The first time Scott West and I met to discuss this piece, he had just done the final walkthrough for Philtoberfest on Market Square. The event honored the late Phil Pollard, a beloved Shepherd of positivity known as much for his incredibly warm approach to life as he was delightful music.
In fact, Pollard was such a ray of light that when you ran in to him, you almost felt embarrassed for not living with the bliss that he enjoyed.
It was the fifth event of the year produced by the Wests on Market Square, with each having its own charitable cause. For Philtoberfest, a donation was made to the education fund of Pollard’s three daughters.
The Wests
The Wests have taken a different approach than others have in the past with their downtown events by keeping the outside vendors to a minimum. The hope was that the businesses in the area would benefit, and a handful of shops and restaurants have indeed had record days during this entertainment series.
But it’s just par for the course if you ask Scott or Bernadette West.
The couple has a long history of focusing their efforts on preserving Knoxville’s downtown area and were beloved for their revitalization efforts downtown and in the Old City a decade ago.
By 2005, they owned a handful of successful businesses and a residential space inside Market Square.
The roster included Oodles Uncorked, Earth to Old City, World Grotto and Preservation Pub. Market Square had slowly become the bustling torchbearer of Knoxville.
Then in September of 2006, Scott was sentenced to 75 months in prison for his role in laundering millions in profits from marijuana sales into restoring six historic buildings on Market Square. Bernadette received a two-year sentence for money laundering through historic preservation without being a part of the conspiracy.
All of the personal progress that the Wests had made came to a screeching halt. People were angry. Some even wanted to erase the family from the history books. The buildings were seized and sold at auction.
Scott is generally pretty jovial and hard to shake, but he softens a bit when he describes when he was ushered out of the courtroom in shackles that “clinked and clanked” with no chance of contact with his loved ones after receiving his 6+ year sentence. He described that event as “very traumatizing”, but added, “It got easier every day after that.”
But that’s not where the story starts. Or where it ends, for that matter.
Bernadette is the daughter of a Lieutenant Colonel who served four tours of combat in Korea and Vietnam. Her father met her mother in Germany, which is where Bernadette grew up. That would prove to be important later.
She received a bachelor’s degree in Interior Design and a Masters in Art Education from the University of Tennessee. She also wore the Orange and White as a member of the women’s soccer team.
After college, Bernadette taught art at a Montessori School before landing as an international flight attendant for over 20 years.
Scott was born in Louisville, Kentucky and as a 12–year-old witnessed nationally televised race riots firsthand before moving to Lenoir City before his 9th grade year.
The two met one night downtown many years ago, but Bernadette boarded a plane to Germany the following day. When Scott asked her about a first date, she said she could make space in her schedule exactly six weeks from the following Saturday.
He took Bernadette to a movie for that first date. “It was Batman (the Jack Nicholson one). We wore capes and I brought my sister, Paula,” Scott explained.
A year later they were married.
Travel was easy for a flight attendant, so they toured the world together on a small budget. They backpacked and stayed in youth hostels, which gave them money to take in some of Earth’s most desirable activities. Safaris on the Serengeti. Hikes up Kilimanjaro. Scuba Diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Trekking in New Zealand. They presumably had done it all. But they wanted more.
They wanted to be major players in the revitalization of Downtown Knoxville. So in 1992, they opened Earth to Old City and never looked back.
The Wests broke the law in the mid 2000’s then served their debt to society in the late 2000’s, but chose to start reliving their lives after prison. After having served their time in prison, the Wests began the process of rebuilding their lives. Not only have they have regained their stride, and are now doing more to promote Knoxville than ever before.
The fact remains that downtown Knoxville would not be what it is today, as a blossoming primrose of art, retail, music and culture, without the huge leap of faith that the Wests took when they purchased six buildings on Market Square when vagrants outnumbered open signs. The subsequent work and creativity that followed, along with the efforts of a few dozen other businesses and the city, have allowed for continual growth in the city’s center.
This is for those who don’t know the whole story, or for those who have forgotten it, intentionally or otherwise. It’s a story about the state of downtown Knoxville as we know it.
BLANK sat down to discuss this story with Bernadette and Scott at a table inside the courtyard of Oodles restaurant, where Scott remembers his first impression of a collapsed roof that would create a waterfall in the middle of the building when it rained.
Here is our conversation about their wild ride and what they’ve got planned next. According to them, this is just the beginning.
BLANK: Does ‘Keep Knoxville Scruffy’ mean something to you because you saw the downtown area when it was at it’s scruffiest?
Scott West: Part of Knoxville’s history is from an article from the Wall Street Journal where they were degrading Knoxville when we got the World’s Fair by calling it a “Scruffy little city by the Tennessee River.” Years later Jack Neely wrote about it in his secret history books, so we picked it up. Much like Austin has embraced “Keep Austin Weird”, we’ve embraced “Keep Knoxville Scruffy”.
