top of page
Search

Community Input: A New Chapter for Central Street's Sears Building

  • Aug 15
  • 2 min read
Invitation to the Community input session on 8/20/2025

Your voice is needed to shape the future of a long-neglected piece of North Knoxville's history. The East Tennessee Community Design Center (ETCDC) is hosting a Community Collaborative Input Session on August 20th, 2025, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM at the Brookside Event Venue in Happy Holler (1221 N Central Street, Knoxville, TN 37917.) While two properties are on the agenda, the former Sears building on Central Street is a key focus for our neighborhood. This is a great opportunity to influence the redevelopment of a key part of our neighborhood that has been underutilized for so long.



For decades, the massive Sears/Knox County Central building on Central Street has been a familiar presence in Old North. This building was once home to the city's first large "suburban" Sears store, has a complex history, and we have a chance to give input into how we can better use the location for future growth.


The old Sears, built between 1946 and 1948, came at a cost to the community: a beloved park that hosted local baseball games and the old North Knoxville school were both torn down to make way for the store and its expansive, now-vacant surface parking lots. The building itself, after Sears closed in 1984, was repurposed for office and storage space for Knox County Schools, with most parking lots remaining an empty eyesore.

This move replaced a vital community space with a large, impersonal warehouse and replaced baseball fields with fields of hot asphalt. A departure from the original walkable design of Old North, and a stark reminder of our area's past razing for car centric suburbanization.


Now, as Central Street undergoes a revitalization with new sidewalks, lush greenery, and a focus on walkability, we have a chance to reverse that trend. The ETCDC Community Collaborative is the first step in envisioning a new future for this site. By proposing dense, walkable options, we can reclaim valuable community space and repair the damage done by past development. Let's move away from the "past" of large surface lots and into the "future" of welcoming more neighbors and creating spaces that feel more like our neighborhood's original intent: a dense, walkable, and diverse community where people can connect.


The feedback of our neighborhood is crucial and will directly influence the redevelopment plans. From ETCDC: "We truly need as many residents as possible to share their voice, as the feedback gathered will directly influence the future of these two sites."

This is our chance to reimagine this space and help shape a vibrant new chapter for our neighborhood. We can work together to ensure that what gets built next adds to the character of our neighborhood, rather than detracts from it.


Please join us at the input session to share your voice, ideas, and most of all: imagination!


More on the historic Happy Holler Sears:



ONK Logo_white.png
bottom of page