Just one link with lots of comments, in which "Big O" walks through my town and does a pretty decent vlog.
Comments:
"Big O" doesn't sound local and mentions, in the video, having come from Atlanta. An immigrant! Probably that's typical of the best "walking tour of a small town" vlogs. People who have always lived in a small town tend to overlook things that they're not advertising. You get a better view of the town through fresher eyes. More balance. More willingness to focus on things like litter, and, by focussing on one piece of litter in this video, celebrate the general tidiness of the streets.
Gate City was only starting to talk about building the middle school when I was a student; actually built it when my sister was in high school. She worked on the clean-up crew in the summer! I missed all the fun! The old college building, which housed grade eight when I was in school (grade seven had to use classrooms in the elementary school building), was pulled down and replaced with a nice new elementary school gym. When I was in elementary school nobody thought kids needed a gym. On the other hand, when I was in grade nine, people thought ninth graders were competent to mingle with high school students in "open" classes, divided by how much people had already learned rather than when they were born, which made high school more interesting than grade school had been.
Gate City does not actually have two fire departments. The one located "in the old Food City building" on Route 23 is for Weber City, which has its own zipcode. They are two separate organizations. The quiet older man walking around the fire truck is our Fire Chief; he still fights fires, operating a truck and directing the younger men. He was the first responder who arrived in time to save the Cat Sanctuary from a chimney fire in 2015.
"Pal's" is a local fast food chain. Their signs always feature "Pal's Instructions"--sometimes calling attention to new menu items, sometimes giving advice on life in general. The pastel checkered buildings were challenged under an eyesore law in Kingsport, where the chain's based, and ruled to be just exactly as ugly as local eyes could be asked to endure. Anything tackier would absolutely be illegal. The Pal's in the video is managed by a relative of mine and is my pick of the fast food places in town, though the McDonald's and Taco Bell are writer-friendly and have better food selections than Hardee's.
The glass plant's been closed for a while.
Q.S.Q. was named from its owners' initials and closed when the last one died. It and the laundromat next door have been known to attract drug traffic, because neither is monitored in the evening.
How much of a drug problem do we have, really? "Scag" is about the rudest name a local person of my age and background ever called anybody. We used it to mean any drug addict including, if we wanted to be nasty, cigarette smokers. Decent human beings do not talk to scags. But mild non-prescription stimulants such as coffee and tea were always socially acceptable and, unfortunately, some people trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs have become meth addicts. Others have become addicted to prescription painkillers as a result of trying to work through injuries or compete with their grandchildren's generation on jobs. So we do have a drug problem, with the attendant social problems, illegal traffickers trying to take over blocks or open-air markets, addicts stealing property or engaging in prostitution to support their habit, people falsifying their medical records to get more prescription painkillers for resale. About 2000 some too-clever-for-her-own-good body got a grant to open a methadone clinic and twelve-step group meeting place. There weren't a lot of heroin users interested in methadone, and my understanding is that someone closer to Kingsport took over that business, but Gate City has always had plenty of twelve-steppers. Classic alcoholics, mostly harmless, they don't really bother anybody but just hang around downtown lowering the tone of Kane Street. Drug activity usually takes place around the state line and involves the welfare-and-other-kinds-of-addicts brought in to stock those awful apartment towers. Yes, there's a lot of it.
Nancy Broadwater was the vet who offered to euthanize Mogwai-cat when her hind legs went spastic. I've been told that that degree of spasticity really is fatal to a majority of cats who develop it...as with polio, though in cats it's caused by a different virus. The odds might really have been against Mogwai making a full recovery, but she did. A year after Dr. Broadwater recommended putting her down, she'd grown up with all her oddly proportioned body parts fitting together into a classic Siamese-type body shape, and become a beautiful, healthy, athletic cat with funny-looking spots on her face. She did look freaky and as if she might not have been meant to live as long as she did, though, as a kitten. I don't really blame Dr. Broadwater. There are just cats who are dumb animals, useful as small predators but pretty much interchangeable, and cats who contribute as much to your family as any of the humans and more than your brother-in-law...Mogwai was one of the latter. I have felt sort of...weird...about Dr. Broadwater ever since. Like the way you feel about the Canadian government trying to salvage its government medical system by urging everyone with a chronic disease to "choose" suicide. It's not possible to hate Canada but...ick.
"West Jackson Street or whatever"? Jackson Street buildings are numbered either "west" or "east" from that central location.
