Butcher and the mayor more or less pushed it plus a couple of more developers who left town afterward some to Chattanooga actually. But in Knoxville both parties have their share of bad deals. Alexander was a backer of Whittle Communications which cut a deal to build it's corporate Head Quarters in Knoxville. The campus was built and they left town shortly after. The city was stuck with a building one of many at the time in the downtown area empty.
Downtown has come back a little bit mostly being converted to residence etc but if you want to shop you better hit the outlying areas such as Knoxville Center {formerly called East Towne Mall or West Town Mall. Most business development is west actually. East and west Knoxville and County has better terrain for building on. North Knox County has some places but not quite as flat. Emory Road on I-75 north is about the limit of it on the north side and it's growing up fast now.
One last thing. I think if the fair hadn't gone bust contributing to the banking failures Jake Butcher and not Clinton would have been the DEMs 1992 choice in the POTUS race.
Butcher was never going to be elected Governor, so a possibility for President in '92 was highly unlikely. He ran in '78, not in '82 (and even so, he would've been out of office as Governor for either 6 or 10 years by then, unless he would've challenged Gore for the Senate seat in '84, a bloody primary that might've resulted in our holding Baker's seat with, say, former Congressman Robin Beard, Sasser's challenger in '82), and although he had to inherit the substantial baggage that Ray Blanton's Democrat affiliation, I doubt he would've won even if Blanton had been clean (and the sole reason Blanton won in '74 was because of Watergate and Lamar! working for the Nixon WH). You might recall that Alexander obliterated Mayor Tyree in the '82 election by 60-40%, and that was a bad GOP year. Probably even helped carry one Don Sundquist to an open House seat over the favored Bob Clement in a 'Rat gerrymandered seat that is now one of the most GOP in the state, the 7th.