Walk behind Kern's Food Hall on Chapman Highway right now and you'll see a green caboose with a mural wrapped around it, no rails underneath, no gravel bed, just cleared dirt where a working freight line sat until this past winter. That caboose belonged to B. Ray Thompson, the coal man Thompson-Boling Arena is named for, and the family that painted every one of his engines shamrock green donated it to Legacy Parks Foundation back in February. It's the first piece of what's officially called the SoKno Rail Trail and Art Walk. It won't be the last thing that looks finished before the trail actually is.
That's the part worth paying attention to if you already live here. The trail connecting Chapman Highway to Ijams Nature Center is still under construction, with the first 1.5-mile stretch not expected to open until fall 2026. But the businesses along the corridor stopped waiting for permission months ago. They're already building their front doors toward a path that doesn't have a surface yet.
What's Actually Gone
The tracks are gone. That's the real milestone, not a symbolic one. Gulf & Ohio Railways closed the line in December 2025, and by the time Legacy Parks held its launch event at Kern's in late February, the rail removal between Ijams and Kern's Food Hall was already underway. What's left is a 3.8-mile corridor that used to move coal cars and now, for the moment, moves nothing except construction equipment and the occasional determined dog walker cutting through.
Dogwood Arts, the nonprofit managing the public art side of the project, opened its mural installation window from June 22 through August 28 this year, meaning the muralists are wrapping up their work on the corridor's walls right now, this week, as you're reading this. Legacy Parks is putting more than 12,000 square feet of new murals across the corridor, with individual stipends budgeted above $11,000 each, funded by a $1 million gift from the Lawson Family Foundation specifically earmarked for the stretch between Kern's and Island Home Park. That's the section getting the formal Art Walk designation. The rest of the 3.8 miles will be trail without the gallery treatment, at least for now.
The Map Nobody's Drawn Yet
Here's the geography, because it matters more than it sounds like it should. The full trail runs from Chapman Highway at the south end up to Ijams Nature Center. Inside that longer run sits the 1.5-mile Art Walk, bookended by two trailheads: one at Kern's on Chapman Highway, the other behind River's Edge Apartments near Island Home Park. Project materials describe the design as pulling from New York's High Line, treating the corridor as a living system rather than a static path, with landscape architecture and lighting design worked in alongside the art.
What that means on the ground is that the trail doesn't dead-end at a park entrance the way a lot of greenways do. It threads directly behind the restaurants and breweries already lining Sevier Avenue, which changes how those businesses think about which side of their building is the one that matters.
Backs Becoming Fronts
Scott West closed on a warehouse at 1004 Sevier Avenue earlier this year to open Buffleheads, a duckpin bowling and games bar going into the old Everything Mushrooms space. The building backs directly onto the future trail corridor. West has been blunt about what that means for how he's designing the place.
"With the trail coming through here, the back side of this building may end up being the front side."
That's not a marketing line. It's a construction decision. West is planning garage doors that open onto the trail side, expecting people to roll up on bikes rather than park out front. He's not alone in making that bet before there's pavement to justify it.
A few blocks away, the team behind the new Old Sevier Market, a full-time neighborhood grocery opening at 906 Sevier Avenue in the same building as Redbud Kitchen and Fly By Night, is putting its patio, bike rack, and dog-friendly area behind the building, near the tracks. Chris Morton, who also runs Alliance Brewing and South Coast Pizza, is leading that project with roughly thirty local partners behind it. The market is explicitly positioning its rear entrance as what the team calls a jumping-off point for exploring the rest of the avenue, which only makes sense if you assume foot and bike traffic is about to start arriving from that direction instead of the street.
None of this required the trail to be finished. It required people who watch this corridor closely enough to bet on where the traffic is headed before the city finishes building the thing that will carry it.
What's Already Worth a Walk This Week
You don't need to wait for fall to have a reason to be out here. A few things opened just in the last two weeks:
- SoKno Sourdough finally has a real storefront at 2006 Barber Street, tucked between Redbud Kitchen and Hi-Wire Brewing. Owner Stephanie Carlson had been running the bakery through what she called a speakeasy entrance situation for a while. Now there's a front door, open several days a week, with more than 300 bagels rolled daily.
- Old Sevier Market held its neighbor meetup on August 17, gathering input on what goes on the shelves before its full opening.
- The existing lineup along Sevier is still the backbone of the strip: Hi-Wire Brewing, Alliance Brewing, SouthSide Garage, Fly By Night, and Redbud Kitchen, with Buffleheads set to join them once its garage doors are ready to roll up.
Carlson is also president of the Old Sevier Merchants Association, and her read on the construction dust currently coating half the avenue captures the mood better than any press release could.
"Even though the construction's happening, it's good to be here when we are, as we grow."
The Summer Everyone's Been Renovating Around
If Sevier Avenue has felt like a permanent construction zone this year, that's because it has been one on two fronts at once. The rail-trail work is only part of it. A separate Sevier Avenue streetscape project, aimed at making the corridor friendlier to walking, biking, and just lingering, has been running alongside it and was expected to continue through the summer of 2026. Layer on the Gay Street Bridge closure, shut since June 2024 for structural repairs, and you get a stretch of road where regulars have had to relearn how to get around their own neighborhood more than once this year.
The rail-trail project itself hasn't been friction-free either. Some neighbors along the corridor have raised concerns about noise and privacy as construction moves through backyards that used to border a quiet, mostly unused freight line, and the project has drawn a federal challenge tied to how the rail line was abandoned. Legacy Parks hasn't offered a public update on how that affects the timeline, so treat the fall 2026 target as the plan rather than a guarantee.
When the Trail Itself Opens
The piece to actually mark on a calendar is the first 1.5-mile segment, Chapman Highway to Island Home Avenue, targeted for fall 2026. That's the Art Walk stretch, the one getting the murals currently being finished, the lighting design, and the two trailheads at Kern's and behind River's Edge. The remaining miles up to Ijams will follow, though no one involved has put a firm date on full completion.
For context on why Legacy Parks is willing to spend this kind of money and design attention on a stretch of old rail bed, the broader Urban Wilderness system it connects to already includes more than 60 miles of trails and greenways and has been estimated to contribute around $14.6 million a year to the local economy, according to a figure from the Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. The rail trail is being built as another spoke into that same wheel, not a standalone amenity.
So if you live in Old Sevier or anywhere within walking distance of Sevier Avenue, the honest advice is this: the construction fencing and the missing rails aren't a sign that nothing's happening. They're a sign that the businesses around you have already made their bets on which direction the neighborhood is about to face. You might as well go see the mural on that green caboose while the paint's still fresh.
If you're curious how projects like this tend to shape home values and buyer interest in the neighborhoods around them once they're finished, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this market closely. Tilley Home Group tracks exactly this kind of shift across Knoxville and Maryville, and we're always glad to talk through what it might mean for your own address, whenever you're ready.
