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What about the Fountain City site?

by Matt Edens

This deal with what to do with the Farmers Market seems like the proverbial pig in a poke. Not that I’m quite sure exactly what that proverb means, or for that matter, all that clear on just what a poke is. Some sort of sack, I think, and I grew up on a farm, believe it or not.

Anyway, people invoke the pig in a poke whenever they’re sure they—or at least their government—are being swindled in a deal. Why buying a pig in a sack is a sucker’s bet, I’m not so sure. We grew tobacco and raised cattle, not pigs. Although, growing up we once bought a piglet. I don’t recall there being a sack involved. He was a cute little guy I named Clarence. I was about 10. Eventually we ate him (and I thought growing up on a farm was tough).

If I had to take a poke at this pig business, I’d reckon that it’s the fact that we’re buying something sight unseen that sets people to squealing. Which, come to think of it, may mean the pig in a poke isn’t the best metaphor in this case, since we’re technically selling something rather than buying it—but only technically. Through the county’s original RFP process, folks who live around the Farmers Market at least had an idea of what they were getting themselves into, much as my father, in the aforementioned pig purchase, knew that when he bought said piglet he was really getting a sweetheart deal on sausage futures.

And that’s where, in the case of the Farmers Market, things get a tad slippery. Whether Target builds the Target itself or lets someone like Holrob or Graham build it, we’re still getting essentially the same slab of bacon. From what I gather, most of the input into the RFP was less concerned about the pig and more about the poke it came in, what with all the agitation for parkland and walking trails and space for public meetings and maybe even a library (one which, curiously, no one seemed to object to). The shopping center itself seemed pretty easy to swallow, so long as it came with a generous side of, well, pork.

That’s certainly what I thought, based on the responses the county got. Sure, both proposals ladled on the gravy and even made some ham-fisted attempts at “New Urbanism.” There was even some housing in the Graham proposal. But I was a little underwhelmed.

At a moment when West Knoxville was starting to flirt with the idea of “town centers” and “lifestyle centers,” redeveloping the Farmers Market seemed like a perfect opportunity to go whole hog and build something like this: www.mashpeecommons.com—a move that might have even resulted the Mall formerly known as East Towne being something besides the runt of the litter. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how much you dressed up the new center with adjectives like “town” and “lifestyle,” in the end it’s just putting lipstick on a pig.

The surrounding development is such a maze of mammoth frontage roads and parking lots that even a perfect gem of a town center would, at that location, be as odd an anomaly and likely doomed to failure as the Farmers Market itself. Plus, if you proposed such a thing, the folks out there who subscribe to the mantra “density bad, greenscape buffers good” would likely go nuts. They’re worried right now that Target will build its new store with the “minimum setbacks”—which might not be a setback at all, if you ask me.

That’s when I realized I had the right idea but the wrong location. Rather than thinking about developing a new Target, I should have been considering how to redevelop the old one on Broadway that will most likely be closing. Sure, it’s not as big a site as the Farmers Market or the Massachusetts development I took as a model, but it doesn’t need to be. Smack dab in the middle of Fountain City, most of the peripheral stuff a town center development needs is already there: not just the neighborhoods, but even a pre-existing town center waiting to be expanded upon. There’s already a library, park and walking trails, too. So if the Target deal gets done and the site on Broadway becomes available, we should issue another RFP. And this time, I say we go hog wild.

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