Sunsphere Restaurant ad. McClung Historical Collection.
ENERGY TURNS THE WORLD
THE SUNSPHERE RESTAURANT
A six-month-long party highlighting the beauty and resources of our area, the world is invited and every evening ends with fireworks and chicken dancing? Let’s do it! East Tennessee completely embraced the 1982 World’s Fair, with its theme song “You’ve got to be there, the 1982…World’s…Fair!”
In the early 1970s, with the continual drain of business to the west side of town, downtown Knoxville needed a boost to jump-start redevelopment. Not merely a boost, but a so-called quantum leap. The idea for Knoxville to host a World’s Fair was presented by W. Stewart Evans, then executive director of the Downtown Knoxville Association. Evans had heard how the 1974 World’s Fair was already benefiting its host city of Spokane, Washington. He assessed the same could be done in Knoxville.
In 1975, the Downtown Knoxville Association requested that Mayor Kyle Testerman appoint a committee to conduct a feasibility study on Knoxville hosting a World’s Fair. Testerman chose well-known young banker Jake Butcher as the head of the committee. The seventeen-member bipartisan committee of business, political and civic leaders reported back that the project was possible. Energy was suggested as the theme due to Knoxville’s proximity to and association with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and it being the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The 1982 World’s Fair, formally known as the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, was proposed to run from the beginning of May until the end of October with the theme “Energy Turns the World.” In 1977, the fair was endorsed by President Jimmy Carter and the Tennessee General Assembly.
Enthusiasm for the fair grew and swelled all across the region. Then, It happened. In a throwback to the distasteful words of John Gunther, citing Knoxville as the ugliest city in America, in 1980 a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote a scathing article titled “What If You Gave a World’s Fair and Nobody Came?” citing Knoxville as a “scruffy little city…on the Tennessee River.” Shocked and appalled, but mostly hurt, the citizens of Knoxville banded together in their efforts. On May 1, 1982, President Ronald Reagan opened the Knoxville World’s Fair with twenty-two different countries participating. Record attendance of 102,842 guests was set on October 9. On October 30, the day before the fair closed, the 11 millionth visitor passed through the gates.
Of course, you can’t have a World’s Fair without a theme structure. The fair management committee began working with William S. Denton, president of Community Tectonics Inc., and Hubert Bebb, the founder of that company, who had also been a designer at the 1933 World’s Fair held in Chicago. Together they proposed the concept of the Sunsphere. The initial plan was for a glowing sphere, 160 feet tall, 86.5 feet in diameter, where five hundred guests could eat and drink on four revolving levels, at the projected cost of $3 million. The structure would serve as a symbol of the fair by representing the sun, the source of all energy. It would be a glowing beacon that would mark the fair site and would also serve as an observation tower.
The different levels of the sphere were meant to represent the formation of the earth through the ages and would be illustrated on each floor with sound systems, graphics, murals, furniture and color selections. The first floor was to be the Precambrian and Azoic era of rock dust and gas development, the second floor the rock and fossil development of the Precambrian and Proterozoic era, the third floor the age of fish of the Paleozoic era, the fourth floor the age of birds and dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era, the fifth floor the age of mammals or Cenozoic era and the sixth floor the future era of the space age.
The construction of the sphere would be of solar bronze glass, which would resemble the sun in the daytime, but in the evening it would give off a glow of a brilliant sunset. Preliminary plans included a call for two service elevators, two passenger elevators and two stairways. As the year went on, the projection for the height and the cost of the Sunsphere both increased.
When finished, the Sunsphere soared to be a 266-foot-tall steel truss structure, topped with a 75-foot gold-colored glass sphere. The glass-paneled windows were cut into seven different shapes and layered with twenty-four-carat gold dust. It weighed six hundred tons.
During the fair, an observation deck was located on the first level of the sphere, the kitchen and private dining on level two, public dining rooms on levels three and four and a cocktail lounge on level five. An elevator was installed specifically for transporting product and kitchen supplies.
The Sunsphere Restaurant was run by the Specialty Food Service Division of Hardee’s Food Systems, Inc., of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Rolf Tinner, a native of Switzerland, was the executive chef. Hardee’s did operate one of its signature fast-food franchises on the ground level near the Sunsphere, but the Sunsphere Restaurant was a fine dining establishment.
