Drive Sevier Avenue right now and you will hit a flagger. Two lanes narrow to one where crews work through utility conduit and roundabout grading at Foggy Bottom Street, and it has looked roughly like this since early 2025. Most people walking or driving that stretch assume the mess ends when the mess ends, all at once, sidewalks and trail and everything together.
That is not how it is going to go.
A new 3.8-mile rail-trail is being built along the old Gulf and Ohio Railways tracks that run behind the same businesses stuck behind those flaggers, and the first mile and a half of it opens this fall, ahead of the road project sitting right next to it. If you have been treating the construction on Sevier as one long inconvenience with one finish line, it is worth knowing that the two projects tearing up your commute are on genuinely different clocks, and the one you'd expect to take longer is actually winning.
Two projects, same block, different owners
The confusion is understandable. Both projects sit within a few hundred feet of each other along the corridor between Chapman Highway and the South Waterfront, and both have been visibly under construction for over a year.
But they are not the same project, and they are not run by the same people. The Sevier Avenue Streetscape Project is a City of Knoxville public works job: new ADA-compliant sidewalks, a rebuilt railroad crossing, streetlights, traffic signals, a roundabout, and utilities moved underground, all funded through a $19.2 million investment the city council approved in October 2024. Whaley Construction and Southern Constructors Inc. have been working the corridor since early 2025, and the work has required real patience from the merchants along it. Deanne Thomas, who owns SoKno Throwback and Threads on Sevier, told a local TV crew she watched game-day foot traffic evaporate during the Gay Street Bridge closure and worried the streetscape construction would repeat that hit on her monthly numbers.
The trail is a different animal entirely. It is being built by Legacy Parks Foundation on rail bed that Gulf and Ohio Railways applied to abandon and donate back in December 2024. Knoxville City Council approved that donation in September 2025, and by February 2026 the foundation had crews on the ground. The first 1.5-mile segment, from Chapman Highway to Island Home Avenue, is set to open this fall. Legacy Parks executive director Carol Evans has said she hopes to finish the full 3.8-mile connection, stretching from Kern's Food Hall all the way to Ijams Nature Center, by the end of the year.
Here is the part worth sitting with: a project that started later, on paper, is on track to finish first.
| Project | What it is | Public groundwork began | Expected to open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sevier Avenue Streetscape | Roundabout, sidewalks, buried utilities, railroad crossing | Early 2025 | Early 2027, per the most recent city reporting |
| Kern's-to-Ijams rail-trail | 3.8-mile paved trail and art walk on donated rail bed | February 2026 groundbreaking | First segment this fall, full trail hoped by year end |
If you were picturing the streetscape project wrapping up by the summer you already had circled on your calendar, that date has slipped. Earlier city updates had pointed to a summer 2026 finish. The most recent reporting from February 2026, released alongside the trail's groundbreaking, pushes the streetscape completion to early 2027, after the greenway is already open and in use.
Why the trail is winning
The mechanics explain the gap better than any press release will. Legacy Parks inherited a corridor with no live traffic, no buried gas or water lines to relocate, and no businesses that need a driveway kept open during construction. It is, structurally, a much simpler build. The streetscape project has to do all of its work underneath and around a street that South Knoxville Elementary School and every Sevier Avenue business still depend on every single day. Two lanes have to stay open. Utility work has to wait for school breaks. None of that is anyone's fault. It is just a harder kind of construction.
The first piece of public art on the new trail is already in place, a mural painted directly onto a retired caboose that once belonged to B. Ray Thompson, the coal executive the Thompson-Boling Arena is named for. The caboose is green because Thompson's company, Shamrock Coal, used that color on its cars. Muralist Emmanuel Jarus, who started out painting graffiti on train cars before building a career doing it professionally, painted it as the trail's first dedicated piece, unveiled at the groundbreaking.
What's already open while you wait
You do not have to wait for either project to finish to notice the corridor is busier than it was a year ago.
- Wokxville, a gluten-free Asian concept from chef Dustin Cochran, opened inside Kern's Food Hall on Chapman Highway this summer, right next to his other stall, Disco Chicken and Donuts.
- Earl's, a full-service restaurant at 610 Waterfront Drive in the South Banks development, opened in January 2026. It comes from the same restaurant group behind Raven Steakhouse and Bella in Maryville, and it sits along the South Waterfront a short walk from Suttree Landing Park.
- Angry Dumplings and Tea, owned by Jason Chou, is already open on Sevier Avenue. Chou has said publicly that the new trail could give a further boost to a business district he describes as already growing.
- A new 72-vehicle parking lot opened on Island Home Avenue beneath the James White Parkway, cutting the walk to Sevier Avenue businesses to five or ten minutes and giving people an option that skips the roundabout construction zone entirely. Between that lot, the 200-plus spaces near Suttree Landing Park, and the Regal parking garage's weekend and evening spaces, the corridor has more than 600 public parking spots if you know where to look.
The Old Sevier Merchants Association has been meeting directly with city leadership, including Mayor Indya Kincannon, to keep pushing for exactly this kind of interim access while the bigger project finishes.
Ijams is already the trail's other anchor
The eastern end of the new trail lands at Ijams Nature Center, and it is worth remembering that Ijams was never waiting around for a trail to become a destination. The Hummingbird Festival, now in its 15th year, drew crowds to the Homesite on August 15 for bird banding and a fifty-vendor marketplace. That's just passed, but the calendar does not slow down. Movies Under the Stars is in its 14th year and keeps running into fall, with screenings starting closer to 8pm as the days shorten. Big Fun Tuesdays returns to Mead's Quarry on the first Tuesday of every month with the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club, live music, and food trucks. Pickin' on Nature keeps its free bluegrass jam going on the third Sunday of each month at the Visitor Center lawn.
None of that changes because a trail is being built. It just means the trail is connecting two places that were already worth showing up to, rather than manufacturing a reason to visit either one.
What this actually means if you already live here
If your mental model has been one long construction zone with one finish line, replace it with two separate ones. The trail's first mile and a half opens this fall, giving you a paved connection toward Island Home Avenue well before the road project wraps. The sidewalks, the roundabout, and the buried utilities on Sevier itself are a longer wait, into early 2027 by the latest word. Park at the new Island Home Avenue lot or near Suttree Landing Park if the roundabout traffic is slowing you down, and expect the corridor's restaurant and retail mix, Wokxville, Earl's, Angry Dumplings and Tea, to keep filling in before the concrete does.
The Fowler Group covers this stretch of Knox County closely because we work with people who already live here, not just people shopping for it. If you are weighing a move within this corridor, or just want a straight answer on how a specific street or block is likely to change over the next year, The Fowler Group is a good place to start that conversation.
