Tag: development

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News

Former Downtown Bank Building May Survive

It looks as if a bank across the street from AutoZone Park that was slated for demolition might be saved or at least will not come down without a fight.

The former C&I Bank Building, opened in 1972, has a distinctive atrium and sloping glass front side. It is on the north side of Madison across from the ballpark and next door to the long-abandoned Sterrick Building, the second-tallest building downtown.

Last week the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce, which owns the building, indicated it would be demolished and replaced with a parking lot. On Tuesday, however, John Moore, head of the chamber, said, “An interested party has a plan for the site and we are running the traps to see if we can meet their needs in a potential sale.”

In a letter to architect Tony Bologna, Moore said he was previously ignorant of the building’s history “and the community’s love for it. This is valuable information and changes the perspective.”

It is unclear how much “love” the community has for a building that cannot find an occupant. It was once proposed as the site of a minor-league baseball hall of fame — an indication, perhaps, of its prospects. Moreover, the Sterrick Building and other neighbors on Madison are in the same empty boat. The vaunted downtown revival is largely confined to housing and entertainment, with commercial buildings not showing much sign of new life.

Bologna, who has designed downtown buildings and was a partner with Henry Turley in many successful downtown developments, said in his letter to Moore (copies of both letters were sent to this newspaper) that the former C&I Bank is a “one-of-a-kind design” by the late Memphis architect Francis Gassner.
“The building stands as an icon among the city’s most notable architectural creations,” Bologna said. “The removal of this building will not in any way promote the redevelopment of the Sterrick Building. There are many serious obstacles to the redevelopment of the Sterrick Building but the need for additional parking is not one of them.”

Gretchen Gassner Turley, daughter of Frances Gassner, wrote a letter to The Commercial Appeal about the building that was published Wednesday. She also urged that it be preserved.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Meeting Needs

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The Cannon Center for the Performing Arts — and the expansion of the Cook Convention Center — was one of the most challenging construction projects in recent years. Plagued by missed deadlines, cost overruns, and lawsuits, the expansion was finally completed about four years ago.

But Pierre Landaiche III, the Cook Convention Center’s general manager since 1996, says the story has a happy ending. So happy, in fact, that the convention center board has even brought up the idea of adding more space.

“Memphis is a hot destination right now. No one else will ever claim Elvis or Beale Street,” Landaiche told a group from the local Public Relations Society of America last week. “We just have to meet the need.”

To be a successful meeting destination — and share in the hundred billion dollar convention industry — a city needs hotel rooms, attractions, transportation, and meeting facilities. Before 1995, Memphis had three of the four. What it lacked was meeting facilities.

“Generally, we heard, ‘Your building needs to be updated,'” Landaiche said. “‘You need more meeting rooms.'”

Though Landaiche said it was easy to justify the project by the time it was completed, the public didn’t always see it that way.

“The general consensus was that it was the worst public project ever done in the city of Memphis,” Landaiche said.

The convention center is funded with the hotel/motel occupancy tax. During the expansion, the convention center added a 28,000-square-foot ballroom, as well as 10 smaller meeting rooms and the Cannon Center auditorium.

“The Cannon Center is arguably one of the top five theater venues in the country, especially when it comes to acoustics,” Landaiche said. “Compared to other facilities around the country, we got a bargain.”

Miami’s new Carnival Center — which includes a concert hall and opera house — cost about $473 million. A new symphony center is being erected in Atlanta for $300 million. Nashville’s 1,900-seat Schermerhorn Symphony Center cost $120 million (The Cannon Center seats 2,100.)

“We paid $60 million and that was only four years ago,” Landaiche said. “It’s paying off.”

Since the project — which cost $106.5 million in construction and additional settlement fees — the convention center’s annual revenue has almost doubled from $1.3 million before the expansion to $2.5 million afterward. Before the renovation, the center saw about 12 national conventions a year and now it’s almost triple that. That means an additional 200,000 people through the doors each year, and roughly 95,000 hotel-room nights each year generated just from convention center and Cannon Center events.

Landaiche estimates the conventions mean a $70 million economic impact for the city. But even with the investments paying off and revenue up, the convention center still runs at a $2 million deficit each year.

“We can’t charge enough for our product to break even,” Landaiche said. “Places like Phoenix and Ft. Lauderdale are giving their convention space away.”

The convention industry is notoriously competitive.Washington, D.C.’s convention center expects to have a $22 million deficit this year. And it’s surely bracing itself for next April when the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center — created by the company behind Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland resort — opens with 2,000 rooms and 470,000 square feet of convention space in nearby Maryland.

