Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, Sept. 8 • The News Sentinel reports that the University of Tennessee football team sleeps overnight in the local Radisson, even when their Saturday game is at home. We think the coaches are a little confused. They stayed at home for last year’s Peach Bowl, so now they figure they ought to rent a hotel to play in Neyland Stadium? Thursday, Sept. 9 • Knox County commissioners vote to enact an 18-cent property tax hike should voters defeat the new county wheel tax in a referendum. That prolonged screeching noise you hear, punctuated by a crash, is the sound of wheel tax opponents, skidding off the road. Friday, Sept. 10 • Speaking of which, Knox County spokesman Mike Cohen announces that he’s quitting his job to take a position with a local PR firm. Sources say, and he denies, he’s leaving because he didn’t give the wheel tax the proper spin. Saturday, Sept. 11 • The Sentinel reports that the Tennessee Department of Transportation will hold public meetings seeking input on how to solve transportation problems statewide. Does anyone else think that having TDOT take all those !@#$ orange barrels out of the middle of the damned interstate might be a pretty good start? Sunday, Sept. 12 • A Sentinel account says that famously well-endowed adult movie star Ron Jeremy will debate a prominent feminist on the subject of pornography at an upcoming University of Tennessee forum. The venue? UT’s Cox Auditorium, of course. Sometimes the truth is way funnier than anything we could come up with. Monday, Sept. 13 • Local mental health professionals teach a class to improve listening skills at First Cumberland Presbyterian in Oak Ridge. We attended, but we have no idea what they said. Slept through it. Tuesday, Sept. 14 • In angry response to a new sex shop opened off Highway 411, Blount County officials appoint a regulatory board to oversee (i.e. “discourage”) adult businesses. Proprietors of the Adult XXX Superstore near Clover Hill Road complain that the new board members should at the very least buy them dinner before they try to screw them. Knoxville Found 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: The sliver of signage pictured hangs just above the women’s clothier Vagabondia on Market Square. Congratulations to Arthur B. Carmichael III for recognizing the marker and speedily accepting our challenge. Metro Pulse is delighted to present you with a MetroFest T-shirt from last weekend’s local music spectacular. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend KNOX COUNTY OFFICE OF NEIGHBORHOODS Thursday, Sept. 16 6 p.m. City County Building Commissioners’ Conference Room 400 Main St. Neighborhood Workshop: Knox County Codes (Dirty Lot Ordinance)

One Garage, No View
Enlarged garage designed to serve downtown’s future needs

The surface lot still known, some five years after its eponymous department store closed, as the Watson’s Parking Lot, is all jackhammered away, and every day giant mechanical shovels toil away at excavating the site for construction of a large city-sponsored parking garage.

This project has been discussed in one form or another since the ambitious days of the Worsham Watkins plan. A few months ago, when the city boosted the number of parking spaces to 692—more than twice as many as plans originally called for, adding a couple more floors—it might have seemed as if it could be only good for downtown. Parking is the neighborhood’s sorest complaint, from shoppers, employers, and residents. When it comes to parking garages, one might think, the bigger the better.

Knoxville Director of Development Bill Lyons says the garage will serve several purposes. First, he mentions prospective Market Square shoppers; he says rates in the city-sponsored garage will be “low,” though he says it’s not yet determined what that means. “Low, or validated, or something,” he says.

Also, area residents and corporate entities will be a big part of the garage’s clientele. Lyons says it has yet to be determined how the spaces will be apportioned.

However, this project has a dark side: literally. The additional parking spaces add two floors to the project. That makes the garage even with the tallest buildings on the square. For casual visitors, it will obscure, for the first time, the backs of the buildings visible from Walnut for a century—and, for example, the old painted furniture-store sign that still promises “PHONOGRAPHS.”

For residents and office and retail tenants, there’s more to the change than a lost curiosity. The new construction will also darken the west-side buildings’ rear windows, several of them newly installed. Property owners say frankly that the larger-than-expected structure will reduce the marketability of the buildings on the western side of the square, especially for residences.

Currently, several buildings on the square’s west side enjoy afternoon sun, and views of downtown’s western side, the Sunsphere, and of sunsets.

Noel Hudson and his wife Andie Ray live in comfortable quarters above Ray’s dress shop. They’re both residents and retailers. Hudson regrets the loss of natural light into their 19th-century building, and he wonders why there’s a need for all that much parking. The previous surface-parking lot wasn’t always half full; the new parking garage, as recently amended, will offer five levels of parking.

Hudson tries to be realistic about this common hazard of urban living—“It’s part of living downtown,” he says—and he’s optimistic about what it might mean for the shop his wife runs.

“It’s gonna block our views, too,” sympathizes Chamber Partnership chief Mike Edwards. Though the move is taking much longer than expected, the Chamber is still anticipating moving into new digs on the west side of the square. The parking advocate is sanguine about the development. “Downtown areas are vertical, are they not?” he says. It’s true that the buildings on the square’s east side, backed to a shady alley, probably never had much natural light in the back. Still, views are considered a legitimate issue in residential development elsewhere in town, and in the 150-year history of Market Square, no buildings have ever been tall enough to block the windows of the western buildings.

Lyons says the city never made promises not to block windows with the garage; he says their only constraint was that the garage should be no higher than the square’s western roofs.

