The Andrew Johnson Building is a high-rise building in downtown
Knoxville, Tennessee
Knoxville is a city in and the county seat of Knox County in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 United States census, Knoxville's population was 190,740, making it the largest city in the East Tennessee Grand Division and the state' ...
, United States. Completed in 1929 as the Andrew Johnson Hotel,
at , it was
Knoxville's tallest building for nearly a half-century.
[Ronald Childress, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for Andrew Johnson Hotel, March 1980, p. 3] In the 1980s, it was converted to office space by
Knox County. In 1980, the Andrew Johnson Building was added to the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...
.
[Ronald Childress, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for Andrew Johnson Hotel, March 1980, p. 1] In 2017, BNA Associates announced plans to convert it back to a hotel. The plans were approved in 2020. As of 2022, the county offices have been almost entirely vacated in preparation for the extensive renovations.
Named for President
Andrew Johnson, the Andrew Johnson Hotel was Knoxville's premier hotel from the time of its completion through the 1960s. In its early years, the hotel was popular with foreign dignitaries visiting Knoxville to inquire about the newly created
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolin ...
, as well as with tourists en route to the newly created
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an American national park in the southeastern United States, with parts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The park straddles the ridgeline of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, w ...
.
Country music
Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, ...
singer
Hank Williams spent the last night of his life at the hotel, on December 31, 1952.
[Jack Neely, ''Knoxville's Secret History'' (Scruffy Books, 1995), pp. 90-91.] The studios of
WNOX
WNOX (93.1 FM, "Awesome 93.1") is a commercial radio station licensed to the suburb of Karns, Tennessee, and serving the Knoxville metropolitan area. The station is owned by SummitMedia and airs a classic hits format.
WNOX's studios and o ...
, which played a role in the early development of country music, were located in the Andrew Johnson in the late 1930s, and musicians such as
Roy Acuff became regional stars broadcasting from the building.
Design
The Andrew Johnson Building stands at the southwest corner of
Gay Street's 900-block, and shares a central courtyard with the adjacent Riverview Tower. The building's eighteen stories consist of fifteen floors, a
mezzanine, and a two-story
penthouse. The building is rectangular in shape, with a recess running up the middle of the west facade. The ground floor extends out beyond the rest of the building to provide a base for the unique second story, which includes an open-air pavilion.
[Ronald Childress, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for Andrew Johnson Hotel, March 1980, p. 5] While most of the building's exterior consists of brick, the ground floor's Gay Street facade is sheathed in concrete cast to appear as
rusticated stone.
[Ronald Childress, National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for Andrew Johnson Hotel, March 1980, p. 2]
The second story of the Andrew Johnson was designed as the main story, and originally contained the hotel's lobby and front desk, a ballroom, and a pavilion.
The pavilion consists of a five-bay
arcade
Arcade most often refers to:
* Arcade game, a coin-operated game machine
** Arcade cabinet, housing which holds an arcade game's hardware
** Arcade system board, a standardized printed circuit board
* Amusement arcade, a place with arcade games
* ...
, with arches flanked by
Ionic pilasters. Each side of the pavilion was originally flanked by terraces and balustrades, which were replaced when the ballroom was expanded in the 1960s. The second story is higher than the building's other stories to accommodate a mezzanine, which overlooks the lobby.
Most of the windows for floors four through fifteen are simple, rectangular windows, with the exception of the fourteenth-floor windows, which are topped by small arched
pediment
Pediments are gables, usually of a triangular shape.
Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the lintel, or entablature, if supported by columns. Pediments can contain an overdoor and are usually topped by hood moulds.
A pedim ...
s. Atop the building is the
penthouse, which is seven bays wide, and is adorned with brick Ionic pilasters. The second story of the penthouse originally had oval windows, but these have been replaced with simple rectangular windows. From the mid-1930s until the late-1970s, a large neon sign reading "Hotel Andrew Johnson" stood atop the building.
History
Hotel
The Adair Corporation of
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
began planning a large hotel (initially named the "Tennessee Terrace") at the corner of Gay and Hill as early as 1918, but lack of financing continuously stalled the project.
The hotel was designed by
Baumann & Baumann, an architectural firm responsible for a number of prominent buildings and houses in the Knoxville area, including the
Knoxville Post Office on Main and the
Church of the Immaculate Conception on Vine. By 1927, only seven stories of the hotel had been completed, and construction was briefly halted because of financial issues.
J. Basil Ramsey, president of the
Holston Union Bank, managed to raise the necessary funds, however, and the hotel was completed shortly afterward.
Business at the Andrew Johnson received a boost with the creation of the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an American national park in the southeastern United States, with parts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The park straddles the ridgeline of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, w ...
in 1932 and the formation of the
Tennessee Valley Authority
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolin ...
(TVA) in 1933.
[Jack Neely, ''From the Shadow Side: And Other Stories of Knoxville, Tennessee'' (Tellico Books, 2003), p. 24.] The hotel was located a few blocks from
U.S. Route 441, which connects Knoxville to the national park's main entrance. TVA's headquarters, also located a few blocks from the hotel, drew a steady stream of curious foreign diplomats and activists to Knoxville during the 1930s and 1940s, among them French existentialist
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and lit ...
