To the growing list of urban infrastructure sites that have been repurposed as community gathering spaces, like New York’s High Line and Atlanta’s Beltline, add one more: the Urban Wilderness Gateway Park in Knoxville, Tennessee. The site of a four-lane highway that was stopped in its tracks is being reenvisioned as a 2.2-mile linear greenway that leads to more than 50 miles of trails, a nature center, historic sites, playgrounds, and five city parks.
For more than a decade, a host of public and private groups have worked to piece together various properties, easements, and land use agreements known collectively as Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness. Through collaborative planning, an extensive trail and greenway system has emerged, linking important historic and cultural sites while highlighting narratives rooted in Knoxville’s past. Now totaling 1,000 acres, the city’s Urban Wilderness has become a premier outdoor destination just minutes away from the urban core.
The initiative gained momentum in 2015 when Mayor Madeline Rogero successfully blocked a planned 5-mile extension of the James White Parkway, a controlled-access highway originally intended to connect downtown Knoxville to destinations including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The agreement marked the end of a struggle with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, halting construction that would have cut through the heart of the Urban Wilderness. “After the road extension project was halted, the mayor committed $10 million in capital funding to begin work on the transformation of the state right-of-way and integrating it to be the front door to the Urban Wilderness,” Rebekah Jane Justice, chief of urban design and development for the city, told AN.
Two years later, the city selected a multidisciplinary design team to develop a phased plan to revamp the site into an urban amenity that would reconnect neighborhoods once cleaved by the roadway. The first phase included improvements such as the bike park at Baker Creek Preserve, which includes a well-known mountain biking trail.
The project celebrated a new milestone in March with the ribbon-cutting of the Baker Creek Preserve Pavilion. The pavilion, a contemporary shade structure located at the trail entrance, provides amenities including bathrooms, wayfinding, picnic tables, and a water-filling station. The curved structure frames a large sloping lawn that hosts seasonal events such as the Appalachian Mountain Biking Club Fall Festival, which attracts visitors from across the country.
“We wanted to create an iconic symbol as the gateway into Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness,” said Brandon Pace, a partner at Sanders Pace Architecture in Knoxville. “As Knoxville becomes more well known within the mountain biking community, it’s important to have something that’s identifiable as a part of that.”
The pavilion’s primary structure consists of Corten steel columns and beams, which reference the legacy of South Knoxville industries that were once active along the nearby Tennessee River. A lattice steel substructure supports the skin, which is made of lightweight perforated Corten steel panels that diffuse sunlight. A series of bright orange fabric panels complete the roof.
Despite the pavilion’s straightforward appearance, its design and fabrication required a delicate balance of ingenuity and technology. Throughout the design process, the team tested their ideas with both digital and physical models. During construction, designers worked with a local fabricator to create ½-scale mock-ups to refine material patterns and connection methods. In addition, both the steel fabricators and shade-sail makers were given templates to clearly communicate the complex geometry of certain steel components and the unique shapes of each shade sail.
The design team also collaborated with a graphic designer to integrate Urban Wilderness branding into the building. That included a large signage panel that forms a backdrop for performances and events held at the preserve. The orange palette used in both the signage and the shade sails is derived from the park’s overall branding.
“We really tried not to create a big, heavy building… rather, to have something that’s lightweight and more fitting as the backdrop to activities that take place there,” said Pace. The architects also developed a new detail for tying the sails to the structure. Pace explained that “usually, the shade sails you see at restaurants have a turnbuckle at each corner, so you end up with a weird shape.” To avoid that, Sanders Pace devised a “shoelace strategy” that secures the edges of the sails to a rod that’s ultimately attached to the steel structure. By holding the edges taut, the maneuver ensures that sails have the desired parabolic shape.
A second pavilion, located nearby at the highway terminus, is set to begin construction this fall. Sharing the same architectural language as the Baker Creek Pavilion, it’s equipped with more bathrooms and features graphics that orient visitors to the entire Urban Wilderness Park system.
These phase 1 improvements to the gateway park project have catalyzed a much larger, more ambitious planning effort that seeks to reconnect Knoxville’s disconnected urban neighborhoods and celebrate the city’s cultural and industrial heritage. Using this project as a springboard, the city applied for a federal Reconnecting Communities grant and was recently awarded $42.6 million—money that will be used to fund phase 2 of the gateway park. During that stage, the existing section of the James White Parkway will be reduced to two lanes and the other two lanes will be landscaped and converted to a bike and pedestrian path linked to downtown.
Already one of the region’s top tourist destinations, the Urban Wilderness has proved to be an economic boon for the community. According to a University of Tennessee report released in December 2023, the site generates $24.9 million annually for Knox County’s economy.
Some say the best is yet to come. “The aspiration is to create local connections and make a place that feels like it’s for the whole city,” said Andrew Moddrell of PORT Urbanism, a public realm design and planning firm that collaborated on the gateway park. “It’s this recreational network, and there’s a lot of awesome stuff to do there—nature centers, quarries and lakes that you swim in, trails along the riverfront, and of course a ton of world-class mountain biking.”
What’s being developed now is an increasingly accessible public gateway to all those assets. As Moddrell said, “This will provide a front door to a place that never had one.”
Vernon Mays is a writer and editor based in Richmond, Virginia.
