McKay's Papermill Drive Building Future: What Comes Next

McKay's own closing announcement in February ended with a phrase West Knoxville has been repeating for months now: "please stay tuned for further announcements." The store meant it as reassurance. Six months later, it reads more like the honest truth. Nobody, including the company that bought the building, has said what happens next. And if you look at what that company has actually been buying along Papermill Drive since 2023, you start to understand why.

What Actually Closed on May 3

McKay's on Papermill Place Way wasn't just another used bookstore. It opened in 1985 as the first McKay's location outside North Carolina, the store that proved the "read it, trade it back" model could work in a second market. Forty years later, the Knoxville location shut its doors for good on Sunday, May 3, 2026, not because business had slowed but because the building sold out from under it. Trade credit and gift cards still work at the chain's Chattanooga and Nashville stores. The Knoxville shelves are gone.

The sale itself happened quietly in late February. Knox County property records show the building at 230 Papermill Place Way changed hands on February 23 for $4.25 million, purchased by an entity called Papermill Place LLC.

The Name on the Deed

Papermill Place LLC traces back to Nick Patel, president of Turkey Creek Hospitality, a group that has built hotels across East Tennessee. According to Tennessee Secretary of State records, Papermill Place LLC shares a principal address and registered agent with Turkey Creek Hospitality, which already owns and operates the Holiday Inn Express & Suites just down the road on Papermill Drive.

That single fact changes the story. This isn't an outside investor picking off a distressed property. It's a local hospitality developer adding to a footprint he already had on this exact stretch of road.

Three Parcels, One Owner

Here's the part that hasn't made it into most of the coverage. The McKay's building isn't the only property Patel owns on this corridor, and it isn't even his most recent purchase.

Patel bought the shuttered car dealership at 231 Papermill Place Way back in June 2023, nearly three years before McKay's ever went on the market. That timing matters. It means the McKay's purchase wasn't a reaction to a bookstore closing. It was the next piece of something that had already been in motion for years, on land that sits directly beside it.

Why "Gateway Corridor" Is the Tell

When Turkey Creek Hospitality released its statement on the McKay's sale, the language was careful in a specific way. The company described the purchase as "a strategic alignment of properties within an important gateway corridor in Knoxville." Not a single-site plan. An alignment of properties, plural.

Real estate advisor Joel Richmond, who represented Patel in the deal, put it a little more plainly in a separate statement to local media:

"The site lends itself to a wide range of possibilities given its location, visibility, and overall fundamentals."

Both statements are doing the same work. They're describing potential without committing to a use, because the shape of whatever comes next likely depends on how many of these adjoining parcels end up combined into one larger footprint rather than redeveloped separately. That's a slower, quieter process than a single teardown-and-rebuild, and it's exactly the kind of process that produces "no formal plans yet" statements for months at a stretch.

This Corridor Has Reinvented Itself Before

Papermill Drive's own name is a clue that this kind of transition isn't new here. The road is named for a paper mill built along Third Creek in 1838, which ran for nearly fifty years until its milldam failed in 1886. The corridor didn't stay quiet after that. Western Plaza opened nearby in 1957 as Knoxville's first shopping center outside downtown, and West Town Mall followed in the early 1970s, pulling Knoxville's primary commercial center from downtown out to West Knoxville for good. Bearden has spent close to two centuries absorbing the closure of one anchor and building the next thing on top of it.

That doesn't tell us what's coming for the McKay's site. It does tell you this stretch of West Knoxville has never sat empty for long, and that the neighborhood's commercial identity has always been rewritten in stages rather than all at once.

The corridor around McKay's hasn't paused while this one building sits empty. Daps Pizza and Provisions opened this summer just up South Northshore Drive, and a new 7 Brew drive-thru opened at the Pinnacle at Turkey Creek in March, one more tenant in a shopping hub that keeps adding names. The McKay's building is the one piece of this stretch that's genuinely on hold. Everything around it kept moving.

What to Actually Watch For

If you want to know what's happening at 230 Papermill Place Way before it shows up in a press release, the earliest public signals won't come from a news story. They'll come from paperwork. Site plan submissions and rezoning requests in Knox County or the City of Knoxville typically go through the Metropolitan Planning Commission before anything gets built, and those agendas are public. Building permit filings are another early tell, since a developer rarely pulls permits until the assembly is settled. Right now, based on the most recent statements available, none of that has surfaced for this site. That absence is itself the update. When it changes, it will likely change across all three parcels at once, not just the old bookstore.

What This Actually Means for the Neighborhood

McKay's wasn't just inventory. It was one of the few places in West Knoxville where you could spend an hour without spending much money, a habit a lot of Bearden residents built their weekends around. Its absence is a real gap in the everyday texture of the corridor, and that gap will likely stay a gap for a while longer. The three-parcel pattern suggests whatever eventually replaces it will be sized to the assembled footprint rather than the single building, which usually means the announcement, when it comes, will be bigger than "what's going in the old McKay's."

For now, the honest answer is that nobody outside Turkey Creek Hospitality knows, and the company itself has said as much twice. The most useful thing a longtime resident can do is watch the paperwork, not the headlines.

If you're keeping an eye on how corners like this one shift the character of West Knoxville, or you're weighing what a stretch of Papermill Drive or Kingston Pike means for your own next move in the area, Jennifer Shuler knows this corridor block by block. Let's Connect.