It’s good to be back in Knoxville.
Don’t get me wrong – it was good to get away. I spent nearly three months in New York City this summer, exploring the city of insomnia by subway. The air smelled like hope and exhaust, and everyone dressed as if today’s appearance mattered. You could get a gyro and a doughnut from an Indian guy down the block; in the big city, diversity is as vast as inflation, and beers cost eight bucks apiece. As an individual, I became one of many separate and autonomous cells in a much larger organism, passing other cells of life on streets built like veins across the bloody, pulsing, beating heart of Manhattan. I was nobody at all, just like everybody else.
Back in the South, in the jungle humidity of August in Appalachia, the heartbeat is a bit more irregular. The beers are cheaper, the streets pulse with less frenetic energy. Chacos are normal. People you don’t know smile when you pass, because in the South people still see people as people. There are less strangers in a city with 182,000 people than in a city with 8.4 million.
In 1980, a little rag from New York known as The Wall Street Journal reported that Knoxville was a “scruffy little city on the Tennessee River.” Almost 35 years later, this town has transformed in many ways, but the scruff remains in the people who choose to call it home. The face of Knoxville is scruffy – and we like it that way.
Around campus, of course, things are looking freshly shaved, primarily due to an administration working efficiently to keep the face of the university competitive. In a chat with The Daily Beacon, Vice Chancellor for Communications Margie Nichols said, “Everything we do is about ‘will this get us to the Top 25,'” a list where scruffy doesn’t quite cut it.
Look around and remember this place just three months ago. Strong Hall was pretty scruffy – I’ve heard it’s namesake, Sophronia, haunted its windows – but the BIG ORANGE BIG IDEAS razed that building this summer, now constructing a new Strong Hall full of shiny new laboratories. The old Stokely Athletic Center was pretty scruffy, but the BIG ORANGE BIG IDEAS demolished it and its neighbor, Gibbs Hall, to make way for a much needed parking garage alongside a residential facility with a dining location and 729 new single occupancy rooms. Speaking of occupancy, have you seen the newly opened Fred D. Brown Jr. Residence Hall? Not exactly stubble.
But The Wall Street Journal wasn’t calling UT-Knoxville scruffy. Assigned a story on the 1982 World’s Fair, The Journal’s reporter, Susan Harrigan, sought to describe Knoxville alone; the city beyond and before BIG ORANGE BIG IDEAS, the mountain community straddling railroads, rivers and real moonshine stills. After more than 30 years, her disparaging remarks have been claimed by her intended victim, and “Keep Knoxville Scruffy” is a bumper sticker. Scruffy City Hall is a bar. There’s no Top 25 plan for this town, no need to shave.
The sense of unfulfilled promise, the suggestion of casual neglect in a five o’clock shadow – is that what makes scruff so sexy and Knoxville so mysteriously fun? I met two Australians on a cross-continental American summer this weekend. Their trip began in Las Vegas and passed through cities such as Austin, New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville, but they both noted Knoxville as a hidden gem on the route – one of their favorite stops.
This column is dedicated to the scruffy little city on the Tennessee River, and more directly, the people who feed (and are fed by) it. Old City and Happy Holler and Fourth and Gill and South Knoxville and North Knoxville and a crazy little road called Sutherland Avenue; Ijams and the Bijou Theatre and First Fridays and last calls at Tin Roof. Hundreds of people wander around North Broadway, a little different than the thousands that wander past Hodges Library on any given Tuesday morning. This town is bigger than we realize, smaller than it could’ve been and deeper than most students are willing to dig.
I’m looking for the stories in the scruff.
R.J. Vogt is a senior in College Scholars. Last year, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beacon, but this year he just shows up occasionally and drinks our coffee. He can be reached at [email protected], but he doesn’t really matter anymore, so he’d prefer you don’t contact him unless you have a lead on an interesting story around Knoxville. He also tweets approximately once per week at @rjvogt31.
