I’ve seen scads of the Kingsport bus tokens with the stamped out K in the center, but I’d never seen one like this. I’m thinking that is may be earlier than the K tokens, but (curses!) I can’t prove it. Yet.
Now that Bank of Tennessee is breaking forth from the constraints of the past and is going to land a big new footprint, so to speak, on the half-block of land they own between Cherokee and Cumberland with Center Street frontage. This is what that area looked like around 1975.
It’s got crappy resolution. I was living in a, er, low-rent apartment at the time and was playing around with a Polaroid camera I’d bought somewhere. Anyway, this shows the corner of Cherokee Street (see the Kingsport Camera Shop sign mid right? That’s all been taken over by that other bank) and Center. There was a service station there, and one across the street. They used to everywhere, for some reason. Like pharmacies now.
The tower just under the wires on the right is where the telephone company is.
Roberts Tire & Recapping occupies the buildings low in the picture.
Construction work brings to light the facade of a structure built in 1927 at 209 Broad Street. The date is in the escutcheon above the remains of the front door. Originally, there were white columns on either side of the building, in front of the facade.
There was a building boom on Broad Street in 1927 and both Kingsport National Bank and this, The Farmers and Merchants Bank, opened up around June of that year. In 1945, it became Sullivan County Bank. At some later date, it was home to Harris & Graves Insurance. By 1959, it was the Moore & Walker Insurance building.
Garrett & Garrett Attorneys, as you can see, had the upper floor.
I found this today at an antique store. It’s the old blue and gold, Sullivan High Pirates. Looks like a booster item to be. I can’t even hazard a guess as to the date. I went there 1961-1963 and don’t recall ever seeing one. But, then, I never paid much attention to sports.
It’s 1.25″ in diameter with a lethal-looking pin on the back. Those were dangerous times…
Radio Electric Supply Co. (RESCO) was THE place for electronics when I was starting out in Radio. They had everything, or could get it quickly for you. This shows them at 961 East Sullivan Street in Kingsport and this is where I remember them. At the station where I worked, it was standard practice to answer any query as to where the engineer was with “You checked RESCO?”
However, in 1945, the company is listed at 210 Cherokee Street (near the alley behind the bank) (across from where Kingsport Camera Shop used to be), you know the place.
This little measuring tape (I haven’t chanced pulling the tape out to see how long it is) was made in Hong Kong. That the trademark is “HONG KONG” and not “Made in Hong Kong” places this in the ’60s.
Those of you who used to travel West Sullivan Street know that a major widening of this venerable artery is underway. This echo of the path of the South Fork of the Holston River will become a grand boulevard to lead traffic down to where they’re hoping to get all that development going.
Anyway, my point in all this is that wall you can just see a bit of at the lower right hand corner. That wall was on the boundary of the leveled parking lot for The Little Store Supermarket built here in 1952-53 (Grand Opening was January 15, 1953). It was the second Little Store in Kingsport. The first opened in 1939 at 311 East Sullivan Street (for years afterward that building was Brown’s Custom Shop). Kermit Young started the first Little Store in Bristol in 1934. He learned the business working at his father’s grocery operation in Johnson City. Thank you, Kingsport Times-News, January 14, 1953. Note: this building was razed in 2009.
From The Little Store to Oakwood Market, all on Canal Street: this was Supermarket Row.
The now former site of Ward’s Feed Store on Revere Street.
For years, this store was on the corner of Cherokee and Main.
This was the old paint-up sign on Cherokee.
Architect’s rendering of the not-yet-quite-built Downtowner Motor Inn, corner of Center and Shelby Streets in downtown Kingsport. It was announced in the Kingsport Times-News in 1960 and was probably open for business in 1961. Having a Downtowner was a big deal at the time. The only other one in Tennessee was in Memphis. This one lasted until the early 1990s. At some time in the 70s, I took my mother to the restaurant there to have breakfast. I found a cockroach in my biscuit.
The Downtowner corporation began in 1958 in Memphis. At one time, it was owned by Perkins
Pancake House and then changed hands several times until it mostly went belly up in 1993.
When I first came to Kingsport in 1956, this lot was empty. You could look out the back door of the Kress building and see the old City Hall on the west corner of Shelby and Center. Hinch Gilliam had a cab stand up on the Market-Shelby corner on this lot.
There must be hundreds of copies of this card. They’re all over the web for sale at prices ranging from $10 to $24 each. I probably paid a buck when I bought this one a decade or so ago.
Back before the now ubiquitous air conditioning units became common on business rooftops, these structures dominated. This unit, which used to be on top of the Variety Printing building (formerly one of two downtown locations of Mack Ray Cafeteria…the other was on Commerce Street in the old Harry Mills Motors, across from WKPT), cooled the inside air by evaporation. Inside this louvered, wooden structure was a coiled pipe through which air was pumped. Water was sprayed over the coil, thus cooling the air by evaporation. Something akin to the effect you’d get from a wet t-shirt, if the only reason you were wearing a wet t-shirt was to cool off. And if you had a breeze of some sort.
At any rate, I would often get lightly sprinkled with water walking down the alley, if the breeze (mentioned before) was blowing the right direction.
Why was I in the alley? Going around to Wallace News, of course.
Note the (ha!) stabilizing wires. Such strength.
Before the likes of George Carter and J. Fred Johnson strode the land, the area now hosting downtown Kingsport was a wetland, a marsh, a swamp. A good place for hunting rabbits, it’s said.
Not a particularly good place to site a new town, so, two ditches were dug, one to the west and one to the east, to escort the water out of the downtown basin and off to somewhere else.
So here is Canal Street. It’s actually a cut-and-cover culvert: the western ditch. It comes out here:
This is on Reedy Creek, next to the old Irpco (sounds kind of like a burp, no?), which, in memory, is the old Coca-Cola bottling company on West Sullivan Street.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 