For two months this spring, the shortcut disappeared. If your Westmoreland loop runs down to Third Creek Greenway and across the wooden bridge locals call the Zig Zag, that route simply wasn't there. The bridge closed February 2 and didn't reopen until April 3, and the two months in between changed more than a construction schedule. They changed what people noticed about the walk itself, and they changed what was waiting at the other end of it.
The easy version of this story is "the bridge is fixed, go enjoy it." The truer version is that the closure exposed how much a single 200-foot structure was carrying, and how much better the Bearden end of the walk has gotten while everyone was rerouting around it.
The Bridge Had a Hole in It
The Zig Zag Bridge is officially the John Ulmer Bridge, named for the KCDC planner who first envisioned a trail connecting UT apartments on Sutherland Avenue to Painter Avenue back in the early 1970s. That trail became Third Creek Greenway, Knoxville's first paved greenway, and the zig zag crossing near Concord Street became its most recognizable feature.
By this year, the wooden decking had gone from charming to actively dangerous. The city's announcement of the closure described it plainly: worn and slick-when-wet decking that needed to come out. Alison Bullock, the city's Parks and Greenways Coordinator, put it more bluntly once crews got into it:
"This is a significant rebuild. Parts of the original bridge were rotten and in bad shape, there was even a large hole. So the crew took it down to the 8-by-8-foot posts. All they kept was the metal railing."
That's not a patch job. That's a bridge rebuilt from its structural bones, with only the railing surviving from the original. It reopened April 3, and what's underfoot now is a different piece of infrastructure than what closed in February, even if it looks the same from a distance.
Two Months Without the Shortcut
Here's what the closure actually forced: anyone who normally crossed the Zig Zag as part of a Westmoreland walk had to find another way through, and Third Creek Greenway turns out to be more of a hub than most people treat it as day to day. The 5.3-mile greenway connects to Sequoyah Hills Park and Greenway, Bearden Village Greenway, and Neyland Greenway, and it bisects the 26-acre Tyson Park along the way, home to tennis courts, the Knoxville Skatepark, and a large accessible playground.
If you spent February and March rerouting, you likely rediscovered pieces of that network you'd normally skip past on autopilot:
- The Tyson Park connection, which lets you swing through the skatepark and playground area instead of crossing at Concord
- The Bearden Village Greenway link, which feeds directly into the restaurant and shopping corridor without needing the bridge at all
- The Sequoyah Hills Park and Greenway tie-in, useful if you were willing to add distance to avoid the closure entirely
None of this is new infrastructure. It was always there. But a closure has a way of making you actually use a map instead of muscle memory, and a lot of Westmoreland walkers spent two months learning their own neighborhood's connections better than they had in years.
What Waited at the Bearden End
While the bridge was out, the destination most people are walking toward got better too. Old Kingston Pike in Bearden Village saw two changes worth knowing about, and they sit four doors apart from each other.
Honeybee Coffee opened its third Knox County cafe at 4520 Old Kingston Pike in July. The brand started as a catering operation in 2014 and opened its first storefront on Sevier Avenue in 2017, so this Bearden spot brings a proven house-roasted coffee and pastry lineup rather than an unproven concept. It keeps modest hours, open Tuesday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and weekends from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., which makes it a genuine morning-walk stop rather than an all-day hangout.
A few doors down at 4524 Old Kingston Pike, the beer garden long known as Bearden Beer Market rebranded and renovated as Ashe's Bearden Beer Market. The additions are the kind that change who actually uses the space: seltzers, wine, and prosecco alongside the craft beer list, a full daily menu, and a complimentary kids' zone with a swing set and chalk. What used to be a stop for beer enthusiasts on their way home is now built for a family walking the greenway on a Saturday afternoon.
Put those two together and the practical effect is this: the walk that got harder for two months now ends somewhere genuinely better than it did in January.
The One Saturday When the Loop Becomes a Racecourse
There's a date worth marking now, months ahead. The CrossKnox 15K and 4-Miler runs this December 12, and its route is essentially the same corridor the Zig Zag closure forced everyone to explore: Morningside Park to Neyland Greenway to Third Creek Greenway to Tyson Park and back through to Bearden Greenway, finishing at Bearden Elementary School.
For anyone who treats this stretch as a daily or weekly walk, that Saturday morning is worth planning around rather than running into by accident. A few specifics from the Knoxville Track Club's own event rules:
- The race starts at 8 a.m., with the 15K course closing after two and a half hours
- Dogs, bikes, and roller blades aren't permitted on the course that morning, per race insurance requirements
- Registration and packet pickup happen at Bearden Elementary, with race buses running from there to the start lines beginning at 6:30 a.m.
If a mid-morning walk on the second Saturday in December is part of your routine, this is the one week to either join in or reroute.
The Walk Is Different Now, Not Just Reopened
The temptation with any infrastructure repair story is to treat it as a return to normal. This one isn't that. The bridge you're crossing this fall was rebuilt down to its posts rather than resurfaced, which means it should hold up longer than the version that developed a hole in the decking in the first place. The Bearden end of the walk has a new coffee stop and a beer garden built around families rather than just a beer list. And the whole corridor gets a hard reminder every December that it doubles as a race course for a few hours.
None of that shows up if you just glance at "bridge reopens" and move on. It shows up if you actually walked the detour in February, or if you notice that Honeybee's hours line up with your usual morning loop, or if you know to check the calendar before December 12.
That's the kind of detail that comes from paying attention to a neighborhood over time rather than checking in on it once. If you're the kind of person who wants that level of read on Westmoreland, whether it's the walk to Bearden, the Cherokee Country Club side of the neighborhood, or the market underneath all of it, The Creel Group has been tracking this corner of Knoxville long enough to know it street by street. When the conversation eventually turns from coffee runs to square footage, that's the kind of local read worth having in your corner.