Memphis is not only competing with similar size cities such as Birmingham, but with industry leader Las Vegas, as well. And with a possible expansion in the works for the six-year-old DeSoto Civic Center, Memphis may get more competition closer to home.

Generally, convention-center renovations and expansion happen in 10-year cycles.

“Because of the level of activity we’ve had at the Cook Convention Center, the board along with the convention bureau and the hotel community are beginning to look at a long-range convention plan to start talking about the need for an expanded facility,” Landaiche said. “It’s basically, how do we address the meeting planners’ needs in the future?”

The talk is still just that — talk — but any expansion would be predicated on a needs analysis for events that are currently too large for Memphis but are interested in coming here.

Said Landaiche: “A $2 million deficit at the end of the day for $70 million [of economic impact], it’s not a bad investment.”

Categories
Living Spaces Real Estate

New Neighbor

CREDIT: Renderings courtesy of Grant and Company

Harbor Town, established in 1989 — making it the granddaddy of the downtown residential revival — is getting a new neighbor. Toward the south end of Mud Island, near the Auction Street Bridge, RiverTown is going up. Occupancy is set for November.

Keith Grant, who, along with his brother David, is a principal for RiverTown, says the downtown development was a change of pace for the homebuilding team.

“In the past, we’ve done predominantly single-family housing,” Grant says. “We feel like some of the projects downtown are too contemporary or they don’t have a view of the Mississippi River. By building [RiverTown] and not retrofitting a building, we feel that we can offer something for Memphians to purchase that they can enjoy.”

Grant is president of the Memphis Area Homebuilders Association (see his monthly Living Spaces column on page 4), the third generation of Grants to be so appointed (after his father, Richard, and his grandfather, Carl).

When the finishing touches are put on it, RiverTown will be composed of 200 units in 23 buildings. Prices will range from the mid-$200,000s to the upper-$600,000s, with sizes going from 1,300 to 3,200 square feet. Some units are two or three stories high. The 3,200-square-footers will have a large patio overlooking the river and a recreation room on the upper floor.

Renderings courtesy of Grant and Company

The Signature. RiverTown on the Island offers six different building styles/floor plans.

“The best part about RiverTown are the views,” Grant says. “Every unit has a view of the river or looks back at the skyline. In some cases, they have a view of both. Every unit also has a balcony. We oversized the balconies because we knew people would be spending time on them.” Each unit comes with a garage as well.

Grant feels like he’s well suited, through his homebuilding experience, to know what people are looking for in the real estate market.

“Even though they want something that’s a little contemporary for downtown, the bottom line is that Memphians are still traditional,” Grant says.

“The styling at RiverTown is more contemporary on the outside. Yet, it has a resort appearance because the overhangs on the buildings are similar to what you might see in Florida. We aren’t just putting siding all over it. We’re putting brick, because people down here are accustomed to it.”

Grant assures that RiverTown will fit in nicely with the neighborhood.

“They’ve got a lot of good things going in Harbor Town,” he says. “It’s a nice community with a resort feel to it. That’s kind of what we incorporated into ours. We wanted to be an extension of what’s in Harbor Town now.”

RiverTown isn’t all that different from other projects Grant has been involved with, he says.

“The nice thing is that RiverTown is all on one site. [It’s] not spread out, which makes it a lot easier to supervise. It’s still wood frame. We still use a lot of the same contractors that we use on our single-family houses. So we feel we have a lot to offer coming from the single-family market.”

See for yourself by logging onto RiverTownOnTheIsland.com. In addition to floor plans and renderings of what’s in store for Mud Island, you can go on a virtual tour of what a furnished unit will likely look like. ■ — GA

LivingSpaces@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Leafing for Good

CREDIT: Karen Schaber

Maybe, as local architect Lee Askew put it the other day, Memphians simply can’t see the forest for the trees. Literally.

Though residents may not notice just how many trees grow in Memphis, visitors are often
surprised at how green the city is. Maurice Cox, a former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, and associate professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, was certainly surprised. “This seems like a city within a park,” he said.

Cox and Askew were two panelists at the University of Memphis’ “Urban Design and Placemaking: A Dialogue for Change” symposium last week. Held in connection with the university’s Turley Fellowship (created last year by developer and Flyer board member Henry Turley), the symposium brought local leaders together with experts from Harvard and the cities of Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Nashville to start a dialogue about placemaking in Memphis.