It’s the same idea, but in our case, the underlying meaning, which was meant to be a bit of a jab originally, was, “What makes Market Square special?”
In fact, the most important thing we’ve done downtown is, instead of luring a giant national chain in Market Square and making it “Anywhere, USA”, we opened locally-owned, locally-operated businesses. The pioneering efforts downtown are not national chains. The pioneering efforts of downtown are Knoxville businesses.
So “Keep Knoxville Scruffy” means, keep the things that make Knoxville special in tact. It means support local art, support local music, support local farmers markets, local businesses, that is what it means to us.
When we could get no one else to rent space from us, we created businesses to occupy the six buildings that we owned.
BLANK: You got your start in the Old City, is that correct?
Bernadette West: Yes, we had Earth to Old City in the small location that is just above Melting Pot. I always really liked Market Square even though it was a bunch of empty buildings and I wanted to move the business up here, but it was a family business and everybody else wanted to stay put. There wasn’t anything going on at all so that’s when we moved into a bigger location in the Old City. We actually did six events a year in the Old City. We were big proponents of having street parties down there, even though there was fencing that didn’t include our business. We were just outside of the boundaries.
BLANK: What did you see in Market Square that made you want to set up shop there?
BW: We always thought that it had to start on the top of the hill. We didn’t think the city was going to dedicate any efforts to the Old City, so I started looking at the buildings up here. I was looking at the building right next to Tomato Head but I also looked into the other buildings on the same side of the Square. I went to the courthouse and found out who owned those buildings. So I ended up mailing a letter to Boston to the guy who owned them. It turned out that he moved back and forth from Knoxville to Boston all the time. He was a Turkish man named Fikret Gencay, but everybody called him Frank. He was so impressed that I had written him a letter to Boston, so we met with him constantly…had coffee with him for probably over a year. He owned buildings on Gay Street as well. He just bought them at auction. But the Oodles building was the one I was really interested in.
SW: We kinda took turns hanging out with Frank and gaining his trust. But he would never let us in the buildings. And I finally figured out that it was because they were condemnable. So I told him, “Frank, we do not care what shape the building is in. We understand that we are buying air. We are buying a location, that’s it.” At that point, he let us in.
BW: We had intentions of moving Earth to Old City up here (to the Square). We knew, kinda, what we wanted to do in 2000.
Market Square, early 2000
BLANK: What was Market Square like when you bought the buildings?
SW: People get mad at me when I say this, but at that point, Knoxville was embarrassed of its downtown. In the early to mid Nineties, people from out of town would come to Earth to Old City on Sundays and ask, “Is this it? What else is there to do downtown?” At the time I was president of the Old City Neighborhood Association so I got with Jack Neely and borrowed his knowledge and wrote “The Lost Tales of the Old City Walking Tour.”
It would tell about Kid Curry shooting two deputies and riding the sheriff’s stolen horse across the Gay Street Bridge and all those kind of stories. It was funny, there was a writer from the New York Times who came through and I gave her a couple of brochures about history and how there were 40 businesses open in the Old City at the time. A few months later, on the cover of the Travel section, she had printed the brochure verbatim, which I was cool with, cause that means it must have been pretty well written.
But Market Square was tumbleweeds. Bernadette, who has unending energy, would
be painting all night long. At 4:00AM, I’d be so tired that I’d want to leave and I’d walk outside and there would be dozens of homeless people asleep under the farmer’s market shed. There was only one farmer who supplied the market at the time, and he died during the time we were working on the Pub, so it was basically vacant. It had a post-apocalyptic feel to it. That was just ten years ago.
BLANK: What was your vision for the Square at that point? What made you think that it would change?
SW: Before the city invested nine million dollars in the Square, before the parking garage and before Regal Cinemas relocated down town, we sat down and talked about what it should be. Most people were in favor of a two way street with parking at the doors and in the middle. Bernadette said, “I grew up in Germany and this is a Gem in the Southeast. This is the best thing Knoxville has going for it. It should be a pedestrian plaza; a town square.” She pushed and pushed until people were in favor of that plan and that helped make it the way it is. The idea was to get feet on the square instead of tires.
BW: Every city in Europe has a main plaza that is the hub of the town. Some cities will have several for the individual towns or villages. It’s a very common thing to see over there. I always knew that it could be what it is today.
BLANK: What made Market Square take off?
SW: There were five major events that I point to for the growth of the Square. The credit goes to all of these people and their ideas. Ashley Capps and AC Entertainment bringing Sundown in the City was huge for the Square. That drew thousands of people for those shows. People were experiencing downtown for the first time in a long time and were excited. Leigh Burch and the Sterchi lofts development on Gay Street helped too, because now you had 100+ residential rentals. And you’ve got Tomato Head. And David Dewhurst was coming onto the downtown scene at that point too. And what we did certainly helped out as well.