Developer John Craig, who recently purchased the tallest building on the square’s west side—it was his great-grandfather who sold phonographs there—is vigorously renovating the building for a combination of retail, office, and residential spaces, and already has some tenants. He was taken aback to hear about the parking garage’s added height.

“Overall, I’m pleased that the city is planning to provide convenient parking for businesses and residents on Market Square,” Craig says. “The real question is, ‘Why so big?’ My concern is that it all seems to be driven by the anecdotal We don’t have enough parking.” He talks about the “jumbled history” of the garage project, which began as a more modest-scaled, and chiefly residential, project under the ill-fated Worsham Watkins proposal. He describes how it “morphed” into an extra-tall mega-garage with little public discussion. “Somewhere the communications broke down,” he says. “The people who should have been knowledgeable weren’t.”

Craig is concerned about the effect the heightened garage will have on the value of his and other buildings on the square’s west side. “It definitely has an economic impact,” he says. “It reduces the attractiveness of the apartments. It hurts, economically, what we’re trying to do.”

He’s also concerned about unanswered questions regarding security for the garage. He’s leery about “the scale of it. A lot of people are going to be surprised when this thing gets built—and it’ll be too late.”

Craig doubts whether the newly added upper floors, the ones that most inhibit views of the sky and afternoon sunshine, will even be used much.

Even with the Watson’s lot closed, daily use of the State Street lot, two blocks away, is hardly at 10 percent capacity. (Scheduled to be supplanted by the transit center next year, that parking lot may close without ever having been half full.)

Most of the displaced “Watson’s” parking was placed in the closer, newish Locust Street Garage, much of which is dedicated to the UT Conference Center; but even now, it’s rarely full. On Monday during business hours, its top floor was almost completely empty. Craig observes that when he came downtown for Boomsday, perhaps downtown’s single biggest parking day, he parked there—and was surprised to find that garage’s three upper floors nearly empty.

Chamber Partnership head Mike Edwards has long sought to maximize parking downtown, especially to retain major businesses. He’s looking not only toward existing demand, but recruiting new businesses. “You can drive around and see a number of vacant spaces,” he admits. But he adds that doesn’t matter much to prospective businesses. “They say, ‘Where is my parking? I want to have parking that I control.’” Edwards cites MPC studies showing a dearth of parking in the area, and links it to storefront vacancies.

Lyons says he’s confident that the new parking will be well used, but he adds the city has not yet determined how much parking will be dedicated to whom. He says that Kimberly Clark, which occupies a nearby office building, is definitely in the mix, but that Home Federal, which has cited its parking needs as a reason to demolish the nearby Sprankle Building, is only a “potential” candidate.

Lyons also confirms rumors that the garage is seen as key to recruiting business to TVA’s East Tower. The headquarters of the shrinking federal agency, which presently employs only a third of the workforce these towers were built to handle in the ‘70s, is anticipated to lease that tower to other tenants. Lyons isn’t sure how many spaces might be required. “Probably they would like an awful lot,” he says.

Edwards is skeptical about that part of the plan. “I would be surprised if the East Tower got parked in that garage,” he says. “There are other parking solutions that can work.”

In the final mix, what was originally contemplated as a condominium project with some parking has become a parking project with a few condominiums. On the south end of the site, a residential/retail complex is still in the works. If all goes well, that construction should start in early ‘05 and be finished by the end of that year. It’ll include 12 two-story condos—a fraction of the number originally contemplated—with 9,000 feet of retail space.

With an alley-style courtyard in the middle, Goss says the design was a “deliberate borrowing” of the design of the rowhouses of nearby Kendrick Place, where a double row of apartments share a courtyard.

In architectural renderings, the condominiums are there, and finished, but the parking garage next door, which will be finished earlier and will be at least a floor taller, is not. Goss has no quarrel with the parking garage; he says he left it out of the drawing only because the parking garage would block out familiar landmarks which offer the viewer a sense of place.

—Jack Neely

Cinema a Firm ‘Maybe’
Property, investment arrangements not final

Mayor Bill Haslam has bared “contingent” plans for a movie theater he describes as a “significant step in the development of downtown.” The long-awaited announcement of an operating agreement for a downtown cinema came Tuesday, within weeks of the groundbreaking for the Market Square Phase II parking garage/residential/commercial building on Walnut Avenue.

In cooperation with the city’s Industrial Development Board, Regal Corp. and third-party investors, the cinema will tentatively grace the 500 block of Gay Street. (Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale agreed to present County Commission a contract to swap the Gay Street property for the city’s old News Sentinel site on Church Avenue.)

At 45,000 square feet, the state-of-the-art theater is projected to house eight screens and feature stadium seating and exhibit first-run and other commercially popular films. Cinema parking will be free in the city-owned State Street garage. Construction on the project is slated to being in the spring and be completed in spring 2006.

The theater represents Phase III in the revitalization plan, but Haslam emphasized that it is “not a done deal.” Once the property transfer with Knox County is compete, the project remains subject to a determination of final costs and attraction of private investors. Haslam says he sees the movie theater as a “catalyst” for downtown, where he says other interested retail and restaurant companies have been awaiting a commitment to its construction.

—Clint Casey

September 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 38 © 2004 Metro Pulse