Gay Street

Gay Street is a road in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, that navigates the core of the city's downtown zone. Since its improvement in the 1790s, Gay Street has filled in as the city's foremost budgetary and business avenue and has assumed an essential part in the city's recorded and social development. The road contains Knoxville's biggest places of business and most established business structures. A few structures on Gay Street have been recorded on the National Register of Historic Places.

Some portion of Charles McClung's unique 1791 plat of Knoxville, Gay Street was a point of convergence for the early political movement of both the city and in addition the State of Tennessee. By 1850, Gay Street was home to three-fourths of Knoxville's business activities, and in 1854, the road turned into Knoxville's initially cleared road. On the eve of the Civil War, Gay Street was the site of synchronous Union and Confederate enlisting rallies. After the war, Gay Street saw broad business improvement as railroad development conveyed a mechanical blast to Knoxville.

Social foundations built up along Gay Street incorporate the Lawson McGhee Library 1886, the Bijou Theater 1909, the Riviera Theater 1920, the Tennessee Theater 1928, and the East Tennessee History Center 2004. The Knoxville Journal, Knoxville Whig, and Knoxville Register were all once headquartered on Gay Street, and radio stations WNOX and WROL both communicate from Gay Street at different circumstances amid the twentieth century.