Barn Burner in a Backwater

By KURT ANDERSEN

With its World's Fair, Knoxville tries to get on the map

Knoxville is not the prettiest or most intriguing city in the world, or the U.S., or the Southeast, for that matter. There are scores of larger American cities, two of them right in Tennessee, Nashville and Memphis. Why, then, is it in Knoxville (pop. 183,000) that the 1982 World's Fair opens on May 1? Simple: seven years ago, a group of high-rolling local businessmen started thinking that a Knoxville World's Fair would be a nifty thing to whip up. Local citizens were dubious, and some are now peeved. But what was not long ago a desolate downtown patch of rail sidings and weeds is now a nearly complete 77-acre complex of gleaming pavilions, an aerial tramway, a fabric-covered amphitheater and a quarter-mile-long pit that will soon be World's Fair Lake. The fair's signature structure: the Sunsphere, a steel shaft housing two restaurants, which with its gilded-globe top looks like the world's only 266-ft. microphone. Says Fair President S.H. ("Bo") Roberts: "This is going to be a bench mark. We will think of Knoxville before and Knoxville after."

Some 2,500 construction workers are rushing to cover the fairground's red clay with sod, lay the roads and put the finishing touches on structures like the enormous Chinese-Egyptian-Peruvian pavilion before opening day. Most Knoxvillians are steeling themselves for a six-month influx of 11 million tourists. But for all that, the fair, named the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, will be modest by international standards. Montreal's Expo '67, for example, was ten times as costly, and included twice as many foreign participants.

But Knoxville's shindig is by no means minor league. For a daily admission charge of $9.95, patrons will get the run of exhibits from 23 foreign countries. China has lent an ad hoc museum of treasures, including 20 two-ton bricks from the Great Wall. Among the other 1,000 artifacts coming from the People's Republic: pearl-encrusted tapestries, ancient porcelain and a pair of life-size 3rd century B.C. terra cotta warriors. The Egyptians, too, plan to ship some splendid pieces, including the chariot of Pharaoh Ramses II. Japan's installation, with perhaps a touch of international swagger, will show off the country's state-of-the-art industrial robots. Australia is building a wind-power facility, and the $21 million U.S. pavilion, which will house a giant movie screen and talking computers, is to be powered in part by a 5,000-sq.-ft. rooftop solar energy collector. There will be plenty of mindless flash and hubbub as well: clog dancing, exhibition basketball (featuring the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers) and football (the New England Patriots, the Pittsburgh Steelers), high school marching bands, fireworks, clowns and a souped-up roller coaster that cruises at fearsome speeds. "The World's Fair is going to be a staggering success," promises Knoxville City Planner Lee Kribbs. Not everyone is euphoric. At least 1,000 tenants have been forced out of their apartments by landlords giddy at the prospect of renting $200-a-month apartments to out-of-towners for $600 a week. In response to the evictions, the city set up a World's Fair Housing Board to mediate tenant-landlord disputes. Warns Lawyer John Austin: "Some landlords still haven't got the message. We will see to it that nobody rents from them after the fair, because we are not going to need them." Some excesses are uncontrolled. The University Inn motel will nearly triple prices by charging $84 a night for rooms that now cost $29. Immobilized mobile homes parked in a field ten miles south of the fair can be had for $101 daily.

Small businessmen are not alone in scrambling to make a buck. The fair's organizers are big businessmen who conceived it as a profit-making venture as well as a civic-spirited showcase. The fair and adjacent real estate developments were financed by an intricate combination of private money and, to a much larger extent, public funds. Nearly all the deals have a common connection: Jake Butcher, 46, a Knoxville banking magnate and twice a candidate for Governor. Banker Bert Lance, Butcher's friend and Jimmy Carter's ill-starred budget chief, made the entrees necessary to arrange for $43.5 million in federal subsidies and talked Egypt into participating. Another Butcher friend, Jesse Barr, who was convicted in 1976 of bank fraud, was later hired by the developers of property fronting the fair as their chief financial consultant. Butcher's own bank loaned $1 million to the fair; the bank's former chief executive officer and current counsel is a developer of a nearby parking garage financed with $6.3 million in federal money. Butcher's brother-in-law is an owner of a new hotel overlooking the fairground -- built with Government-backed bonds -- and his investment bank served as the fair's financial adviser.

Says University of Tennessee Political Scientist Joseph Dodd, a sharp critic of the fair: "City resources are being used to benefit a small number of wealthy people. There's a direction to the flow of money. The direction always comes back to the Butcher network."

The organizers are unapologetic. "The investors took a capital risk," says Tom O'Brian, a New York banker involved in the fair's private financing. "I see nothing wrong with a return commensurate with that risk." As for Butcher, he is nonchalant about his role. "Every project," he says, "needs a shepherd." By staging a "super barn burner" of a World's Fair, he claims, Knoxville "got 30 years of growth in five years."

In fact, when the fair ends next fall, residents will be left with more than just a municipal debt of perhaps $300,000 a year. They will inherit a six-acre park with a lake and a handsome 2,500-seat theater. The once downcast downtown will be anchored by new and renovated buildings, expanding the tax base and generating new jobs.

"A World's Fair can create a lot of intangible benefits," says Roberts.

"Getting a taste of being an international city may raise our expectations culturally and aesthetically." Roberts' hopeful and boosterism sounds almost quaint: it has been at least a dozen years since World's Fairs --grand, unself-conscious celebrations of progress and technology -- were right in step with the Zeitgeist. But Knoxville, a latecomer to urbanity, is excited anyway. Even John Austin, ambivalent about the enterprise, appreciates the hoopla. Says he: "We'd still be a backwater town on the banks of the Tennessee River without the fair." --By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Anne Constable/Knoxville

With reporting by Anne Constable/Knoxville

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