Wannabe City

In Knoxville

Election week 1997 presented Knoxville with a double whammy. First, as part of a nationwide downsizing, Levi Strauss announced it would close its biggest plant in Knoxville, laying off about 2,300 jeans-makers in one of the city’s largest industry closings ever. The plant closing not only will cost the area’s economy those workers’ salaries; it will also severely diminish the presence of one of America’s most socially responsible corporations, one that had been especially generous with Knoxville.

Second, a political newcomer came out of nowhere to trounce a veteran council member who has been firmly rooted in the political structure of Mayor Victor Ashe. Danny Mayfield, a young black minister who has developed a support program for African-American males, handily defeated William Powell, a leader in the black community who had distinguished himself most by his loyalty to Ashe.

Only a day or so later, the mayor announced that one of Knoxville’s most popular broadcast news personalities, WBIR-TV’s Gene Patterson, would join his cabinet as a point person in economic development.

As startling as these events were, they are only the latest in a series of shocks that, for more than a year, have had Knoxvillians shaking their heads and pondering the end times.

Since 1995, Knoxville has:

* seen hometown Forbes 500 millionaire Jim Clayton take plans for a new headquarters for Clayton Homes to nearby Maryville;

* lost the Knoxville Cherokees hockey team because of an inadequate coliseum and an unfair revenue split;

* faced the threatened loss of the Knoxville Smokies baseball team;

* watched as proposals for a new justice center, a new baseball stadium, and a new convention center hopscotched from site to site around the city’s downtown, with no one able to decide exactly what should go where;

* seen its well-respected police department racked first by the cover-up of an officer’s hit-and-run incident and, in recent weeks, by the questionable killing by officers of a mentally disturbed black man who himself had called the police for assistance.

To add ironic insult to actual injury, the smaller of the city’s two shopping malls—East Towne—has just renamed itself the Knoxville Center, even though it sits on the far eastern border of the city’s suburban sprawl, six or seven miles from the historic downtown core.

Coming on the heels of a failure to unify city and county governments last year, these events have alarmed Knoxvillians, who are not sure where their government and business leaders are taking them.

Three-term mayor Victor Ashe has taken the biggest hit so far. A seasoned pol, known for his ability to advance his agenda despite almost any adversity, Ashe has looked uncharacteristically indecisive in recent months. Nothing is more indicative of confusion than the efforts to get a new ball park for Knoxville’s double-A baseball team, the Smokies.

Last year Ashe announced that the city would move the Smokies from the city’s antiquated Bill Meyer Stadium to a new facility. When the inner-city neighborhoods adjoining the old stadium began to put up a fight to keep the Smokies there, the search for a location quickly degenerated into a site-of-the-week announcement. As the debate progressed, it soon became obvious that Smokies owners wanted to get the team away from Knoxville’s black and poor neighborhoods to environs more attractive to middle-class baseball fans.

Finally this spring, Ashe threw up his hands and abandoned the search for a new ballpark, announcing that henceforth the city would try to build a long-needed convention center.

Since then, everything Knoxvillians thought was nailed down has been coming loose and floating away.

“I think that Knoxville is going through a crisis of confidence,” says Bruce Wheeler, a University of Tennessee history professor who often writes about East Tennessee’s economic and social past. “Knoxville seems to be at a disadvantage compared to Nashville and Chattanooga in doing things that cities do very well.”

Down the river

Probably the most pernicious effect of the city’s current malaise is “ ’Nooga envy,” the tendency on the part of Knox movers and shakers to compare the city to its sister downriver.

Knoxville has never expected to rival Nashville (except in retrospect as the could-have-been home of country music) and never wanted to grow up like Memphis, but somehow it always thought it should be one up on Chattanooga.

After all, Knoxville holds a solid place as Tennessee’s third largest metropolitan statistical area, according to U.S. Census data. In 1994, the Knox MSA boasted 631,107 people, while the Chattanooga MSA remained a distant fourth at 439,189.

But while Knoxville rested after the 1982 World’s Fair, Chattanooga began a prolonged episode of planning and community involvement that culminated in the Tennessee Aquarium, which has become an outstanding tourist draw and the generator for a substantial reinvestment in the center city. Knox movers and shakers are now prone to bouts of hand-wringing over why they weren’t first to think of a fish zoo.