But the city of Knoxville had to be behind the revitalization of downtown or it would have been crippled. The city is behind Market Square, therefore funds went into the plaza itself and the parking garage. You have to have that or you can’t succeed. It all started with ‘Nine Counties, One Vision’ under the Victor Ashe administration, but a big pat on the back went to Mayor (now Tennessee Governor) Bill Haslam. He looked at that plan and said that it was a good idea. Most mayors want to change things that don’t have their name on it. He allowed it to happen and he has gotten credit, which actually was an Ashe plan to a degree. So in truth it was a series of administrations that made it happen. I give them tons of credit.
BLANK: When does all the federal trouble come in to the equation?
SW: In the same way that we couldn’t find tenants to put in the buildings we bought, we couldn’t find any banks to loan on Market Square. When we started developing thes
e buildings it was a lot more expensive than we realized. There was a lot of financial pressure on us. My brother was involved with Marijuana, and had made a lot of money through it. I basically told him that I could clean that money. About 30% of the money that we used for the buildings, not the businesses, came from my brother. The reason that the buildings were seized when we got indicted was because I was considered part of a conspiracy. The way conspiracy law works, it doesn’t matter if you touch it, all that matters is that you were a part of it. So because I laundered 2.1 Million dollars from his Marijuana sales, that made me a leader in the conspiracy.
BLANK: Considering how much you’ve put into your businesses and your town, has your indictment created a misconception about you?
SW: Well I don’t think it’s a misconception. What bothers people about me is pretty accurate. I did break the law. But I also went to prison and did the time for breaking the law. I’m willing to say, “Hey, I did the time, I’m not bitter, not resentful.”
The part that some people aren’t getting is, they’re not letting go. To the people who want to hate me forever, they’re going to hate me and there’s probably nothing I can do about it. They’ve got it in their minds to never forgive. But human beings do forgive. You have to do that or you couldn’t move forward in life.
The key point is this, there is law, then there’s morality, then there’s ethics. What I did, I’m OK with in terms of morality. I don’t smoke marijuana and I don’t sell marijuana, but I think people should have a right to do that. Right now I consider myself a good-intentioned bad guy. In ten years, I’ll be the good-intentioned good guy because Marijuana will be legal. It won’t change the fact that I was a criminal. The reason why I’m OK with myself is because I know where the law is gonna be. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ll be vilified in the future.
It’s important for people to know that when I went to prison for 4 and a half years, I did not lose that time. It was actually a great chapter in my life. That’s not to say I would ever choose to go there, and I never will again, but I used the time when I was there. I wrote four books. I worked out a lot and got in really good shape. I read and felt really healthy. It was a productive time for me. I didn’t lose it, I used it.
When Bernadette was in prison, she taught Yoga, she created a soccer league, she ran the art room…she didn’t just waste time either. You know, I have some ideas, but Bernadette executes. She is the one who actually gets stuff done. She was the linchpin of Market Square revitalization. She is a very great and productive human being. The only reason she ended up in prison was because she was married to me. If she didn’t plead guilty, I would’ve got 25 years. That’s about as good of a wife as you could have huh?
BLANK: So how are you operating in the same buildings now?
SW: We don’t have the buildings. The six buildings we owned were seized and sold. My sister reacquired one of the buildings from a man who bought it at the auction at a big markup after it all took place (The Wests paid $120,000 in 2001, it sold for $400,000 at auction in 2007 and Paula West McAnally bought it later for $550,000) and Bernadette and I recently bought another building next to the Preservation Pub.
BLANK: What was the original concept behind Preservation Pub?
BW: The whole premise of Preservation Pub was to raise money to help preserve the downtown buildings. Because it was in the best shape of all of the buildings, we were able to put something in there right away to help generate income to renovate the other buildings.
BLANK: Did you expect it to become the place to hang out for musicians and artists of all kinds coming through town?
BW: Well, I didn’t see it as being this huge musician thing, as it is now. We didn’t really do live music much when we first opened up. In the back of my mind it was something that I always wanted. I don’t always like to go out on Friday or Saturday night but I really like to dance. I wanted a place that would open every day of the week. That was one of my main goals. Now there are lots of performers of all kinds that come here. We have singer/songwriters, solo artists, full bands and because we have the second floor we have another group of artists who play there earlier in the evening as well.
We were limited to just music when we just had the first floor. We always planned on expanding. That was an idea from the get go, so when we were able to concentrate on growing, we could focus on all the problems we had about the first floor. Everything from it’s too smoky, to it’s too loud, to you can’t get anything to eat…we tried to solve those things on the second floor Speakeasy. That made it easier for us to expand into things like comedy or Write Nite.
RB Morris from the 1st show at Preservation Pub
BLANK: A lot of great Knoxville bands have adopted the Pub as their home base.
