Gay Street

Downtown Knoxville, Tennessee 

Since the development of  Gay Street in the 1790s, Gay Street has served as the city's principal financial and commercial thoroughfare.  It has played a primary role in the city's historical and cultural development.  The first paved street contains Knoxville's largest office buildings and oldest commerical structures.  Several buildings on the street have been listed on the Historic Register of Historic Places.

The Gay Street Commerical Historic District, added to the National Register in 1986, originally consisting of 35 buildings constructed circa 1880-1940 along Gay Street and adjacent side streets.  The buildings ranged from 1890s-era wholesale outlets to 1930s-era movie theaters such as the Gay Theatre, the Bijou Theatre, the Riviera Theatre and the Tennessee Theatre.

Kress Building

417 Gay Street

Circa 1937

The former Kress building has a 8,000 square foot ground-floor footprint. At one point in the early mid-1900s, S.H. Kress & Company operated more than 250 department stores in the southern and western United States.  In 1925, they added a Knoxville location, putting up a three-story building plus a basement at 417 S. Gay.  Knoxville's Kress business has been gone for decades, but the building itself has remained a vital historical and architectural landmark on the downtown landscape.  Now the structure is finding new life as a multi-purpose development thanks to a local developer who purchased the property in 2020.  

Bijou Theatre

803 S. Gay Street

The Bijou was added to the National Register of Historic Places December 4, 1975.

The theatre opened on March 8, 1909 and over the next four decades would host performers such as the Marx Brothers, Dizzy Gillespie, John Philip Sousa, Ethel Barrymore, Houdini and others.  After a period of decline in the 1960s and early 1970s, local preservationists purchased the building and renovated the theatre.

The Bijou Theatre building consists of two parts, the original hotel section completed in 1817 and the rear theatre section built in 1909.  The theatre has a capacity of approximately 700 with two balcony levels.  There are two loggia levels and three box levels on each side of the building.  The stage is 35 feet deep and 69 feet wide. 

The Bijou orchestra floor, boxes and stage viewed from the upper right loggia.