The Downtowner Motor Inn

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downtowner

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.

Early Air Conditioner

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earlyac

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.

Borden Mills

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bordenmills

Look at all the windows!  This E.G Kropp (Milwaukee) post card carries a Kingsport postmark for July, 1937.
It was mailed to Eccles, WV. The message, in a somewhat cramped script:

Hello! Honey! Read your last letter yesterday. We came to Norton last Friday. Sue, M.F. and my-self came to Kingsport Tuesday.  Sue & M.F. have (something, something…I’m working on it – the script is hard to read).  Will go  home Monday.  Will write a letter then. Love, Mama

Canal Street

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canalstreet

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:
itcomesouthere
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.

The Last of the Big Store

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bigstoreburn

In November, 1985, the building that once housed The Big Store burned down.  The Big Store was an all-in-one place; even the Post Office was there.  It was said you could go from birth to death at The Big Store.  J. Fred Johnson’s, which is now a furniture store on the west corner of Broad and Center, was a spin off, as was Hamlett-Dobson Funeral Home.
Judging from the shadows, I must have gotten there early in the morning, but it appears the firefighters had everything pretty much under control by then.

Plaza Say Gone

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As you know, they’ve torn down
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This was one of our first strip malls, on Lynn Garden Drive, when it was still the main way to Gate City.  Had a Grant’s…had a Kroger…had my stepbrother’s barbershop.  It even had a decent common area:

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Those trees in back, striving for the sunlight, survived, I hope.  Probably just bulldozed over, though.  All compound things are impermanent.

Midnight Sun

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midnightsun

Forty-six years ago, I began the first permanent rock show on WKPT-AM.  John Dotson had “Sounds of Summer” the previous year, but it ended when he went back to school or left town or something.  It was a good show and broke the Easy Listening hold on that staid, NBC-affiliated station.  So, I swooped in the next year, ditched “Teenage Terrace”, (which I had been on when I was in high school, from 5:00 to 6:00 pm, as I recall, with Marty running the board and we students, when we showed up, sitting at the table in the news studio) and had the 6:00 pm to midnight slot all to myself as “The Midnight Sun”.
Since this was before 8-track tapes in cars became widely available, I was a success, as it were, with the kids cruising Broad Street.  Then, the tapes came and I eventually moved into the afternoon Drive Time slot.  The fact that, for the most part, I had to buy my own records for the show and management had the nerve to put something like this cloth sticker out helped me leave it behind.  “Like it is”, my ass.  The phrase was a joke by this time.
The ellipse is 4″ on the horizontal axis and 2-1/2″ on the vertical.

The Famous Rotherwood Farm

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thefamousrotherwoodfront

“The famous Rotherwood Farm at the junction of the North and South Forks of the Holston River”   bottom: “Kingsport, Tenn. in the distance”

This is one of a series of cards published by T.J. Stephenson, Kingsport, Tenn.
I have 20 unduplicated cards of this series and I know there are more.  The earliest postmark I’ve found is 1925 and the latest is 1942.  They were around for a while.
The cards were printed in Cambridge MA under the “Tichnor Quality View” name.

Here’s the back:

thefamousrotherwoodback

The plate numbers on the cards I have run from 121027 to 121042 (I don’t have all of that run).