Mayor is moving toward a Gay Street cinema
by Barry Henderson
Mayor Bill Haslam staged a news conference in a light drizzle at the new entrance to Krutch Park Tuesday to announce that the long-discussed Gay Street multiplex cinema will be pursued by the city directly across Gay, behind the facade of the old, long-shuttered S&W Cafeteria. He said the intermodal transit center that’s been part and parcel of the city’s plans for that Gay Street block for the last couple of years will be “decoupled” from the theater. It will be sought separately on a different timetable, allowing the theater to be built sooner.
Good for him.
Less than two months after taking the oath of office, the mayor has taken a decisive stance on an issue that has generated controversy since its inception. The former administration wanted the theater to be a part of the transit center, allowing for federal participation in its financing. All well and good, if it had worked out that way. But the project, requiring federal approval at every stage, was taking too long.
I was an advocate of the transit-center/movie-theater concept, having used the similar downtown Chattanooga facilities, which work together admirably. As the process dragged on and no progress was evident in bringing the theater into fruition, the idea became less and less appealing. Knoxville needs the transit center and the federal help in creating it, but the downtown needs the movie theater even more and as soon as possible to capitalize on momentum that’s still building in its redevelopment.
Mayor Haslam has said as much, and County Mayor Mike Ragsdale is ready and eager to cooperate. His minion, Communications and Government Relations Director Mike Cohen, was standing there in the drizzle to show county backing for Haslam’s approach, which will involve using county property. The set of buildings on the east side of Gay Street in the block proposed for the theater, including the cafeteria and its Art Deco features, is owned by the county.
Haslam declined to discuss any cost projections for establishing the theater, saying lots is left for negotiation with prospective operators of a theater, and historic-preservation considerations have yet to be evaluated. The original estimates, which are now practically useless, suggested that the theater might cost about $6 million, and that $2 million of that cost might be paid by the Federal Transit Administration as part of the transit-center project. The mayor emphasized that his administration is committed to the transit center and is evaluating alternate sites downtown that would allow for such a center to be expandable for future needs. He said his decision to move it elsewhere came when he realized that the Gay Street site was not suited to expansion.
I was frankly worried that his Tuesday announcement would hedge on the question of separating the theater from the transit center—that he might merely call for a fresh public process to help determine the course that the city should take. But Haslam deftly turned that corner, pointing out that Kinsey Probasco, the downtown redevelopment team, had participated in “an extensive public process” before recommending that the cinema be created and given priority, and that the Crandall Arambula urban design commissioned by the Nine Counties. One Vision group also gained public input before concurring on the Gay Street corridor’s potential for the kind of redevelopment that a major movie theater anchors and embodies.
There is so much promise in the commitments of both the city and county administrations to reaffirm downtown Knoxville’s position as the core of commercial, cultural and entertainment activity in this entire region that it’s hard sometimes to believe that the downtown was allowed to fall on such hard times as it did in the 1980s and ’90s.
Today there’s a full-bore resurrection of Market Square taking place. The expanded History Center is opening, and it’s beautiful. Ragsdale is being counted on to fulfill his dream of a new, state-of-the-art central library for which all of Knox County can be thankful. A downtown, vastly improved and enlarged Discovery Center is being discussed in the same breath as the library. The Knoxville Convention Center is an imposing and promising presence, linking the downtown with the University of Tennessee in ways the World’s Fair Park never quite did, in spite of the addition of our Knoxville Museum of Art.
To say that what Knoxville’s city center needs is a “destination attraction” is to minimize what’s already taking place and is enhancing our total urban ambiance in ways no themed structure or facility could possibly deliver. What this downtown really needs is a multi-star headquarters hotel to support the convention center so that discriminating organizations and business and professional groups will see this as a fine location for their future rounds of meetings.
We’re well on our way now. Let’s get there.
February 19, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 8
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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