KNOXVILLE — Saturday’s block party at 800 Howard Baker Jr. Ave. drew a bounce house, two food trucks and a survey offering seven possible futures for the 2.1-acre lot, all seven already priced out by a consultant. Missing was an eighth option: putting back what was there before the city cleared the block for urban renewal in the 1960s, when it held homes, businesses and at least two churches serving a predominantly Black neighborhood. Since then the site has gone from the Public Safety Building to an empty Public Safety Building to dirt and a parking lot next to the Civic Auditorium.
Wendell Cagle, chair of the Section 800 Advisory Task Force, said the seven listed options represent “the full range of what’s actually feasible,” a range that includes a mixed-income apartment building, a “flexible greenspace pavilion,” and a satellite DMV annex. “Nostalgia’s not really a land use,” Cagle said. “We looked into it.”
KCDC planner Carla Hutcheson said the bounce house and food trucks tested well with block-party attendees, whose feedback will be weighted equally with written survey responses from former residents and descendants who no longer live within city limits and had to mail theirs in. “We’re treating lived experience and casual Saturday interest as equivalent inputs,” Hutcheson said. “That’s what an inclusive process looks like in 2026.”
The task force has retained Hearth & Vector, the placemaking consultancy behind the county’s $140,000 rebrand of a Rutledge Pike cattle pasture into “AgriCentre East,” to test names for whatever eventually gets built. Early internal candidates on a task force handout include “Founders Commons” and “Heritage Row,” neither of which corresponds to anything that stood on the block.
Cagle said the task force expects to bring a final recommendation to City Council “sometime in the new year,” a phrase he confirmed has appeared in every task force update since the group’s first meeting in March.
A KCDC spokesperson said no decision on the site’s future is imminent, adding that none has been imminent for the fifty-some years since the buildings came down either.