NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION

The creation of the Neighborhood Organization started with a group of mothers that wanted to better the lives of their families. These women enlisted the aid of social and housing activists, and a renaissance began. This group evolved into the Fourth & Gill Neighborhood  Organization, whose purpose was to create a better neighborhood and improved housing standards for those residing in the dilapidated and ignored Victorian homes. Armed with urban renewal money, the first housing and quality of life improvements began. As this program was gathering momentum, the gas crisis of the early 1970s led to a "back to the city" movement throughout the country. 

​

Knoxville's growing professionals discovered the once fine homes that comprise the neighborhood, and these "new immigrants" began to buy and restore many of its houses.

Over the past decades, social activism and home restoration have combined to ensure that the renewed Fourth & Gill Neighborhood is an urban success story. There remain houses that are unrestored, but the prospects for this century-old part of Knoxville have never been brighter. l11e community's architectural attributes combine with the social history of the people who built and rebuilt the neighborhood, and who continue to rehabilitate its buildings. It's a 19th and 20th century neighborhood, but also a 21st. It's not uncommon to find a resident who has moved three or four times in the last twenty years, but never more than five blocks, leaving a chain of renovated houses behind them. And new, infill houses have been built on lots where other buildings have been lost, drawn to this urban neighborhood of friendly neighbors and walkable streets.