The State of Fort Sanders (Page 1 of 5)

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tenn., in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were softwooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn’t doing very well.”

—From A Death in the Family, James Agee

If you walk down Highland Avenue on a warm afternoon, James Agee’s 1915 observation of Fort Sanders still rings true. At least, in part.

Houses built between 1880 and 1910 line the blocks, Queen Anne-style homes with striking facades, and front porches, bays and steep roofs. There are a few trees. But the panorama is no longer unified as it was in Agee’s Knoxville.

Mixed with the relics of history are newer artifacts: high-density apartment complexes, built in the late 1960s — brick, squat and boxy, with narrow concrete porches lining the balconies and two stories of rudimentary two-bedroom apartments. The streetlights are modern; They’re tall and bright enough to light an entire parking lot, but here they shine into windows.

Independent businesses are here, too, most established in the 1960s or 1970s. Cars line both sides of the street, and instead of parents walking their children to school and toddlers playing on the sidewalks, most people milling about are college-aged students walking themselves to classes across the road with iPods in their ears or cell phones held to their faces. They look at the ground as they walk, ignoring their setting and the other students. 

With this pastiche of parts in one locus, what defines Fort Sanders? Is this hamlet an archetypal student neighborhood, a significant historic district, a borough for the young and creative or a healthy blend of all of the above? Is it a safe and diverse community equally fit for raising children and hell? Or does its crime level dissuade prospective residents and threaten current ones?

The Fort Sanders neighborhood located just west of downtown Knoxville and across Cumberland Avenue from the University of Tennessee is named for the Civil War Battle of Fort Sanders, fought on Nov. 29, 1863. It was an overwhelming victory for the Union.

In 1880 the area was named West Knoxville, and it developed as an upscale suburb of downtown. Its most admired ex-resident, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist James Agee was born there in 1909. Until the 1930s, the homes were chiefly owner-occupied, single family dwellings, but during the Great Depression, the larger houses were subdivided into more affordable apartments. When UT grew exponentially in the second half of the 20th century — from a student population of 9,000 in 1960 to more than 28,000 in 1980 — many of the apartments were again converted, this time into undergraduate student apartments.

Time hasn’t been kind to the Fort since then. Once-prominent homes have fallen victim to arson, vandalism and poor maintenance. Agee’s former home at 1505 Highland Ave. was demolished in 1962. Apartments were built in its place, as a seeming verification of Knoxville’s carelessness regarding its own past.

Fort Sanders now faces a convergence and uncertain future. As the landscape and development changes, many of the area’s dearest fans wonder if “progress” will preserve this neighborhood as an integral visual record of Knoxville’s history or if it will become another fringe-campus neighborhood, subsumed by the university that made it popular, with homogenized but profitable high-density student housing, corporate fast-food eateries on every corner and high-rise parking garages creating the skyline.

Crime in the Fort

Most recently, Fort Sanders has been in the public eye because of crime. During the fall 2007 semester, UT students received frequent notifications of crimes occurring in the neighborhood. A new information system implemented by the university dispensed these reports as the transgressions took place. “The new UT ALERT system is designed to enhance and improve communication so that all members of the UT campus community can stay informed in the event of an emergency,” the UT Web site states.