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Seven Days

Wednesday, August 28
It's reported that ESPN's college football promotional ads that featured Vol fans as pig-totin' hillbillies have been pulled from further showing, following protests from Voldom. The network says the Vol fans want the ads recast to show Kentucky basketball fans as pig-totin' hillbillies.

Thursday, August 29
Knox County will be receiving state and federal funds for surveillance, trapping, and testing mosquitoes for West Nile virus, state health officials say. Sheriff Tim Hutchison immediately offers the services of one of his six helicopters to assist in mosquito surveillance.

Friday, August 30
A state legislator from Newport is accused of participating in a scheme to produce phony diplomatic passports. Federal authorities probably misunderstood that such documents are required of all residents of Cocke County who wish to visit other localities.

Saturday, August 31
The Vol football team lays a 47-7 lickin' on Wyoming in its season opener in Nashville. Wait a minute. Did the Legislature sneak home games over to Nashville instead of adopting tax reform?

Sunday, September 1
The News-Sentinel completes the first phase of its move from its downtown offices. The second phase reportedly will involve moving the newspaper to its Cincinnati corporate headquarters.

Monday, September 2
The 23 employees of Consolidated Freightways in Knoxville are told they no longer have jobs. Happy Labor Day.

Tuesday, September 3
The state identifies a number of area streams, including Knoxville's First, Second, and Third Creeks, as unacceptably polluted. KUB officials immediately respond that Knoxville's drinking water comes from somewhere else—anywhere else.

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Yep, sometimes we like to toss out an easy one just to prove we're good sports. Many readers were able to identify last week's Knoxville Found, and knew it resides on the corner of Clinch and 16th Street, just up from the Scottish Rite Temple. Scott Fugate explained it in even more detail, noting that the monument honors the 79th New York Volunteer regiment, which "manned the parapet of Fort Sanders when Burnside's troops repulsed the attack of Longstreet's Corps on Nov. 29 (I think), 1863. They were noted for wearing highland attire (after the Scottish custom) prior to the war." Alas, Scott also predicted, "I'm probably 24 hours late on this," and said prediction was also correct. Despite Scott's valiant effort, Amy Arnold of Knoxville was first to correctly identify the monument, and so, is awarded a fitting prize: Adventures of a Nineteenth-Century Medic: The Life and Times of Dr. William Hunt, 1810-1882, which includes an account of Dr. Hunt's experiences during the battle of Knoxville.

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

BLACK CULTURAL CENTER
Friday, Sept. 6, 11 a.m.
Saturday, Sept. 7, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.
1800 Melrose Ave.
Ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new facility on Friday, Grand Opening Harambee Festival Saturday.

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
Thursday, Sept. 12
1:30 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
The Sprankle Building rezoning is on the agenda. But it's been on for the previous six meetings, too, only to be postponed.

Botanical Cemetery
Lakeshore plan calls for many changes

Fitness buffs and nature lovers stroll, jog, power-walk, and meander through Lakeshore Park on a daily basis. But few are aware they're walking over someone's grave.

That is—someday it'll be someone's grave. In less than two decades, the green rise that faces the intersection of Northshore and Lyons View drives will become a final resting place for some of Tennessee's military dead, as the East Tennessee Veterans Cemetery expands across Lyons View.

A 23-acre section devoted to 5,000 burial plots isn't the only change in store for the park. The Lakeshore Mental Health Institute now operates five large buildings and four cottages on roughly 80 of Lakeshore Park's 178 acres. A land plan on file with the state shows that the institute will shift to the southwest corner of the park, where the empty 250-bed Waterside dormitory stands.

Under the plan, which was based on drawings by Ross/Fowler Landscape Architects, a narrow border of parkland would divide the new campus and the cemetery annex. That will leave more than 110 acres eventually controlled by the city of Knoxville for a park and walking trail, ball fields, soccer fields, and picnic areas (most of which already exist)—plus a 28-acre botanical garden slated to open as early as 2004.

"It's not going to be a botanical garden in the sense of you march along and there's a row of plants," says Tom McAdams, a member of the Lakeshore Park's board of directors, adding that it would be more of an "estate garden" and less scientifically laid out. McAdams says there are several parties working on different layouts for the gardens and that those plans should be unveiled this fall. The board hopes that the botanical gardens would be paid for out of a combination of city and private money, with the bulk of the funds coming from donations.

So when might all these changes begin? As far as the city and the park board are concerned, as early as next year. Problem is, a lot of this is dependent upon moving the mental institute, a state-run facility that in recent years has suffered from the same neglect as hundreds of other state-run organizations. Lakeshore Mental Health Institute superintendent Lee Thomas has unsuccessfully lobbied the General Assembly for the past three years to come up with $1.8 million in planning funds. When asked about the idea that the Legislature will fund the cost of building a new $35 million facility, Thomas says "I'm not optimistic. The real issue the state faces right now is whether they want to keep putting money to patching this facility."

Currently, the ceiling of the institute's 118-year-old administration building leaks to the point where the third floor has been closed off from use. Thomas estimates it will cost $200,000 to fix the roof and an undetermined amount more to update elevators in all the institute's buildings. And that's just part of what's needed.

Because the institute no longer provides lifetime care, Thomas estimates the average long-term stay is a little more than five years, and six days or less for short-term patients. It no longer needs the kind of room as did the communal asylum of old, when it reached a 2,800-resident peak in the early 1970s. So the new campus would only occupy about 22 to 30 acres.

