February 14, 2014 - The City of Knoxville will be donating 500 bricks from the McClung Warehouses to Knox Heritage, officials announced Friday.

Also Friday, as demolition of the last remaining McClung Warehouses building nears completion, City officials allowed a resident and a business, Sanders Pace Architecture, to move back into the building at 514 W. Jackson Ave. that had been ordered vacated for safety reasons since the Feb. 1 McClung Warehouses fire.

Knox Heritage, a nonprofit historic preservation advocacy group, plans to sell the commemorative bricks as a fundraiser to benefit its J. Allen Smith Endangered Properties Fund. Money raised from the sale of bricks from the lost McClung Warehouses will go to help save other historic and endangered properties.

After two fires, the last McClung Warehouses building on Jackson Avenue is being demolished because it poses a threat of collapsing. That risk also forced officials to close Jackson Avenue and vacate the building across the street from the fire scene.

Mayor Madeline Rogero has reiterated the City's commitment to redeveloping all of the properties it owns on Jackson Avenue, acquired in November 2013 in a settlement with a bankruptcy trustee. The City is hopeful that a developer or developers may be able to assume ownership of the properties from the City by the end of the year, following a public input process and the issuance of a Request for Proposals.