Some Thinkin’ on Smokin’ & Drinkin’

I was walking past Preservation Pub on Friday around happy hour when I heard a voice proclaim from the patio: “When I’m mayor of this town, ain’t gonna be no drinkin’ nowheres!”

I stopped in my tracks and laughed out loud. The faux prohibitionist looked deeply pleased with himself as his friends rolled their eyes.

I knew no one at the table but, in a classic bit of Knoxville hospitality, they invited me to join them for a beer. All downtown residents and business owners, they were in the middle of a raucous debate about the city’s evolving rules around where one may legally smoke a cigarette or wander with a cocktail, and I am helpless to resist a raucous debate.

To recap, without going too deep into details you’ve likely already read: 

• Last Tuesday, City Council passed the first reading of an ordinance, on a 7-2 vote, prohibiting smoking and vaping indoors at 21+ bars. 
• On Friday, the City announced a pilot program that will allow people 21+ to “sip and stroll” on Market Square. City Council will consider a second Designated Outdoor Refreshment Area (DORA) around Covenant Health Park. 

Between the four of them, my new patio friends cycled through just about every pro and con I’ve heard, online or otherwise, about the two issues: overregulation, underregulation, personal freedom, public safety, nuisance behavior, economic impact, and more. 

They agreed and disagreed, shouting at each other but in an … affectionate way? Every so often, one would pause to concede the other had a good point. The age-old Knoxville pastime of voicing strong opinions about complicated urban issues over beer always warms my heart.

To be clear, I’m not conflating the nonsmoking ordinance with the DORA proposals. These are separate issues with different stakes, different policies and plenty of nuance. What they do have in common is that both brush up against some of the same fundamental questions.

How do we enjoy our lives the way we want while sharing a city with other people trying to do the same?

Earlier in the day, I stood at the other end of Market Square while Mayor Indya Kincannon gave a brief press conference about the pending DORA designations.  

Of the proposed Market Square DORA, she painted a pretty idyllic picture: sipping a mimosa while browsing the Farmers’ Market, enjoying a cocktail while listening to Jazz on the Square, that sort of thing.

“It promotes responsible drinking because, instead of saying ‘I have half a drink left, I’ve got to finish it because I’m meeting my wife at a shop,’ you can just leave, enjoy it responsibly, sip it while you stroll,” she said.

Under the proposal, drinks would be sold only by approved businesses with existing beer permits and liquor licenses, with official stickers identifying approved containers. So, it’s not brown bags of mystery booze we’re talking about here. Still, it makes some people nervous.

“We’re very, very committed to making sure that we maintain our family-friendly environment,” Kincannon reassured. “This does not allow people to act crazy. Public intoxication is still illegal, underage drinking is still illegal, and the City and KPD will be making sure that this remains a very family-friendly setting for everyone.”

Kincannon noted that the Covenant Health Park DORA followed a different approval process than Market Square. Its exact geographic area will be published in the City Council agenda later this week. “It’s basically the plaza area in the immediate vicinity of the stadium,” she said. “It’s a very discrete geographic area that has already been designated by the State but Council needs to approve it.”

I’ll be interested to learn more about what that will look like functionally. Is it needed just so people can carry their drinks from Iron Forge Brewing or the like into the stadium? Is it intended as a pre-game spot? If the latter, I think it’s a fair question to ask whether a DORA might further concentrate spending within the stadium footprint at the expense of other Old City merchants. 

How do we enjoy our lives the way we want while sharing a city with other people trying to do the same? That question extends to businesses trying to coexist, and ideally be good neighbors to one another, too.

Kincannon described the two pending DORA zones as “baby steps,” a testing ground for potential designations elsewhere.

Maybe that could include the Old City. The future Neyland Entertainment District would seem an obvious candidate, although the notion of expanding the roaming radius of day-drunk Vol fans is not, on its face, especially reassuring. Where else? What results has this experiment produced in other cities? How have they navigated it and what can we learn? 

It seems like a lot of this stuff just boils down to making imperfect decisions in shared spaces.

Every day, individually and collectively, we’re all doing these little dances of negotiation. What do I want? What do other people need? What am I actually entitled to? What do I owe the people around me? What choices can I make? Which variables are within my control, and which are simply the conditions of existing in a place full of other humans with their own ideas about how life should work? 

And urban life, at its best, asks us to tolerate a little friction. Some people want to smoke indoors in their favorite dive bar. Some people would prefer not to inhale a cotton candy vape cloud while playing a gig with their band. Some people like the idea of strolling Market Square with a margarita. Some parents may find that less charming while steering a toddler past a wobbly dude with a souvenir cup. None of these positions are inherently ridiculous.

My new patio friends never solved anything, obviously. But I appreciated the scene anyway, of people arguing, changing their minds a little, hearing each other out, caring enough about Knoxville to debate it.

Nobody gets their exact preferred outcome all the time. The ongoing work of city life is learning how to share space with one another anyway.