Meanwhile, the cemetery would be growing because of the advanced age of World War II and Korean War soldiers and sailors. The cemetery, which opened in 1990, consists of 20 acres and more than 6,000 burial plots. More than a third of those plots are already filled, and the remaining plots will be filled in two decades. According to Al Kovash, cemetery administrator with the Tennessee Department of Veterans' Affairs, it has been the plan all along for the cemetery to jump across Lyons View. "There is no property behind us, at the cemetery, and there's no other land available there," Kovash says. "That (annex) would probably give us another 15 or 17 years."

The multi-use phase of Lakeshore's history dates back about 10 years. In the early 1990s, with the mental health institute shrinking, a non-profit group called Knox Youth Sports approached the state with the idea of opening up the institute's land for ball fields. Eventually, Gov. Ned McWherter and Mayor Victor Ashe worked out a deal under which the state gave the city 20 acres and agreed to lease another 60 acres free of charge. In exchange, the city agreed to demolish some old buildings and take care of the property.

Just as the institute welcomed the advent of a public park surrounding its campus, Thomas has no qualms with it bordering a cemetery. "The sad thing is, you can sit here and hear the 21-gun salutes every day," he says of the increasing number of burials. "After what (veterans) do for us, I'd be all for burying them on the town square, if that was possible."

Apparently there's never been anything hush-hush about plans for the park. It just seems that, like the institute itself, it's well-used and highly visible, but never given much thought. "This plan was not generated with any isolation of the people who live next to us," Thomas says. "None of us have tried to keep this a secret."

—Ann Hinch

Tourism Quandary
Hotel numbers are up, but the rising tide doesn't lift all boats

Some of the folks in Knoxville's tourism industry are scratching their heads about the wonderful season they missed.

Knox County had a good summer in terms of hotel visits. According to national hotel consultant Smith Travel Research, hotel occupancy in the Knoxville market rose 11 percent in April, 6 percent in May, 4 percent in June, and 10 percent in July. (The numbers for August—when Knoxville expected a boost from the Junior Olympics—won't be in for several weeks.)

Meanwhile, some of Knoxville's tourist attractions did poorly. After a good spring, the Knoxville Zoo had a disappointing July. The Knoxville Museum of Art had a very slow summer, drawing only a fraction of the crowd it had hoped. And the Three Rivers Rambler train that leaves from Volunteer Landing says its numbers are down "pretty significantly" from last summer.

However, not every venue that draws tourists had such a slow season. The East Tennessee Historical Museum said it had its best year ever. The Women's Basketball Hall of Fame says it did well during the Junior Olympics by having specially arranged evenings for the attendees.

The complex picture raises obvious questions about what visitors did while they were in Knoxville this summer. As the new Tourism and Sports Corp. under director Gloria Ray gets to work, the contrast will also serve as a reminder that there are a lot of moving pieces to Knoxville's tourism industry.

David Duncan, the former chairman of the Tourist Commission and the new vice chairman of the Tourism and Sports Corp., says the hotel numbers come as wonderful news.

"I think Knoxville as a market was on the rise even before the Junior Olympics and the Convention Center," he says. Duncan says that the Honda Hoot motorcycle convention in June really helped, and he says Knoxville may be benefiting from the number of families choosing to vacation by car instead of by plane in the wake of September 11. But he says he can't really explain why several individual attractions did not do well. "The only guess I have is that the Convention and Visitors Bureau focused on meetings and groups as opposed to the individual tourist market," he says.

The Knoxville Zoo is the most visited tourist attraction in Knox County. Through the end of June, the zoo was on target to meet this year's goal of 395,000 visitors. But July was a slow month, especially in terms of tourists (defined as people who visit the zoo from more than 100 miles away). In July, about 25,000 tourists visited the zoo, down from about 32,000 the year before.

Zoo executive director Jim Vlna believes that the main reason for the slump was weather. "It was hot in July 2001, but not as hot as it was this July," he says. "We have found that once the heat passes a certain point, it really affects our business."

Vlna says August's numbers are coming in "pretty good" and estimates—based on the number of returned coupons—that 265 Junior Olympians came to the zoo. He says that the zoo hopes to get a big boost from its recently opened Grasslands Africa exhibit.

"We are also looking into the idea of coming up with some new ways to cool off the visitors next year," he says.

Another attraction that was disappointed by the summer was the Knoxville Museum of Art. The KMA had expected up to 50,000 visitors this summer. Instead, 15,000 came. "We expected a lot of people to come to see the Lure of the West exhibit, and they just didn't," says KMA marketing manager Letitia Kastura. Kastura says KMA went to considerable lengths to attract Junior Olympians, including printing cards for distribution in the Junior Olympics goody bag and buying a big advertisement and discount coupons in a special Knoxville News-Sentinel issue that was distributed to attendees. "We didn't receive a single one back," she says.

Karen Claussen is the vice president of the Gulf & Ohio Railways, and as such runs the Three Rivers Rambler on Volunteer Landing. She says business was slow this year, and that she did not receive a detectable boost during the Junior Olympics. Her explanation for why business was down is the overall economic downturn. "My gut feeling is that people are spending their money differently than they used to," she says. However, she also says that there are a few things that went wrong that she didn't fully understand, such as a notable decrease in the number of organized tour groups.

"I think there are a lot of hidden rules to the tourist industry," she says. "I guess we have to learn a lot of them."

In contrast to Knoxville's other tourist venues, the East Tennessee Historical Museum had its best summer ever. According to public relations director Shane Rhyne, attendance was up 49 percent in July and 49 percent in August. But Rhyne says that the main impetus for the increase was not so much tourists, but locals. "The World's Fair exhibit was by far the most popular temporary exhibit that we have ever done as far as local attendance is concerned," he says. Rhyne said that the museum's strategy of targeting locals first is what paid off. "We are a heritage attraction, and we have been very aggressive about drawing people from here in Knoxville," he says.

—Bill Carey