Fair visitors who wanted to ride the elevator up in the Sunsphere could purchase a ticket for two dollars, and then those who wanted to stay and dine would be assigned seats in the restaurant with the purchase of their elevator ticket. The third-floor dining room could seat 144 guests and the fourth floor 136. Hardee’s executives estimated serving 2,000 guests a day.
Lunch and dinner in the main dining rooms featured items such as Rock Cornish game hen, prime rib, shrimp cocktail, Alaskan king crab legs and red snapper. A VIP dining room for visiting dignitaries could hold fortyeight and featured more elaborate meals of escargots, crab and lamb–stuffed mushrooms, beef wellington, chateaubriand, stuffed trout, rack of lamb, quail and even a tableside service of raspberry flambé baked Alaska.
In choosing the décor of the restaurant, it became apparent that the tint of the gold glass windowpanes changed the color of the fabrics. The wall coverings were in blue, while the carpet was sand, taupe and crimson, and the dining chairs were brushed satin chrome upholstered with a wine-colored fabric, except in the VIP lounge, where they were upholstered in deep blue with flecks of sand and red. Indirect lighting and candles on each table were meant to soften the atmosphere.
Designers of the uniforms for the workers at the restaurant also found working with color to be a challenge, noting that reds and blues looked good, but the gold glass turned brown and many other colors green. Judy Miler and Fann Burrus had heard that the Sunsphere Restaurant was looking for uniforms, and over a weekend, they worked up sketches and then presented them to the executives of Hardee’s. A month later, they had produced prototypes in taupe, claret and navy. Hardee’s hired them to produce 450 uniforms, which they did with other seamstresses in their homes. They produced khaki trousers and navy shirts for the elevator operators, taupe trousers with claret bow ties and vests to be worn with white shirts for waiters, taupe dresses belted and piped in claret for food waitresses, cowlneck blouses with gathers on the shoulders and side-slit skirts linked by bronze belts for cocktail waitresses and sleeveless taupe sheath dresses with claret cummerbunds and boleros for hostesses.
The Sunsphere Restaurant was a big hit during the fair and served 400,000 guests. Food and drink totals included 207,998 shrimp, 90,998 prime rib, 37,792 red snapper, 19,611 orders of crab legs, 411,614 cheeseburgers, 603,553 French fries and 2,063 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In addition, 1,078,528 ounces of liquor were served. After the fair ended, Hardee’s announced its intention to continue the fast-food establishment on the ground level, as well as the Sunsphere Restaurant.
The Blue Room opened on the fifth level of the sphere, while regular dining was on levels six and seven. The $2 elevator fee was still charged, but the restaurant would offset that cost by providing a free drink to diners. By 1983, the charge for the elevator was dropped, and free parking was touted across the way at Miller’s. Although Hardee’s had every intention of continuing the Sunsphere Restaurant, lack of promotion after the fair forced it to close in 1984, citing losing $1 million a year. Eighty-five people lost their jobs.
The Sunsphere then went dormant, but in a peculiar turn of events, the structure was referenced in 1996 in season 7, episode 20 of The Simpsons, “Bart on the Road,” in which Bart makes a fake driver’s license to take his friends on a spring break road trip. With a choice of Disney World or Knoxville, to the World’s Fair, mentioned in an old guidebook, the gang chanted, “Knox-ville! Knox-ville! Knox-ville!” Upon arrival, they learned they were fourteen years too late. Asking about the Sunsphere, they receive the response, “You mean the Wigsphere?” as in this odd tale, the icon was being used to store sixteen thousand boxes of unsold wigs. Cute as the episode was, Knoxvillians are happy to note, “The Sunsphere is not a wig shop.”
For a brief period in 1999, the observation deck was opened until the Public Building Authority made use of the space to oversee construction of the Knoxville Convention Center. In 2005, Mayor Bill Haslam, as part of his historic preservation initiatives, announced that the last two remaining structures created for the fair, the Sunsphere and the Tennessee Amphitheater, would be renovated and opened to the public. In 2007, an observation deck, free to the public, opened on the fourth floor, and then in 2008, privately owned businesses opened on the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth floors.