Knoxville Lost and Found

Well, today's post shall be short and sweet. I just received approval from the Knox County Public Library/McClung collection to utilize their photos for this blog. Now I can get this bird off the ground. If you are at all concerned about the fate of 710 and 712 Walnut Street, I urge you to visit Knoxville Urban Guy over at Stuck Inside of Knoxville (with the urban blues again). He has the links to all of the relevant articles.  http://stuckinsideofknoxville.blogspot.com/2011/11/are-we-still-tearing-down-knoxville-st.html Next time I hope to hit you with my first content heavy post, but we'll have to see how events play out tomorrow at the CBID meeting tomorrow. Here's hoping for a good outcome for Knoxville's history and future!

       The headline came across the webpage for our local, alternative, news weekly like something from two decades ago. It was written by renowned, local author/historian Jack Neely. It made me feel like the case was already well known by the greater Knoxville community: "The Case for Saving Two Downtown Buildings." I'm sorry, what? Did I accidentally jump into my DeLorean and travel back to 1992 (astute readers will remember this as the year the Mann Funeral Home was destroyed)? How in the world could this headline exist on October 18, 2011? It was as if no historic buildings had been repurposed, as if no one lived in the Holston, as if the fundamental values of reusing and maintaining the structures of our past had never been embraced. It was like Knox Heritage never existed and Mary Temple Boyce was still fighting to keep Blount Mansion from becoming a pile of rubble. I could not believe my eyes, yet here we were again. Another entity, one with a history of tearing do