Home Tour Almost Here

Our neighborhood is fortunate to have several things going for it with this tour.  First, our tour has a great reputation around the area.  We are widely recognized as having the best tour in East Tennessee and many people mark their calendar every year so they won't miss the Victorian Holiday Home Tour.  We are even getting people coming in from out of town to join us.  Last year, several people came up from Atlanta just to go on our tour.  This year we have added announcements about the tour in regional and national magazines such as Old House Journal and the AAA magazine.  

Second, we are blessed with a dedicated group of people who work countless hours as the tour committee to make sure that the tour comes off in a smooth and professional manner.  This group starts meeting as early as February and meets monthly, then bi-weekly and finally weekly as tour time gets closer.  They do everything from soliciting people to have their homes on the tour, to selling ads in the calendar, to doing the calendar (thanks Jesse Ursery!).  They also make sure that everything runs smoothly from getting the buses and porta-potties to arranging for luminaries (thanks Lynne Palmer), to distributing tickets, to making sure the homeowners know what to do (thanks Chester Kilgore) and have enough people to help them in their homes.  This year's tour chairperson is Penny Baxter.  Thanks Penny for a great job under unusually difficult conditions.

Third, this neighborhood is fortunate to have a large supply of gracious homes that have survived years of abuse and neglect to stand as some of the finest homes in the region.  Along with these homes are a great group of neighbors who have brought these homes back and are willing to open them for the tour.  We cannot express our gratitude enough to these wonderful neighbors.  I do think that, if you were to ask them, they would tell you that it actually is fun!  Plus it is a great incentive to finish those refinements and restorations you are working on.

Fourth, we have worked diligently to make constant improvements to the tour.  Just in the past few years we have gone from two buses to four, and we are now using handicapped kneeling buses to make it easier to board and disembark.  We now stage porta-potties around the tour route for the convenience of our guests.  Last year, we put large bows on light poles around the neighborhood and this year we hope to add to them (thanks Tomica Miller!).  Several years ago we invited a local restaurant to offer coffee and cookies for sale during the tour and that has continued each year.  We have been fortunate to establish a relationship with First Tennessee Financial Centers where they act as agents for selling advance tickets to the tour at all of their branches.  Boy, are we grateful for that!  We have had banners made advertising the tour and these are placed in strategic locations around town several weeks in advance (thanks Pete Creel and Andy Anderson).  This year several new innovations are being instituted.  Permanent nametags have been made for tour committee members to wear during the tour.  This will allow people to easily and quickly identify tour members if necessary.  Each home this year will have identifying tags for each person helping in the homes.  These tags will have a picture of the home they are working in on them.  As always, we will have one of your neighbors riding each bus this year.  The new twist is that each of these people will now have a portable radio as well as the bus coordinator at the ticket booth.  This will allow us to improve the efficiency of the buses in running their routes and help eliminate long waits around the neighborhood.  

Of course, all of this work and effort lead to one thing.  That is a successful Victorian Holiday Home Tour and revenue for the Old North Knoxville neighborhood.  You might well ask what we do with the money we earn from the tour.  This money is used for a variety of things.  Among them is something dear to me, namely the cost of printing and mailing this newsletter.  Even though no one is compensated for their work on the newsletter (and that is probably a good thing), we still have to pay for printing and mailing.  With the revenues from the tour, we are able to do this at no cost to you.  Did you know your neighborhood supports not one, but three recipients of Meals-On-Wheels here in the neighborhood?  We also support the Fulton High School Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for Fulton graduates.  Let's not forget our ice cream social.  Your neighborhood group pays for all the costs associated with this favorite annual event.  In the past, these funds have paid for the period streetlights around the neighborhood, as well as the trees planted in the median between the sidewalks and the streets.  This year, we are having signs made that will direct visitors to our neighborhood and we are looking at banners to celebrate our neighborhood.  This is discussed elsewhere in the letter.  We also have funds available to help in emergency situations for residents of the neighborhood.  This coming year, we are going to take a hard look at possibly adding a NC-1 designation to the parts of our neighborhood not protected by the HC-1 overlay.  This will take funding to pay for mailings, meetings, and education.  These are just a few of the uses the money earned from the tour is put to.  If you have some thoughts or interest in this subject, we recommend that you attend our monthly meetings, the last Thursday of the month at 7PM at 1411 Armstrong.  Your participation and input are welcome.

Help from our neighbors on the tour is always appreciated.  If you have time and would like to help, whether on the tour committee or during the tour itself as a home worker, bus worker, ticket sales or some other way, please contact Dave Palmer at 673-8995.

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