north on Gay Street. It captures a moment in time between the opening of a new hotel, just south of Staub’s, the Colonial Hotel in 1908 (renovated out of a streetcar terminus) and the opening of the Bijou Theatre the following spring. With a choice of two theatres and two hotels (the Cumberland Hotel was another, just beyond the Bijou), I bet a few times a week this spot was quite a bustling spot of an evening.
Please note: Some of these photographs have been cropped to show detail.
