How Much of a Tuesday Can You Spend in Bearden Without Starting Your Car?

Two years ago the honest answer was almost none. You could get a beer, maybe a haircut, and that was about the extent of it before you were back behind the wheel headed somewhere else. This summer the answer has changed enough that it's worth writing down, because three businesses picked the same short stretch of Old Kingston Pike and Kingston Pike to open in, and none of them are on the other side of town.

If you live along this corridor, you've probably already noticed the construction signs and the new logos going up faster than you can keep track of. What you may not have connected is that they're clustering, and that the reason they can cluster at all is a walking path that's been sitting there the whole time.

The same few blocks, three new reasons to park once

Ashe's Bearden Beer Market has anchored 4524 Old Kingston Pike for years now, a beer garden built inside what used to be a plant nursery, greenhouses and all, with a Monday night fun run that leaves from the parking lot at 6:30. It's the kind of place regulars describe as dog friendly and unpretentious, the closest thing Bearden has to a neighborhood living room.

This summer it got company close by. Honeybee Coffee opened its third Knox County location at 4520 Old Kingston Pike, just up the block from the beer market by address alone. And a 46,819 square foot Crunch Fitness is on the way at 4581 Kingston Pike, moving into the space that used to hold Persian Galleries, the rug and home goods store that had occupied that spot for years.

That last one is the biggest square footage by far. According to the company's official announcement, Crunch Bearden will carry the brand's newest club design, with a hot studio, a cycle studio, and a dedicated glutes and abs area built into a space that spent its previous life selling area rugs.

Presale memberships at Crunch Bearden start at $9.99 a month with no enrollment fee, a rate the company says locks in for founding members before the doors even open.

Put those three addresses next to each other and you get coffee, a beer garden, and a full gym inside what amounts to one short walk. That's not something you'd have said about this stretch of Kingston Pike a few years back, when Bearden's commercial strip was still mostly a place you drove through on the way to somewhere else.

The greenway was already doing this quietly

None of this required new sidewalks to be poured. The Bearden Village Greenway has been running 1.7 paved miles through the neighborhood for years, an extension of the Third Creek Greenway that connects West High School, Bearden Elementary, and the stretch of Sutherland Avenue in between. It's lined with historic markers that tell pieces of Bearden Village's story as you pass them, and it's flat enough that the Knoxville Track Club uses a section of it for its CrossKnox Race, a route that runs all the way from Haley Heritage Square in East Knoxville to Bearden Elementary on the west side of town.

In other words, the path was already there. What's new is that there's finally enough on either end of it worth walking to. A coffee shop, a beer garden, and a gym clustering within a few addresses of each other only matters if there's a way to get between them that isn't a parking lot, and in Bearden that way already existed. The new businesses are filling in around infrastructure that was built for a different reason years ago and is only now getting used the way it was designed to be.

Two ends of the same road, filling in differently

Further out along Northshore Drive, near Pellissippi Parkway, a different piece of West Knoxville is filling in too, and it's worth noticing because it's happening in the opposite way. Daps Pizza and Provisions opened July 2, 2026 at 9411 S. Northshore Drive, an independent pizza spot built around handcrafted pies and a room meant for hanging out after the food is gone. It sits near Northshore Town Center, the 133-acre mixed-use development at Northshore Drive and Pellissippi Parkway that a recent WBIR report held up as a model for how Knox County might handle future growth, combining housing, restaurants, retail, grocery stores, and a school in one place from the start.

Former Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, who was in office when Northshore Town Center broke ground, called the development "a very good symbol for growth in our community" in that same report, pointing to the mix of housing, dining, and schooling built into the plan from day one.

That's the difference worth sitting with. Northshore was drawn up as a walkable place before a single building went in. Bearden is becoming one the slower way, retrofitted one lease at a time into buildings that were built for something else entirely, a rug store turning into a gym instead of a gym being planned as a gym. Both ends of the same West Knoxville corridor are filling in this year. They're just filling in by two completely different methods, and if you live in one half or the other, your version of West Knoxville looks different depending on which method built it.

If you want a broader sense of how these two ends of the corridor compare day to day, the West Knoxville neighborhood page breaks down more of what each stretch offers.

The next stitch heads downtown

The most interesting piece of this isn't even about Bearden directly. A WATE report on a new greenway project in South Knoxville, a former rail line being converted into a trail with its first 1.5 mile segment between Chapman Highway and Island Home Avenue set to open in fall 2026, noted in passing that once that segment connects with the rest of the city's network, along with the Gay Street bridge opening to pedestrians, someone would be able to walk from Bearden to World's Fair Park to Kern's Food Hall to Ijams Nature Center with barely a vehicle crossing the whole way.

That's not finished yet. The South Knoxville segment alone is part of a larger effort that includes a $19.2 million Sevier Avenue streetscape project expected to wrap in early 2027. But the fact that a story about a rail line in a completely different part of the city ends up naming Bearden as one end of a future car free route tells you this isn't an isolated neighborhood trend. It's one piece of a city-wide project, and Bearden's greenway happens to be the piece that's already been sitting finished, waiting for the rest of the map to catch up to it.

What this actually changes on a Tuesday

None of this means you're giving up your car. It means the honest answer to the opening question keeps growing. Coffee at Honeybee, a workout at Crunch once it opens, dinner somewhere along Kingston Pike, and a drink at Ashe's afterward, all without moving your vehicle once you've parked it for the day. A year from now, if the rest of the city's greenway plans hold, that same walk might plausibly stretch toward downtown instead of stopping at the neighborhood's own edge.

Bearden isn't becoming a different neighborhood. It's becoming a more usable version of the one that was already here, filling in around a path that was finished long before anyone decided to open a third coffee shop next to it.

If you're weighing whether this stretch of West Knoxville fits what you're looking for next, the team at Jennifer Scates Group knows this corridor block by block. Reach out anytime, or start with a free home valuation to see where your own address fits into the picture.