Metro Pulse/Secret History/New Knoxville

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It's not just a defunct brewery. Is it?

by Jack Neely

It's a new year. Out our windows, 150-year-old Market Square is an acre of red-clay mud, molting into a new place: new businesses, new residences, new restaurants, new parks, new movie theaters, new conflicts.

It's new all over. We've got a new convention center and a new symphony conductor and a new county executive and new strategies toward historic preservation and new residents on Gay Street and new tourism promoters and lots and lots of fresh new asphalt. And this year, after the longest mayoral administration in Knoxville history, we'll pick a new mayor.

This city seems to have a new sense of itself. If not pride, which has always been an elusive state here, Knoxville seems to have, at least, a new interest in itself. You can see it in the projects and hear it in the arguments.

Frustrating as they sometimes are, the arguments are surprising new evidence that people care. In years past, a few people made major decisions without much public debate. Looking back over the record, it's sometimes astonishing that many of these decisions, some of them bad ones, did not prompt memorable objection. Trees were cut down, significant buildings were demolished for parking lots, creeks were buried, streets closed, riverfronts obscured. You get the impression that people didn't care much one way or another. They do now.

A popular interest in the subject of Knoxville couldn't always be taken for granted a generation or two ago. Many once regarded "Knoxville" as a creaky, unfashionable, and faintly embarrassing concept that could be ignored, and perhaps sloughed off altogether, in a brave new automobile-driven world of subdivisions and shopping malls and lake houses.

But we weren't thinking about the costs of leaving our city to rot: in time lost in traffic, in air quality, in loss of forests and farmland, in the ever-lengthening supply lines of city services that make each remote new suburb more expensive to the taxpayer than the last. As Knoxville has grown, our density has dwindled. With a per-acre population only one-fourth what it was a century ago, we're spread so thin that Knoxville's on national charts as one of the most-sprawly cities of the 21st century. As Knoxville has become larger, Knoxville has become, in several important ways, less of a city.

Having a real city here again, even up here on this bluff where we had one 80 or 100 years ago, is beginning to seem like our best—or only—option for the new century. How to get there has been the point of contention. For at least a decade, a succession of students of urban issues has urged the mayor to consider a comprehensive city plan. He has consistently resisted the temptation. "Things change," he explains.

Consider three cities: Knoxville, Asheville, and Chattanooga. Often compared over the years, all three cities are located on the same river, whether you call it the French Broad or the Tennessee. All are metro centers of mountainous regions known for Republican conservatism. For Southern cities, all three have an unusually industrial base, now in a state of decline.

Another thing they have in common is that about 15 years ago, as Victor Ashe became mayor of Knoxville, all of them had blighted downtowns.

But there was one big difference that favored those other cities: in 1987, Asheville and Chattanooga were both in the early stages of implementing comprehensive city plans that coordinated parking, tourist attractions, residential development, and historic preservation, employing private foundations and public government in effective projects to re-inhabit the inner city.

In the 15 years since, both Asheville and Chattanooga have become distinguished models of downtown development, each of them described as superlatives for one thing or another in the national press.

Where's Knoxville? As Chattanooga and Asheville have comprehensively rebuilt themselves, our meandering Big-Step approach has landed us in dog poop more than once: the downtown baseball stadium, the justice center, the Worsham Watkins plan, Universe Knoxville. All those ill-planned proposals dwindled and died, some at great public expense.

Meanwhile, the mayor has prompted several of the progressive steps seen in planned cities: riverfront development, residential incentives, greenways and parks. Unconnected with each other, many of them don't work as well as they should. Take Volunteer Landing: combining boat slips with restaurants, residences, and a fine gift shop, it's a wonderful place if you can get down there. But if you don't know what you're doing, you can't—at least not with much confidence or grace. Pedestrians rarely risk it, and drivers, intimidated by the dumb high-speed interstate-style mergings, often lose their way and end up back on the interstate or rocketing toward UT. Better linkages are a big part of modern city plans.

We've witnessed a lot of waste and missed some opportunities. But as the city lurches around, some of the mayor's deficiently planless initiatives are hitting targets. By some accounts, Knoxville is now reinhabiting its core with downtown residents better than some larger cities, like Nashville. Can we catch up with those planned cities, in spite of ourselves?

The mayor's last year will be, at least, interesting to watch. Maybe he does have a city plan, stowed secretly away somewhere up on the sixth floor, but he'd be loath to call it that.