There is not a lot to see in Gate City after 5:00 p.m. When the street lamps come on, some stores keep lights on for security but hardly any are open to the public. There's not a lot of traffic in the daytime. Generally the town looks liveliest between 8 and 9 a.m. and slows down to a siesta pace by mid-afternoon.
Broadwater Drugs has changed a great deal. It was once the classic 1950s American "drugstore," with all the over-the-counter pharmaceuticals getting legitimacy from being sold next to racks of greeting cards, books, toys, snacks, and the classic soda-fountain bar. High school kids might stop for "Cokes" (generic term including other brands of soda pop) and hamburgers at the Campus Drive-In. (Once long ago Gate City had a two-year teachers' college--back when a two-year course was thought to qualify teachers.) Elementary school students, and many of their parents, hung out after school at "the drugstore." It was called that because a Broadwater owned it, though someone from a nearby town also operated a drugstore, without a bar, when I was growing up. In the 1990s the store passed down to the next generation, who closed the bar and took out the fun stuff, having determined that the money was in having a drive-through pharmacy and displaying only "home medical supplies." It went from being a social hub to doing a tightly limited, strictly confidential trade. I've heard that this decision paid. A lot of people like doing small-town gossip but those people are, if possible, more fanatical about their own privacy than those of us who stay out of the gossip.
Southern Graphics looks dead at sundown, when the building is probably empty, but it's a nice, modern print shop. They do everything from signs to books, but they're not publishers, merely printers. They print all our high school yearbooks and most of our local history books.
One of the few businesses that aren't located on Kane or Jackson Street is the telephone and cable company, up the hill to the left on Woodland Street. Apart from that I think we really might see "it all" in this video.
Where "Big O" stops is across the street from the elementary school, the School Board, a row of houses that are "suburban" enough to have had a cat sanctuary (when I was growing up they were patrolled by a free-range bantam hen), and then the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But he's right to turn back, because he started so late. There's nothing to see there after dark. A woman walking out there alone, here I stand to testify, is likely to get the "pretty little girl / lady of your age" (note the absence of anything in between, any willingness to acknowledge that women are ever competent responsible adults) "shouldn't be out alone after dark" kind of annoyance. A man just might be arrested.
When he walks back and looks up King Alley, nothing's going on in the parking lot behind the stores. At one time that parking lot housed a Bristol-Jenkins bus station. (The buses, old school buses painted pale green, ran from Bristol to Kingsport to Gate City to a few other towns ending with Jenkins. The fare for a ride between two stations was a quarter. I rode in from Kingsport on a B-J bus once, the last year the company was in business, 1976.) After the bus company shut down there was still a cab stand up into the early 2000s. I looked for a cab in 2006 and was told that all three of Gate City's cab services had shut down in 2005. Since then the alley has been monitored to keep out illegal activity, which means that most of the time it's dead, but sometimes it's used for open-air concerts and parties.
The Maple Tree Cafe replaced the Roberts Family Bakery Cafe, former home of this web site. Mr. Roberts died and Mrs. Roberts wanted to concentrate on running her AirBNB since it had been less damaged by the COVID panic. She sold the cafe and the gift shop to old friends from Tennessee, where she grew up. Immigration is such a nasty thing if your children want to get a good price on a store, such a wonderful thing if they want to date someone who already lives here and won't try to pull them away. Grandma Bonnie Peters grew up in Indiana. Adayahi immigrated from Wise County. This web site will always be liberal about individual immigrants, even if we can't encourage them, but does observe that, when local people complain about "carpetbaggers" liberalizing the local Republican Party or inflating property values, those local people are getting what they deserve for not sponsoring my book biz.
That "Antique Mall" and "Antique Alley" used to be the Hackney Furniture store and Nichols Department Store. People miss what used to be in those buildings. Alas the mortality of humankind. No living Hackney seems to have wanted to sell furniture and no living Nichols (or Nickels or various other spellings; they're all one family, they were here before Noah Webster brought in the idea of standard spelling, and the name is German) wanted to keep up the big department store building. What's in those buildings now is overpriced but not bad, though currently the corner of the Nichols Building is occupied by an "Italian bistro" that is pretty disgusting.
"Big O" doesn't mention the little building tucked in between courthouse and law firm behind that statue of a soldier. The statue was done by Jim Speers. The building was the quaint little independent local library I loved as a child; after that it's been used by the Historical Society and by business owners' groups. Both deserve a good close look, by daylight.
And yes, isn't it funny how most of the businesses located within a block of the county courthouse are law firms? There's a bail bonding company, too, if you know where to look. However, a wonderful third-or-fourth-generation hardware store remains to be discovered in that Part II video..
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