Gay Street: Trolleys, Theaters, and the Downtown Spine

Gay Street has been Knoxville's main commercial artery since before Tennessee was a state. It runs north-south through the heart of downtown, one block from the river, and for most of the city's history everything that mattered commercially happened on or just off it. The banks. The department stores. The hotels. And, starting in eighteen seventy-six, the trolleys.

The Knoxville Street Railway Company laid the city's first trolley line along Gay Street that year. The cars were horse-drawn initially, which meant that a team of animals pulled the thing along iron rails through the mud and traffic of a mid-Victorian river city. In eighteen ninety, William Gibbs McAdoo electrified the line, and the horse cars gave way to electric streetcars. The system grew to forty-two miles of track at its peak, connecting downtown to the residential neighborhoods that were developing along every rail corridor: Fort Sanders to the west, Fourth and Gill to the north, Mechanicsville to the northeast. The streetcar built the city's shape.

In nineteen oh nine, the Bijou Theatre opened on Gay Street in the rear wing of what had been the Lamar House hotel, with a separate entrance on Cumberland Avenue for Black patrons, who were seated in the second balcony. Over the next four decades it hosted Houdini, the Marx Brothers, John Philip Sousa, Dizzy Gillespie, and the Ballets Russes. In nineteen twenty-eight, the Tennessee Theatre opened a few blocks north, a Moorish Revival palace designed by a Chicago firm, with French chandeliers, Italian terrazzo floors, a Wurlitzer organ, and air conditioning, one of the first public buildings in Knoxville to have it. Roy Acuff performed on its stage for the first time in nineteen thirty-two.

The electric trolleys ran until nineteen forty-seven, when the tracks were paved over and buses replaced them. The Gay Street of the nineteen forties that Cormac McCarthy walked through was still the commercial spine of a city that had not yet fully decentralized. By the nineteen seventies, suburban malls had drawn retail outward and Gay Street went quiet. Both theaters survived that period and were restored in subsequent decades. Both are operating today.