Beneath the 100 block of Gay Street lies a hidden piece of Knoxville’s history. You can see it – or imagine it, at least – when you peer down through the “skylights” blocked into the sidewalk. It’s murky but obvious: something’s down there.
Over a century ago, the railway was bustling and Gay Street was struggling to keep up. A rollercoaster-esque stretch – historian Jack Neely dubbed it the “Death Dip” – took traffic from the present-day elevation of Gay Street at Summit Hill all the way down to the level of the treacherous train track crossing and then back up again on the other side. The city’s ambitious but successful solution — to raise the street up by one level in 1919 — left behind some unique underground spaces.
Perhaps the most trafficked of these is the downstairs of the Emporium, built in 1898 and longtime home of the Arts & Culture Alliance (ACA). Somehow, even being below street level, it’s bright with sunlight that pours in from big windows above. There are studio spaces, offices and colorful art hung everywhere, and it’s cognitive dissonance to imagine that beyond its walls, there might be underground tunnels, petrified store façades, and a grisly tiramisu of mortar and grit that goes down further, and further, and further until …
The elevator opens to a dark, muffled, subterranean space. It feels like a scene from a movie—where the lead gets drugged, stuffed in a trunk, and wakes up strapped to an interrogation chair in a creepy warehouse. Your eyes dart back and forth, taking it all in. Bombastic pillars. Raggedy bricks. Bad fluorescent lighting. A yawning hole in the floor that plunges even further into the black.
Welcome to The Furnace.
The Furnace?
Yes, Knoxville’s forthcoming arts immersion theater space, The Furnace.
“We wanted to lean into that gritty underground Hades thing, because, let’s face it, we’re off Fire Street, right?” quips Liza Zenni, ACA executive director. “And the history was important.” Hence the namesake: In its early decades, this sub-basement served as the coal furnace room for the building above.
Over the years, it’s been used for storage and as an affordable rehearsal and classroom space for local dance and theater groups. In 2020, however, it was flooded when construction on the Jackson Avenue viaduct exposed long-buried coal chutes. When it rained, water poured in. They lost a beautiful sprung floor and years of work, but ACA used the loss as an opportunity to rethink what the space could be.
“We basically made lemonade out of lemons,” says Zenni. “What we had learned from our members during the pandemic is they had found other places to do their rehearsing and to do their classrooms, but the need for theater space was still pressing.”
The Furnace is designed to answer that need while offering something entirely new. The space will be divided into two primary functions: an intimate theater space for rehearsals and performances and an immersive arts gallery – think 360-degree art installations popularized by exhibits like Van Gogh Alive.
“Immersive art is passive,” Zenni explains. “The artist doesn’t have to be there creating, so people can come at two o’clock in the afternoon, pay an admission fee, enjoy it, leave, and you can still have a show there back-to-back.”
Revenue from these immersive experiences will help subsidize the performance space, ensuring its affordability for local artists. This dual-purpose model, Zenni notes, is the key to making The Furnace a sustainable resource for the community.
Visitors will enter The Furnace through a new box office on West Jackson Avenue, tucked beneath the Jackson Avenue viaduct. What is presently a dimly lit, fenced-off collection point for dead leaves and trash will be transformed into a striking gateway featuring a flame-inspired facade, complete with dynamic lighting and digital displays that connect the space to the streetscape.
The Jackson Avenue corridor has grown buzzier in recent years – The Furnace’s entrance will face two social hotspots, PostModern Spirits and Pour Taproom – but it still faces the innate challenges of being downtown. A new venue will serve to make the area safer and more inviting, Zenni says: “The project means different things to different people, and one of the things it means to us is putting eyes on the street, lights on the street, and attracting people and activity.”
As for The Furnace’s interior, architects have leaned into the industrial history of the space, preserving its gritty charm while adding modern functionality. The design includes elements like uplighting to highlight exposed brick and historic architecture and modular features to make the space adaptable for different uses. Retractable walls will allow the theater space to open up for larger events or close off for more intimate productions. An elevator will connect The Furnace to the levels above, providing full accessibility.
Community & the Creative Underworld
The $4 million project has garnered strong community support, with the city and county each pledging $600,000 over three years, alongside $2 million from Governor Lee’s budget. Contributions from the Downtown Knoxville Alliance and Visit Knoxville have also been vital in making this vision a reality.
“We’re really, really fortunate,” Zenni says. “A lot of people have believed in the project and wanted to help. We’re almost there.”
Construction will begin in early 2025 with programming to begin about a year later. The 2024 ACA Annual Meeting took place on Wednesday this week, and in addition to The Furnace, Zenni had a lot of big announcements to share. Recently, she went on a listening tour of 40 local artists and stakeholders to help identify the needs of the community. “I realized how much had changed in the past few years, and that I needed help bringing those changes into focus so that I could recalibrate the ACA to meet our members’ needs today,” she explains.
One initiative is a new online calendar of events that will serve as a centralized hub for promoting exhibitions and performances. They’ll also be working to refine the ACA’s brand identity. Zenni says ACA is committed to taking on a more visible role as a cornerstone of Knoxville’s arts industry, helping to elevate the profile of local organizations and artists. Starting in September, the Emporium’s Balcony Gallery will feature two-month professionally-curated exhibitions with the intent to transfer these exhibitions to other cities, giving Knoxville’s artists opportunities to reach broader audiences.
Studio spaces within the Emporium will also see changes. “Another thing I heard from artists is that the need for space to art, for artists to create, has never been more urgent,” Zenni said. Long-term tenants, some of whom have been in their studios for up to 20 years, will move on at the end of their leases to make way for new artists. These spaces will become part of an incubator model, offering deeply subsidized studio access for a limited term of three or four years, ensuring a continuous cycle of new talent benefiting from the Emporium’s resources.
To help bring these plans to life, Casey Fox will join the organization in January as the new director of impact and development. Additional new staff will be required for The Furnace, including an artistic director and a technical director. All these new initiatives point to one goal: supporting and defending arts and culture in this city. “What we are doing here is important,” Zenni says.
As for underground Knoxville, the ACA is just getting started. Beyond The Furnace, Zenni plans to create a visioning group to explore the future of the hollow corridor beneath the 100 block’s sidewalk. Her initial idea involves light installations—think dynamic displays activated by the vibrations of people walking on the sidewalk above.
“These are gifts of history,” she says. “That space down there, The Furnace—that’s a gift of history. Subterranean Knoxville is a gift of history that no other building is taking advantage of the way we will, because we’re an arts-centered organization. You’ve got to lift that up into the spotlight, because other cities don’t have that.”
The vision is as much about reimagining history as it is about responding to the present. “And that was really underscored for me when I started calculating the impact of the pandemic on all of the arts in the nation,” Zenni says. “Things have changed, and so we have to support our arts and culture industry in a different way by changing, too.”