If you look back at a map of Knoxville in 1895, you will see where Luttrell, Eleanor and Deery Streets doglegged their way out of what we now call Fourth & Gill into the eastern outskirts of the Old City north of Jackson Avenue. The southern termini of those streets disappeared to urban “renewal’ in the 1960s, under the spaghetti noodles of I-40, James White Parkway and, more recently, Hall of Fame Drive. Tiny little Lanier Street went with them along with Hudson Street.
Hudson ran on the north side of and parallel to what was then Park Street (now Magnolia Avenue), intersecting the end of Luttrell and ending at Randolph Street. Those streets were pretty much the same on a late November day in 1964.
It was the 20th, the Friday before Thanksgiving. It had been unseasonably warm that November, with many days flirting with 70 degrees or exceeding it. But that day, a wisp of winter was back in the air, the mercury never getting to 50. A junk man was pushing his cart up Hudson Street collecting scrap cardboard.
Now, when I say a junk man, I do not mean this in the sense that he had storefront, a la Big Don’s Elegant. Nor do I mean that he was a junk of a man, because he most certainly wasn’t. He was a man with a cart collecting the flotsam and jetsam of other businesses to then turn it over for whatever he could get for it…