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Introduction

Cheat Sheet

What's the masterplan?

What are these buildings going to look like?

Who's going to run all these things?

How are we going to pay for all this?

What's going to happen to Market Square?

How can the public give input? And who's listening?

Worsham and Watkins: Who are these guys?

Plan Map

  Recreating Downtown

Worsham and Watkins: Who are these guys?

The planners behind Knoxville's downtown development plan

by Joe Sullivan

What do the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center in Miami, the Cincinnati Bengals new training facility in Georgetown, Ky., and the renovations at Pushkin Plaza in Moscow and Oxford University in England all have in common?

The answer is that they are all the handiwork of Knoxville-based developers Earl Worsham and Ron Watkins. And these are only a small subset of a vast array of projects that the two men have separately undertaken on a global basis over the past four decades.

Now, they are collaborating for the first time in a firm formed for a singular purpose: redevelopment of downtown Knoxville. Worsham Watkins was the only Knoxville-based firm among the five that initially sought the role of working with the Public Building Authority on the master plan for downtown development that was unveiled last week. Under the terms of their selection, Worsham Watkins will have exclusive rights for 90 days after the plan is approved to present a fleshed-out development plan including the lease and financing commitments needed to make good on the $250 million private investment that's envisioned.

In assessing their chances of succeeding, it's instructive to ask just who are Earl Worsham and Ron Watkins and what are their credentials for carrying off the most ambitious undertaking that downtown Knoxville's ever seen.

Earl Worsham

Building came naturally to Earl Worsham. His father was a contractor who built the Andrew Johnson Hotel, among other local landmarks. Even while he was a UT student in the 1950s, young Worsham was building houses on his own. After graduation, he turned to bigger projects, starting with the Hamilton House apartment complex in Sequoyah Hills. Then came the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which Worsham developed in 1969-70 and owned in syndication with an investor group.

A quest for bigger things led Worsham to make a 1975 move to Atlanta, where the biggest building boom in the South was in full swing. As it turned out, Atlanta became a base for developments throughout the South and principally in South Florida. His Hyatt Regency Hotel and Convention Center in Miami was completed in 1984. Then he retained world-renowned architect I. M. Pei for his World Trade Center Tower (now the Centrust Tower). Getting the financing for these massive projects from consortiums of banks and insurance companies elevated his deal-making skills; and he also mastered the ins and outs of working closely with local governments in public/private partnerships.

"Miami was in terrible shape at the time. But it had a progressive, dynamic mayor, Maurice Ferré, who was very supportive of everything we were doing to revitalize the city," Worsham recalls.

Not so for a redevelopment concept that Worsham proposed for neighboring Miami Beach. His idea was to convert the down-on-its-heels south end of the beach into a Venice-like attraction replete with canals and gondolas, not to mention seven or eight hotels. While it didn't come to fruition because "the politics there swung against us," Worsham retained an ardor for European-style attractions that would manifest itself again.

Along with grand designs for new buildings, Worsham also had a bent for restoring old ones. He points with pride to his renovation of the historic but antiquated Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables in the 1980s and numerous buildings in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.

Worsham's increasingly global orientation grew to some extent out of another passion developed during his boyhood in Knoxville: fishing. This eventually led to his becoming chairman of Trout Unlimited International from 1984 to 1989, and bonds developed with those who shared his passion loomed large in both his business and his personal life. Largest among them was his relationship with an Englishman and his Danish wife, Margit, who had built a salmon fishing lodge in Norway that divorcé Worsham often visited. Following her husband's death in 1991, Worsham and Margit's relationship led to marriage in 1994, and the couple spend much of their summers at the Norwegian lodge. "She's a better fisherman than me," Worsham says admiringly.

During a fisherman-to-fisherman exchange program in 1986, Worsham met the man in charge of establishing DuPont's presence in Russia, who talked about the company's need for office space and asked if Worsham would be interested in getting involved. "Shortly afterward, I got a call from a representative of the Moscow city government. That led to the formation of a joint venture with a Russian partner which undertook the renovation of a derelict seven-story apartment building," Worsham recalls.

It was the first of 16 Moscow office buildings that his joint venture either constructed or renovated over the next five years, with a penchant for risk-taking that can hardly be ascribed to his East Tennessee roots. But in 1992 his venture began to turn sour amid mounting political and economic turmoil. "We sold out to a Russian company, but there was one problem: they didn't pay us." After a two-year struggle during which Worsham says the U.S. embassy in Moscow "did absolutely nothing to help us" the original sale was voided and a new deal struck with another company which "has made some payments but nothing like the full amount they owe us."

