Matt Zingg runs Two Bikes in Knoxville's Old City, and he'll tell you straight: nobody leaves a Knoxville Smokies game and suddenly decides they need a new bicycle. That's not a complaint. It's the exact problem Old City stakeholders set out to solve.
Covenant Health Park opened a year and a half ago a few blocks from Zingg's shop, and it did what a new stadium does. It pulled in sizable crowds on game nights for Smokies baseball and One Knoxville SC soccer. What it didn't do, at least not on its own, was send those people wandering past the wine bars, bike shops, and galleries that make up the rest of the Old City. A crowd walking straight from a parking garage to a ballpark gate is not the same as a crowd browsing Central Street. Those are two different kinds of foot traffic, and only this month did the district land on a deliberate way to connect them.
A Stadium Doesn't Automatically Share Its Crowd
The Old City is a small, dense stretch of Downtown built around Central Street and Jackson Avenue, the kind of place where a wine shop, a bike shop, and a gallery can sit within sight of each other. Erin Emory, who manages Corks Wine & Spirits, pointed to that exact intersection when she talked about what makes the district work: a mix of completely unrelated businesses clustered close enough together that a walk down one block touches half a dozen different worlds.
That mix is a strength when people are already walking the block. It's invisible when they're not. A stadium generates its own gravity, pulling attendees in and out along a fairly narrow path, and there was no built-in mechanism nudging any of that traffic toward Two Bikes or Corks or the galleries a few doors down. Inside of Knoxville, the local outlet that covers Downtown's business scene block by block, put it plainly: the year and a half since Covenant Health Park opened has scrambled some of the district's rhythms. That's not a criticism of the ballpark. It's a description of what happens when a major new venue lands next to a small commercial district that was built around a completely different rhythm of foot traffic.
Fifteen Stamps, One Gift Basket, Two Sports Teams
The fix that Old City stakeholders landed on isn't a marketing campaign or a banner on Central Street. It's a digital passport, live now inside the Visit Knoxville app, that turns exploring the district into something closer to a game with a real payoff.
Here's how it works:
- Download the Visit Knoxville app and open the Old City Passport.
- Stop by a participating business, redeem its listed offer, and collect a digital stamp.
- Repeat at fifteen different locations.
- Redeem your completed passport for an Old City gift basket that includes four tickets to either a Knoxville Smokies baseball game or a One Knoxville SC match at Covenant Health Park, valid for a standard home game during the 2026 or 2027 season.
Notice what that mechanic actually does. It doesn't ask a stadium-goer to buy something unrelated to their evening out. It asks them to visit fifteen different storefronts scattered across the district, in exchange for tickets back to the same venue that started the whole imbalance. The reward loops the ballpark crowd back through the neighborhood it walked past on the way in.
Zingg was upfront about the odd fit when Inside of Knoxville asked him about it. Nobody walks out of a ballgame thinking about bike gear. But the passport gave a shop like his a reason to be on the list anyway, and gave the stadium's own audience a reason to eventually walk through his door.
The People Who Actually Built This
This wasn't one organization's idea dropped on the district from above. According to Inside of Knoxville's reporting, Visit Knoxville Executive Director Kim Bumpas brought the initial question to the table: how can we help the Old City. Clint Casey, the organization's Managing Director of Web Experience, did the technical work of turning that question into an actual functioning digital passport.
On the district side, Old City Association President Robin Easter, who also runs Robin Easter Design, has been central to getting Old City merchants to collaborate on something that benefits the whole block rather than any single storefront. Her firm's client liaison and community engagement lead, Caroline King, helped shape the messaging and pull the finished product together.
The stadium's operators didn't sit this one out either. Knoxville Smokies and Boyd Sports Executive Vice President Jeremy Boler agreed to provide the prize tickets and help promote the program at the ballpark itself, including jumbotron videos produced by photographer Dustin Hilbelink. That's a tourism board, a neighborhood merchants' association, and a professional sports franchise all coordinating on one shared incentive. That level of cross-institutional buy-in is unusual for a program this small, and it tells you the mismatch between stadium traffic and storefront traffic was a real, shared frustration, not just one bike shop owner's joke.
What the Business List Actually Tells You
If you already live near enough to the Old City to walk it on a Tuesday night, the passport's real value isn't the gift basket. It's the list of fifteen-plus participating businesses itself, which functions as an up-to-date map of which storefronts are actually open, active, and worth your evening right now.
That matters because a list like this only works if it's current. A wine bar and a bike shop showing up on the same list as a stadium ticket giveaway is a real-time signal that both are open, engaged with the district, and worth the walk today. The Old City Association put its name behind this list, which makes it more reliable than any static roundup floating around online.
"The Old City really is still a place for everyone," Emory said. "There's something here for everyone."
That's not a slogan. It's a description of exactly what the passport is designed to prove, one stamp at a time.
If You Live Close Enough to Walk It
The passport isn't tied to a single weekend or a limited-time festival. The reward window runs through the 2026 and 2027 seasons, which means there's no reason to rush a full circuit of fifteen stops in one night. A more natural approach is to fold it into evenings you're already having. Grab a bottle at Corks. Swing by Two Bikes if you've been putting off a tune-up. Add a stamp on a First Friday ArtWalk night when you're already downtown browsing galleries anyway.
The bigger point is what the passport reveals about how this pocket of Downtown actually functions. A ballpark and a block of small businesses can sit a few minutes' walk apart and still operate like separate neighborhoods until someone builds a deliberate bridge between them. The Old City just built one. Whether you use it to collect a free ticket or just to give yourself a reason to finally walk into a shop you've passed a dozen times, it's worth knowing the bridge exists.
For anyone thinking further down the road about what living in a Downtown neighborhood this connected actually looks like day to day, that's the kind of texture worth understanding before you ever look at a listing. Terri Lawson spends her time in these blocks and can walk you through what a given stretch of Downtown or the Old City is really like to call home. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk through it.
