Knoxville TN’s World’s Fair Park was built for the 1982 World’s Fair.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in Tennessee.
The 1982 World’s Fair Exposition would have the theme “Energy Turns the World”, so it was perhaps inevitable that the city of Knoxville TN would be interested in hosting the event. Knoxville was near the Tennessee Valley Authority, a massive government project which had brought electrical power to the rural areas of the state, and was also close to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which did work on nuclear energy.
Tennessee had not hosted a World’s Fair since the 1897 Centennial Fair in Nashville, though, and there were some doubts, even locally, that the town could pull it off. (The Wall Street Journal famously referred to Knoxville as “a scruffy little city”, which the municipal government then adopted as a defiant motto.) When the city was selected, it prompted a crash program of investment to improve the local infrastructure.
The site that was selected for the fair was the 70-acre railroad yard that had been abandoned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. Many of the old buildings were knocked down. Some were remodeled and modernized to serve as exhibit halls, and a series of new buildings were also constructed. The iconic structure for the Fair was the Sunsphere, a tower 226 feet tall topped by a five-story gold-coated glass sphere with an observation deck.
The Fair opened in May 1982 in a ceremony led by President Ronald Reagan. The pavilions came from over 50 corporate sponsors and from countries around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and West Germany. (The Soviet Union had originally been invited, but that invitation was withdrawn after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979.)
Texaco used the occasion to introduce its “pay at the pump” credit card technology, and Coca-Cola rolled out its new “Cherry Coke” flavor. The Ford Motor Company showed off a Lincoln Continental limousine with a “mobile phone”, while the Oak Ridge Laboratory allowed the public to try out its experimental computer touchscreen. Kodak had a booth which allowed visitors to submit their camera film for its new “one-hour photo” developing process. The Fair also exhibited “The World’s Largest Rubik’s Cube”. The early 1980s were the beginning of the arcade video game craze, and the Fair issued a number of metal token coins commemorating the most popular computer games of the time, featuring “Pac-Man”, “Ms Pac-Man”, “Space Invaders”, “Qix”, “Gorf”, “Scramble”, and “Donkey Kong”. During the five months that the Fair was open, there were 11 million visitors.
After the Fair ended, the City made a series of attempts to establish an attraction on the site, but all of them failed. Portions of the site fell into disrepair and had to be demolished, and the only surviving structures from the time of the Fair are the Sunsphere and the Tennessee Amphitheater. It wasn’t until 2000 that the Knoxville Convention Center was constructed on the site, followed by World’s Fair Park in 2002. The Sunsphere’s observation deck was renovated and opened to the public in 2007. Today World’s Fair Park is one of the largest green spaces in the city.
Some photos from a visit.