, who stayed at the hotel in 1945. The rise of automobile travel in the late 1920s brought large numbers of travellers to Knoxville via the
Dixie Highway
Dixie Highway was a United States auto trail first planned in 1914 to connect the Midwest with the South. It was part of a system and was expanded from an earlier Miami to Montreal highway. The final system is better understood as a network of ...
, with many preferring the Andrew Johnson over the rough motels along the highway's
Kingston Pike
Kingston Pike is a highway in Knox County, Tennessee, United States, that connects Downtown Knoxville with West Knoxville, Farragut, and other communities in the western part of the county. The road follows a merged stretch of U.S. Route 1 ...
stretch.
![Andrew-johnson-hotel-1941-tn1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Andrew-johnson-hotel-1941-tn1.jpg)
For most of its early history, the Andrew Johnson was the choice hotel for celebrities travelling through Knoxville. During a stay at the Andrew Johnson in 1936 (the year before her disappearance), aviator
Amelia Earhart remarked to a reporter that she didn't expect to live to old age.
[Neely, ''From the Shadow Side'', pp. 180-182.] Swiss travel writer
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach (23 May 1908 – 15 November 1942) was a Swiss writer, journalist and photographer. Her bisexual mother brought her up in a masculine style, and her androgynous image suited the bohemian Berlin society of the ...
probably stayed at the hotel while writing her story, "Auf der Schattenseite von Knoxville" ("The Shadow Side of Knoxville").
In February 1943, Russian pianist
Sergei Rachmaninoff stayed at the Andrew Johnson after giving the last recital of his career at the nearby
University of Tennessee
The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state ...
's Alumni Gymnasium.
Perhaps the most well-known stay at the Andrew Johnson Hotel was that of country music singer Hank Williams, who spent the last night of his life at the hotel, and whose death is the source of numerous stories and local legends in Knoxville. Williams and his driver, Charles Carr, checked into the hotel on the evening of December 31, 1952. At some point during the night, Williams grew ill and began convulsing, and a doctor called to the hotel gave Williams injections of
Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is a water-soluble vitamin involved in metabolism. It is one of eight B vitamins. It is required by animals, which use it as a cofactor in DNA synthesis, in both fatty acid and amino acid metabolism. ...
and
morphine
Morphine is a strong opiate that is found naturally in opium, a dark brown resin in poppies (''Papaver somniferum''). It is mainly used as a pain medication, and is also commonly used recreationally, or to make other illicit opioids. T ...
. At 10:45 P.M., Williams and Carr checked out and headed north for
Canton, Ohio, where Williams was scheduled to perform the next day. By the time car reached
Oak Hill, West Virginia
Oak Hill is a city in Fayette County, West Virginia, United States and is the primary city within the Oak Hill, WV Micropolitan Statistical Area. The micropolitan area is also included in the Beckley-Oak Hill, WV Combined Statistical Area. The ...
, around dawn of the following morning, however, Williams had died.
Throughout much of the 1930s, radio station
WNOX
WNOX (93.1 FM, "Awesome 93.1") is a commercial radio station licensed to the suburb of Karns, Tennessee, and serving the Knoxville metropolitan area. The station is owned by SummitMedia and airs a classic hits format.
WNOX's studios and o ...
broadcast from the Andrew Johnson's 17th floor. The station's popular show, Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, had featured performers such as
Roy Acuff and
Homer and Jethro, and listeners in downtown Knoxville frequented the hotel to see the show's broadcasts. By the late 1930s, the station was drawing some 1,000 fans to the station each day, flooding the hotel's elevators. After guests began to complain, the hotel's management asked the station to move.
In the 1940s, R. J. Reynolds, Jr. (1906–1964), the son of
the tobacco magnate, purchased the Andrew Johnson. After his death, his widow maintained ownership until 1973. By this time, Knoxville's Hyatt Regency (now the Knoxville Marriott) had usurped the Andrew Johnson as the city's premier hotel, and the Andrew Johnson began to decline. The hotel changed owners several times throughout the 1970s,
during which time it sometimes served to handle overflow student housing from the nearby University of Tennessee. In the 1980s, the building was renovated as an office building by the Aetna Casualty & Surety Company.
Offices
The Andrew Johnson Building had of office space and housed offices for Knox County for many years. The primary occupant was
Knox County Schools
Knox County Schools is the school district that operates all public schools in Knox County, Tennessee.
History
Before the 1987–1988 school year, the city of Knoxville and Knox County operated separate school districts. In that year the two ...
, the offices of which utilized fourteen of the building's eighteen floors. The building also housed the Finance, Property Development, and Telecommunications offices of the county's Public Building Authority, human resource offices for the Knox County Sheriff's Department, and the county's Probation and Pre-Trial services.
Conversion back to hotel
In 2017, BNA Associates announced plans to convert the structure back to a hotel. The plans were approved in 2020. As of 2022, the county offices have been almost entirely vacated in preparation for the extensive renovations.
See also
*
General Building
*
Mechanics' Bank and Trust Company Building
*
Medical Arts Building
*
The Burwell
References
External links
{{Commons category, Andrew Johnson Building
Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection – Andrew Johnson Hotel
Andrew Johnson
Hotel buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee
Hotel buildings completed in 1926
Skyscrapers in Knoxville, Tennessee
Hotels established in 1930
National Register of Historic Places in Knoxville, Tennessee
Skyscraper office buildings in Tennessee
1930 establishments in Tennessee