The 1982 World's Fair: The Scruffy Little City Did It
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
On December twenty-ninth, nineteen eighty, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article with a question for a headline: 'What If You Gave a World's Fair and Nobody Came?' The reporter, Susan Harrigan, described Knoxville as 'a scruffy little city of one hundred eighty thousand on the Tennessee River,' and the article catalogued the skepticism of major corporations and foreign governments about committing to an exposition in a mid-sized Appalachian city that most of the world had never heard of. Time, Newsweek, and the Nashville Tennessean piled on with similar assessments.
Knoxville's fair officials printed the phrase 'scruffy little city' on commemorative buttons. The buttons read, 'The Scruffy Little City Did It.' They were premature, but not wrong.
The nineteen eighty-two World's Fair, officially the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, opened May first and ran through October thirty-first with the theme 'Energy Turns the World.' Its centerpiece was the Sunsphere, a two hundred sixty-six-foot steel tower topped with a five-story globe made of bronze-tinted glass panels containing twenty-four-karat gold dust. It was completed in early nineteen eighty-two, built in roughly a year on a sixty-seven-acre site between the University of Tennessee campus and downtown.
Eleven million people attended. The fair turned a profit of fifty-seven dollars, which has entered Knoxville lore as an unlikely symbol of bare competence. The Sunsphere and the Tennessee Amphitheater are the only structures that remained after the fairgrounds were redeveloped into what is now World's Fair Park.
For a period after the fair, the Sunsphere sat largely unused and became a punchline for a nineteen ninety-six Simpsons episode in which the globe was found to be storing wigs. In two thousand seven and the years following, the city renovated it as a public observation deck and event venue. It reopened fully in twenty twenty-two, the fortieth anniversary of the fair.
It is still the most recognizable structure on the Knoxville skyline. The city that was called scruffy has not stopped using the word as a point of pride.