BW: We get a strong local following here. When bands come home from traveling, they always seem to come to the pub cause they know they’re going to see musicians hanging out. The beauty of Knoxville, you can get a lot of good, traveling, out of town bands on the way to their big show. Some of my favorite nights are early in the week when there’s a band that is really good that no one has heard of yet.
The kind of music you have here, the way it looks, those are things that are subconscious for people, but those are the things that identify the Pub. We like all genres of music and realize that it can come from anywhere. It takes a lot of work. When I was booking the music I made it a point to listen to every single email. It’s hard to do because you get so many, but I have to give each one of them a chance because they could be the next Cage the Elephant or The Avett Brothers. That’s why we got those bands to play here.
BLANK: What advice would you give bands who are trying to play out or set sail on tour?
BW: It’s a total package. You have to be professional about it when you’re sending out emails. You need a website that is very easy to navigate, you need to be able to listen to the music with one click basically, you need good artwork…it doesn’t have to be professional, it just needs to look like you’re taking it seriously. Paying more attention to your posters and your artwork, that makes me think that you’re going to pay attention to other details as well.
BLANK: Talk about the concerts on Market Square that took place in 2012.
SW: When AC Entertainment ended their iconic concert series this year, we thought, well, if we don’t step in here, there might not be big concerts on the Square anymore. We put a ton of energy into those events. They support a lot of local businesses and make a lot of people happy.
BW: If we have an event on the Square, everybody should benefit. You don’t want to have live music every night on the square or else it would get redundant but events every now and then are great. I think it’s great to have the children’s stuff on the square, the movies, everything, but it has to be balanced. There were a lot of grumblings that came from the tail end of Sundown in the City. I’m sure there was some credibility to that, but I never saw any of those things. I always saw it as something that was beneficial, maybe not in the immediate, but it got all those people down here. They may not spend that $20 that night, but they’ll probably come back to see what it’s like when it’s not so crowded. I went to each place on Market Square and asked what they thought about doing more events on the stage and most of them agreed that it would be good and they helped out a bit with it.
BLANK: So can we expect more events in 2013?
BW: It may be something where we go back to having them on Thursday nights. Saturdays are already pretty good days for the places on the Square. We’re looking at some sponsorships as well that would help out. These things are a celebration of city life. You can enjoy the city that you live in and show it off with entertainment.
BLANK: You’ve now got the first rooftop bar downtown. How did the idea become reality?
BW: When I was in college I learned that you have your footprint of land. That means I own that piece of land to infinity to the sky. So if you can build it soundly, you can build it as high as you’d like. In Germany, everyone has their little plot of land and they take advantage of it. We had the space to make this functional with a greenhouse like the ones you see in other big cities in the United States. We decided to create a beer tree on our Moonshine Rooftop Garden as well that will look like a huge Elm tree sticking out of the roof. We went to Bell Buckle, TN to learn a technique called faux bois, which is the art of making concrete look like wood. We’ve talked to four different companies about doing solar panels up here but I swear, Solar Panel people are like the used car salesman of the hippie world. It’s a natural resource that needs to be captured.
SW: (Laughs) What we want to do is to provide our customers with Guinness-crusted Solar Pizzas. Pizzas made by the power of the sun with veggies grown on the roof in the greenhouse.
BLANK: The footprint is growing with the new acquisition next to Preservation Pub. What’s next?
The Wests overlooking Market Square, 2012
SW: In the short term, The Preservation Alley has capacity for about 50 people and the patio adds another 20 more, so it’s a non-smoking intimate place. It’s a fairly small place but it’s perfect for all-ages parties and gatherings. We don’t charge for the space, we just make sure that people are going to eat and drink a bit. In 2013, we plan to open Scruffy City Hall. It’ll be an event space for parties or for bands that have outgrown the pub or are too big to play the pub.
Imagine a scruffy Bijou…when you walk in the door, the first several feet will be merchandise and a place to buy tickets for the show. Then you’ve got two big stain glass doors that will open an hour before the show and you walk in to a big open room on the first floor. There’s a bar with 40 taps on one side of the room and there’s a stairwell that goes up to the second level. There will be balcony seating looking over the stage. Downstairs will be assembly seating with maybe 300 people standing-room. There will be another 100-150 people upstairs with servers who will take care of you while your seated.
As for the future, you can expect more of the same from the Wests. They have helped create an inviting, safe place for locals and tourists alike in Market Square. And as downtown development stretches it tentacles down Union Street and beyond, Knoxville is proud to have Market Square as their community hub. It has evolved from Knoxville’s vagrant headquarters to a place where children play in fountains and musicians serenade patio customers nearly every day of the week.
Market Square has come a long way and though they haven’t done it alone, the Wests have worked through thick and thin to leave their mark on its history.
