Bijou Theatre

Bijou Theatre

Video

A tour behind the scenes in the Bijou. Watch »

Video

Is the Bijou haunted? Bijou Technical Director Jason Fogarty tells his side of the story. Watch »

Video

Bijou Jubilee commercial. Video by DoubleJay Creative Watch »

Video

A documentary about the history of the Lamar House/Bijou Theatre made by DoubleJay Creative. Created to celebrate the theater's 2006 re-opening, the documentary received a nomination for a regional Emmy Award. Watch »

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If the Bijou Theatre/Lamar House were a person, she'd be the heroine of a silent-screen melodrama or modern-day soap.

She's been grand. And down-and-out. She's been aided by the kindness of strangers. She's fallen into genteel decline and ill-repute only to be lifted again and again. The four-story stucco-and-brick building at 803 S. Gay St., is a survivor. While the theater was built in 1909 as a vaudeville venue it's fronted by a former hotel built almost 100 years before.

Now the Historic Tennessee Theatre Foundation operates the Bijou as a nonprofit, overseen by the Bijou Theatre Foundation. The Bijou is managed by A.C. Entertainment, which also manages the Tennessee. But that's just the Bijou's last incarnation.

The structure may have began as the home of early Knoxville merchant Thomas Humes. Some or all of it has been a tavern, a grand hotel, a vaudeville and movie house, a Civil War hospital, a flop house and an adult movie theater. For a time its walls housed used cars, its entrance a fruit stand. Five presidents have visited. And for a few years in the 1960s an unknown number of streetwalkers and their clients came and went.

As it aged and times changed, the building underwent a seesaw of repairs, renovations, rehabilitations, management changes and money woes. Saving the Lamar House/Bijou Theatre seemed a recurring 10-year dilemma.

In 1976 a fledging Knoxville (now Knox) Heritage led the drive to restore the dirty, leaky building. It had made it to the National Register for Historic Places but more restoration was needed in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Through the years, the Bijou struggled to pay its debts. In 2005 it was closed for almost two years yet avoided foreclosure through combined business, government and individual support. Some $2.1 million not only renovated the building but helped pay its bills and the newly done theater opened again in 2006.

What is now a 783-seat theater with a lobby and offices began when Knoxville was only 30 years old. Humes finished a building on the corner of Gay and Cumberland Avenue in 1817 or maybe 1816, the year he died. Some accounts say he used the three-story structure as his home; others say it was a tavern. Perhaps he planned both uses for the building with a ballroom, bar, dining room and 13 guest rooms. His widow leased the building and it became the grand "Knoxville Hotel," the first of its many names.

A large 1850s addition gave the hotel room for 250 guests. When Gay Street was re-graded, the building gained a fourth floor when its basement became what is still the first story. When the Civil War came, the then Lamar House became a hospital. Here, on Nov. 19, 1863, in the bridal suite, Union Brig. Gen. William Sanders died from his battle wounds.

The hotel survived the war but by the late 19th century was transferring owners and changing names - from the White House to the New Lamar House to the Old Homestead Hotel - every few years. Then investors figured the rundown Old Homestead was a good spot for a new vaudeville palace. They demolished the 1850s addition and built the $50,000 Bijou. It opened March 8, 1909, with a George M. Cohen musical "Little Johnny Jones." Newspaper accounts say some 1,500 people in evening dress attended, and ushers and orchestra musicians wore evening attire. Humes' original remaining part of the building was renamed again as the Wells-Auditorium-Hotel after theater operator Jake Wells.

Six years later, the Bijou added a screen and projection equipment to show those new silent movies. It kept showing films and hosted live theater through the 1930s and 1940s. The Marx Brothers came in 1913; Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in 1924; Tallulah Bankhead in "The Little Foxes" in 1941.

For some years this was only theater white and black patrons saw a movie at the same time in segregated Knoxville. But blacks had to sit in the second balcony up three flights of stairs from a separate entrance on Cumberland Avenue.

And for five years the Bijou was banned from showing any "theatrical or amusement ... of any kind." The Tennessee was being built up Gay Street as a grand movie palace. Its owners also owned the Bijou. So they sold the Bijou with what was basically a no-compete clause. The Bijou seats were removed and a motor company rolled in its used cars for storage. A fruit stand set up in the entrance.

But in 1932, the Bijou reopened with movies and live theater. For almost three decades, from 1935 to 1964, it was joined to the Tennessee and showed second-run or hold-over movies for the bigger theater. The adjoining hotel kept changing its name. From 1913 to 1957, the hotel was the Arlington Hotel, Hotel Lamar, Bijou Hotel, Knox Hotel, Hotel Le Conte, Shannon Hotel and Monroe Hotel.

By the mid-1960s, the theater and hotel were pulled under by urban blight. The then seedy LaMarr Hotel was home to transients and prostitutes until the courts closed it in 1969. And the once "pretty little playhouse" was the "Bijou Art Theater" showing adult films. In 1975 the theater was shuttered because of unpaid taxes, owed rent and a public outcry over the building's decline.

Almost demolished for a parking lot, the building was rescued by a community fundraising campaign and fledging nonprofit. The catalyst for the 1974 start of Knox Heritage was "saving the Bijou," says current Knox Heritage Executive Director Kim Trent. "I think the Bijou is iconic because when it comes to preservation in Knoxville it is what galvanized people in town."

Today, the Lamar House/Bijou Theatre lives with "a great history but a bad past," says Board President Larsen Jay. He learned to love the building in the 1990s as a University of Tennessee student working as an office helper and later production manager. "We are looking to use that history to propel us to the next 100 years. ... I care about that stage and who is the next Dolly Parton, the next Dave Matthews, the next Marx Brothers, to get a shot there."

Amy McRary may be reached at 865-342-6437

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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