South Knoxville's Spy Teck Supply a One-Stop Shop for Sneakiness
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Need a camera hidden inside a teddy bear? Gary Glarner won’t ask why. As Rose Kennedy discovers, Spy Teck Supply has everything you need for a bit of domestic espionage. Full story »
East Knoxville's Cardin’s Drive-In Has Been a Classic For 50 Years
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
At Cardin’s Drive-In on Asheville Highway, Betty Bean finds that some things never change: the peanut butter milkshakes, the carhop service, and the big crowds. Full story »
West Knoxville's Duncan Boat Dock a Fixture of Life on the Lake
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Frank Carlson visits Duncan Boat Dock on Fort Loudoun Lake, where generations of waterfarers come to fill their tanks. Full story »
North Knoxville's Union Stockyards Offer a Slice of Agricultural Life in the 'Burbs
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
If you haven’t heard of Union Stockyards, where you can bid for any cow you want, Jack Neely says you shouldn’t worry. They haven’t heard of you, either. Full story »
North Knoxville's Star Sales a Wholesale Wonderland
Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
Star Sales is on North Central, about a holler and a half past Happy Holler. It’s a plain cinder-block building beneath a big red star, which in this case suggests no influence of Communism. Based on its operating particulars, you’d never suspect this is a place that’s ever particularly merry, or that it sports whimsical artificial Christmas trees, including an over-the-goalposts Go-Vols tree to assuage a mediocre season, as well as an almost life-size statue of Santa himself—or that it may be the best one-stop shop for Christmas shopping on a budget in Knoxville. Full story »
West Knoxville's Mennonite Church Helps Third-World Artisans
Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
Modest, a single story of clean white clapboard, a simple cross over the door, the Concord Mennonite Church stands out like a beacon. It’s way far west Knoxville, on Dutchtown off of 40W, just past billboards for the Katch One Lounge and Krystal. Take a right on exit 374, away from Turkey Creek and towards the Adult Superstore, and a hand-lettered sign points to “Craft Sale.” Held each November in association with the nonprofit Ten Thousand Villages, the sale helps bring handcrafted items made by third-world artisans to North American markets. Full story »
South Knoxville's My Village Provides Day Care for Underprivileged Families
Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
From the outside, My Village looks like a public school, which is a nice way of saying it looks like a prison. Barbed wire sits atop a chain-linked fence that surrounds a red-brick building. White paint chips gather on windowsills under clear-ish glass. Today the cold, mono-grey sky dulls even the brightest colors of two playground sets trapped behind still another fence, and there’s something unsettling about seeing the playthings of children trapped behind so much twisted metal. Full story »
East Knoxville's Broken Wing Meat Processing Aids Second Harvest
Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009
Follow the dimly lit, sinuous Riverside Drive east from downtown, and after a few miles you’ll come upon a bucolic, two-story home with a white picket fence framing the driveway. Behind the house sits a fairly typical garage, complete with a canoe fixed across its facade and fluorescent light emanating from its single window. Across the room, the rhythmic hum of a bandsaw tears through flesh under the surgical, latex-covered hands of Ed Blankenship, the owner and butcher of Broken Wing Meat Processing. Full story »
Burlington’s Spontaneous Trading Post
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009
As online social networking permeates the culture, and archived blogs and tweets and YouTube clips come dangerously close to replacing actual interpersonal experience, let us celebrate anything that brings people together in real contact and conversation. If there is aromatic food on a grill and a truck full of sweet corn and maybe a pyramid of yard-grown tomatoes to share, all the better. Full story »
The Haven of Imani African Community Church
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009
The singers at Imani African Community Church are enthusiastically transcending their space. It’s in the basement of the Middlebrook Ministries building near Sam’s Club on Middlebrook Pike, a lackluster concrete block-tan linoleum room with a stainless steel kitchen at one end. The chairs are folding metal, maybe 20 rows of 10 set up for the service, each with a white-covered book etched in gold letters: Baptist Hymnal. Full story »
The Strange Melting Pot of Green Acres Flea Market
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009
A heavyset, gray-haired older woman—clad on this sunny Saturday in a grandmothery gray sundress and impressively circumferenced summer hat—peruses through knickknacks in the outer lot of the sprawling Green Acres Flea Market in Louisville. She’s here, it seems, just to browse, fussily picking up an item here or there, briefly inspecting it, then inevitably replacing it, a broad smile on her face the whole time. Full story »
A Summer Afternoon in Fountain City Park
Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009
On a bright Saturday, Fountain City Park can seem like a color rendering of Paradise from a Jehovah’s Witness brochure. Children romp and couples hold hands on this micro-topography of small stone foot bridges spanning a clean, shallow creek, with picnic tables and swingsets beneath towering oak trees. Maybe it’s the moist summer, maybe it’s the newer additions, the young willows and magnolias that give it more dimension, but the park seems lusher, greener this year. Full story »
Caged Spectacle
Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008
The great games of the ancient Romans were pageants of grandeur nonpareil. At least as re-imagined by modern-day sword-and-sandals movies, at any rate. These were glorious spectacles staged in cartographically huge, open-air coliseums, towering sandstone walls bathed in sunlight and staring venerably down at a handful of glistening, naked warriors, the mighty champions whose death throes and derring-do would sate the roiling bloodlust of madding Roman throngs. Full story »
Hard Workin’ Man
Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008
When your name is etched on the front of a university building, as Atlanta attorney Joel A. Katz’s is at the University of Tennessee’s Joel A. Katz Law Library, you probably have some latitude about who you can invite to a lecture series at the school. When your name’s also part of the official title of that lecture series, as Katz’s is for the UT College of Law Joel A. Katz SunTrust Lecture Series, you can invite just about whoever you want. Full story »
The Nothing That Didn't
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008
At least it was nice and sunny outside, 65 degrees, with just a touch of a cool fall breeze in the air. It was lunchtime, and Market Square was teeming by Knoxville standards—packs of people out for a midday break from work, eating complicated foodstuffs from sort-of-fancy restaurants on the patios, sitting on the park benches, or just taking a walk through the city’s renovated historic meeting place. Everyone was looking and feeling very young, urbane, and sophisticated. Full story »