Helpful Reflection

I love mirrors and reflections. This one made me laugh because it looked so incongruous stuck right up next to this tree. The image reflected is the university's new parking garage in the Fort Sanders neighborhood. The mirror is supposed to help you see oncoming traffic coming down the hill.

Emergency Light

The Fort Sanders neighborhood, with its proximity to the University of Tennessee, has become a densely populated student enclave. But with that has come crime that preys on people who are perhaps less experienced with life.

This blue light emergency box on 17th Street near Laurel Avenue can be used to call a ride or report a crime. There are also some CCTV cameras at the top of the hill.

I'm glad it's available. I used to park in that lot on the left when I attended night classes at UT, and I can tell you from experience that it was a very creepy walk late at night.

Layers

Here's a close up of the remains of a turret on the Pickle Mansion in the Fort Sanders neighborhood. I've already blogged about it, but I liked all the different textures on this shot.

Fort Sanders Whispers

Imagine it's not long into the 20th century. You're sitting here on the handsome wrap-around porch of the Pickle Mansion looking out over Fort Sanders neighborhood from the top of the hill. Perhaps you're taking evening tea with your neighbors. The lowering sun is still shining benignly and life moves at a gracious, stately pace. I don't know if the Pickle Mansion is haunted, but I can see the ghosts, can you?

Although I really can't do this image justice in words, I know of someone who did...

Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite works by local writer James Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915. It's an autobiographical essay he wrote which was included in the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death In the Family, remembering his life in his family's Fort Sanders home:

"We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew."

- James Agee, Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

There's lots more, and you should really read it to get a sense of Knoxville's essence at a singular point in time. And then come join me in looking for the ghosts in Fort Sanders.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Since I'm up on my historic preservation horse again, I figured I might as well ride it around for a few more posts. So, next stop, the Pickle Mansion in the Fort Sanders neighborhood near the University of Tennessee.

This once-glorious mansion was built in 1889 in the Queen Anne style by then-Tennessee State Attorney General George Pickle. When it was whole and well, it had a hipped roof, ornately-topped turrets, a wide wrap-around covered porch, and beautiful brickwork. Like many of the grand old Victorian homes remaining in Fort Sanders, it had been carved up into student apartments and left to a genteel decay.

Then in 2003, a horrible fire gutted the roof and top floors; luckily, there were no human casualties. But Knoxville lost a grand dame that day. The previous owners were denied a demolition permit by the city. The current owners, who purchased the mansion in 2005, pledged renovation and have stabilized the structure, but have not progressed to the exterior as yet.

I'm hoping for a future where I won't see the sky, even as lovely and blue as it is in this photo, through lonely architectural bones when I walk by. I'm hoping also that I won't see a vacant lot, or another cinderblock apartment complex squatting like a toad by the curving driveway.