The Tennessee River, the City's Axis

Every city that sits on a river is shaped by it in ways that outlast every other decision its founders made. Knoxville is no different. The Tennessee River flows past its southern edge, and for the first century of the city's existence, it was the city's reason for being: the route west, the transport corridor, the hydraulic engine that made commercial life possible.

Flatboatmen working the Tennessee in the early eighteen hundreds would pass through Knoxville heading downstream, part of the commerce that connected the Appalachian interior to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. The river was seasonal, unpredictable, and essential. When it flooded, it flooded badly. When it ran low in drought, the boats stuck.

The Tennessee Valley Authority changed this permanently. The system of dams TVA built between nineteen thirty-three and the nineteen fifties regulated the flow, controlled the floods, and deepened the channel for navigation. The unregulated river that Cormac McCarthy's Cornelius Suttree fished in the nineteen fifties, the river with its seasonal rhythms and its debris and its smell, is not the same hydrological system that flows past the city today. It has been regulated into something more useful and less alive.

The waterfront that was once the McAnally Flats neighborhood, where the fishermen and small-time operators of Suttree lived, is now a park system. The Gay Street Bridge still crosses where it always crossed. The Tennessee Riverwalk runs along the southern bank. The river itself carries the memory of everything the city was and everything it has changed, downstream, past the Sunsphere reflected in its surface, out of sight.