Following his marriage, and perhaps soured by his Russian experience, Worsham decided to forswear the world of high-stakes development deals and move back to his native East Tennessee. "I was 61 at the time [in 1994], and I really contemplated retiring to a life of fishing and hunting and other interests such as art collecting, which Margit shares with me," he says. Home became a lodge which sits atop Cove Mountain on his 3,300-acre Norton Creek Ranch that nestles up to the Smokies not far from Gatlinburg. But retirement didn't follow.

Worsham soon became a director and benefactor of the Knoxville Museum of Art and was spurred on by its president, Richard Ferrin, to get involved in the Big Steps planning process in which the city was then engaged under the aegis of the erstwhile Downtown Organization. One of the big steps targeted by this process was transformation of the World's Fair Park into a destination attraction that would draw more visitors to Knoxville. The park's adjacency to the KMA was one factor in this equation. The museum's state-of the art new facility was a source of civic price. But it wasn't drawing enough visitors or exhibits to make ends meet financially, and a major spur was needed.

Once involved, Worsham's creative juices started flowing again. He soon hatched an elaborate vision for a Tivoli America, patterned to some extent after Copenhagen's festive Tivoli Gardens. But Tivoli America also had a lot of Americana in it. His penchant for thinking big led Worsham into partnership with two of the nation's leading developers of urban entertainment complexes. Robert Snow brought the flair with which he had developed Church Street Station in Orlando into a hub of nightlife in a downtown area that had been moribund. Robert Barron brought the expertise with which the Rouse Organization had guided successful center city redevelopment projects such as Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

But Tivoli America was not to be, at least not in the World's Fair Park. After the city decided to locate its $160 million new convention center there, the Urban Land Institute was called upon for guidance in the master planning of the park and its environs. ULI's advice: preserve and enhance the park as an attraction unto itself and incorporate the sort of visitor attractions that Worsham had proposed into an overall downtown revitalization plan. This led to his collaboration with Watkins on the development of such a plan.

Ron Watkins

Before turning to real estate development in the mid-1970s, Ron Watkins spent a decade in the television business involved in everything from network sales management to program production.

The combination of these two careers stood him in good stead when it came to working with Scripps Cable Systems on what holds promise of becoming the capstone of Worsham Watkins' downtown development plans: studios and perhaps an institute for Scripps' three how-to-do-it cable television channels. While he won't acknowledge it, it's doubtful whether this prospective participation of the HGTV, Do-It-Yourself, and Food channels, with all its synergistic tie-ins to the city's new convention center, would have clicked without him.

Watkins' experience is, if anything, even more diverse than Worsham's. While his commercial development activities are far-flung, he's also well-known in Knoxville for his residential developments such as the Waterford Village on Western Avenue and Gettysvue in the western suburbs. Medical facilities in just about every state east of the Mississippi, corporate R&D facilities and, increasingly, college and university facilities, in both the U.S. and the U.K. have been more nearly his stock in trade. He's also done a lot of work for cities including waterfront developments in Michigan and Alabama and a central city development in Brighton Hove, England, that includes a hotel and a library as well as residential and retail components.

Where Worsham has tended to operate more nearly on his own, Watkins is an organization man. His firm, Partners & Associates, has about 250 employees spread among offices in Knoxville, Lexington, Kansas City, and St. Joseph, Mich. While the firm's name implies that he has partners, Watkins is in fact its sole owner.

Too much business travel brought Watkins back home to Knoxville after his first career in television. "I majored in real estate at UT, and while I really miss my associations in television and the perspective that they gave me, I'd always wanted to be in the real estate development business eventually." Watkins says. But at age 57, he's doing a lot of traveling once again. "Now that my children are grown, I really love to travel, especially in Europe." While he doesn't have an office in England, he spends considerable time working out of the offices of architects with whom he's collaborating on projects there.

His offices in downtown Knoxville are on the ground floor of the Pembroke condominiums, which are a renovation of the former Sprankle Building that served for many years as TVA's headquarters. His bent for downtown restoration was also manifest in his attempt to bring the S&W cafeteria back to life. "I tried every way I knew to make that work, but the building codes were prohibitive," Watkins recalled at a Metro Pulse forum on downtown development.

His showcase home, Sassafras, has panoramic views of Fort Loudoun Lake and the Smokies from a hilltop in the vicinity of Wright's Ferry. And the 34-acre spread is also home to lots of horses.

What fishing is to Worsham, polo is to Watkins. "Next to my wife Debbie and my children, polo is my passion," he allows. It's no coincidence that Knoxville's polo club, which he co-founded, also bears the name Sassafras. The club competes against teams from Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Florence. When it pulls out for a road trip, the entourage of 24 horses that accompany the team's four players is something to behold.

So will be the Worsham Watkins downtown development plan if it comes to fruition.