PICTURES FROM CALVIN, TAKEN SATURDAY, 11/25/07
THE RIVERVIEW APARTMENTS PHOTO ALBUM IS FORECOMING
The 92 Riverview apartments will be torn down to make way for 24 single-family homes and eight duplexes.
By CLIFFORD JEFFERY
cjeffery@timesnews.net
KINGSPORT — In recent years, the low-income apartment complex in Riverview may not have the best reputation, but to a group of people who gathered at the Elks Lodge in Riverview Saturday afternoon, the complex is home.
Granted, it isn’t what it used to be, said Marcus Blye.
MARCUS & TANYA BLYE BEING INTERVIEWED BY CLIFFORD JEFFERY OF THE TIMES-NEWS
Blye lives in Knoxville now, but he grew up in Riverview. He and his wife, Tonya, own Karworkz auto detailing in Knoxville, but returned to Kingsport Saturday for a reunion of Riverview residents. While Marcus grew up in the Kingsport complex, Tonya, a native of Knoxville, has watched that city’s progress on a revitalization effort that Kingsport officials hope to mirror.
The apartment complex was first opened in 1940. There was no heat on the top floor when Blye was growing up there. He remembers the whole family running downstairs first thing in the morning to get warm. Before Blye’s time, Harry Smith remembers when each apartment had a coal-fired furnace and coal box in the back.
THIS PHOTO COURTESY CLIFFORD JEFFERIES, KINGSPORT TIMES-NEWS
Sisters Gail Evans and Kathy Evans grew up in apartment No. 48, next door to Rickie Hankins-Kelley in No. 47. Rickie lived there with Frances Hankins-Haley and Frances’s mother, Henrietta Hankins. Henrietta was a tenant in apartment No. 47 from 1940 to 1988. She died Nov. 18, leaving Mamie Gillenwater, Smith’s grandmother, one of the last living tenants from the opening of Riverview apartments.
While many of the initial tenants have died, Blye said their relatives still live there. Marcus and Tonya Blye hope, when the apartments are torn down and individual homes built, that there would be a place there for those families. Gillenwater said, as the oldest living resident, she was given first choice of the new homes.
An $11.9 million HOPE VI grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is being used to build low- and moderate-income housing. The 92 Riverview apartments will be torn down to make way for 24 single-family homes and eight duplexes.
The apartments were small, Blye said, but the complex was a community. There were fixtures in the complex, like Betsy Hipps who gave Chick-O-Sticks candy to Riverview’s young people and “Aunt Tootsie who worked at the school. She knew all the kids and, if anyone got in trouble at school, their parents knew about it before they even got home.”
Gail and Kathy Evans remembered walking to Edge’s Place for pork chop sandwiches, hot dogs or “the world’s best hamburgers.” There used to be a drive-in theater where the Eastman Chemical Co. business office is now, Frances said. Young people used to walk over there, or down the street to the Dairy Mart.
As the businesses went into decline and then closed, Riverview became a sad place to come back to and visit, Smith said. Like Marcus, Smith hopes the HOPE VI provides a breath of fresh air and needed help for those living in Riverview.