“Every building has to be understood as a building block of the community,” said J. Stroud Watson, an architect in Chattanooga. “The streets, the sidewalks, parks, and plazas are all public space, but the buildings are what frame it.”

During a day-long discussion, the panelists spoke on a variety of topics, including the importance of building structures that can be used for more than one purpose, both for the sake of the physical environment and the city’s collective psyche.

“Yesterday we were shown a historic building that the developer wasn’t sure could be saved,” said Cox. “I was looking at a building that I know can be saved and is the very embodiment of the downtown fabric.”

According to Ann Coulter, the visiting Turley Fellow and the driving force behind the symposium, the panel did not have a set goal when it began. “We didn’t want to hem in the discussion,” she said. “The focus is not just on what you do, but how you do it.”

Recently, in partnership with neighborhood groups, the University of Memphis launched the University District Initiative to address social, health, urban design, and safety issues in the neighborhoods surrounding the school.

“I crossed the street yesterday to go to the Holiday Inn,” said panelist William McFarland, director of the Atlanta Renewal Community Coordinating Responsibility Authority. “[We’re] on a college campus?! It was frightening.”

Even though only 10 percent of students live on campus, the University of Memphis has tried to create an environment that doesn’t shout “commuter college.” The school doesn’t want students to feel like they could simply drive up to their classes. But that perhaps has created a sea of parking lots surrounding the campus, which, to some of the panel, isolated the school from the rest of the city.

“Universities have a way of weakening and collapsing the neighborhoods around them. No one wants to live near loud parties,” said Askew. “There used to be houses from here to Poplar. Now there’s a parking lot.”

But if there’s a time for change, it’s now. “These were professional observers, and they saw it immediately,” said Coulter. “The panelists from out of town commented over and over how the timing is right. The city is ready. The university is ready. The development community is ready. Everyone’s really excited about the opportunities they see.”

Coulter said the group is first taking time to reflect — and to transcribe all the comments — before they decide their next steps. I hope it somehow includes Cox’s idea of Memphis as a city within a park.

I’ve heard enough people mention the city’s wonderful tree canopy to think that Memphis may be overlooking an untapped opportunity.

Frank Ricks, principal of Looney Ricks Kiss Architects, mentioned that he has heard that one of the main reasons people leave Memphis is a lack of recreational activities. But maybe the city needs to frame the question — or the answer — better.

“Instead of wishing for mountains or an ocean,” added Askew, “we should see what we have.”

What if the city committed to the vision of a city inside a park? What would it be like to live in a uniformly lush, yet urban environment? Would people feel more inclined to visit Memphis? It may be last week’s Earth Day talking, but tree-lined streets seem marketable to me. Especially as the country becomes more urban.

A group of arborists and activists recently approached the City Council about applying for the Tree City, U.S.A. program, a designation that says a city commits to a certain level of tree management.

Memphis is the largest city in Tennessee to not have this designation. The administration didn’t make any promises — cities have to spend a certain amount on tree maintenance each year — but it could be a good first step.

Especially if it would mean turning a concrete jungle into an urban forest.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Campus Stadium Gains

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In weekend remarks, mayoral candidate Herman Morris said “other priorities should take precedence” over Mayor Willie Herenton‘s proposal for a new football stadium as part of a redeveloped Fairgrounds. But Morris gave his approval to the concept of the state and the University of Memphis pooling their resources and “building an on-campus stadium that would put this university on a par with some of the others in the country.”

Morris thereby joined mayoral candidate Carol Chumney in the ranks of those supporting a proposal for an on-campus stadium advanced by university booster Harold Byrd and others. As of now, however, both Morris and Chumney oppose use of city funds to fulfill such a project.

Former Memphis Light, Gas & Water chief Morris also defended his involvement in the utility’s $25 million investment in Memphis Networx, a fiber-optics development which he said provided infrastructure that improved the city’s “competitive posture to attract industry.”

Though he has previously been critical of mayoral pressures on behalf of specific brokers, Morris similarly endorsed the $1.5 billion bond issue that funded pre-payment of MLGW’s acquisition of services from the Tennessee Valley Authority. He maintained that the pre-payment deal would eventually pay dividends “somewhere in the nature of $250 million.”

  • The latest balloon being floated in local political circles (and on WREG-TV, News Channel 3, Monday night) concerns a possible bid for city mayor by current Shelby County mayor A C Wharton. The reasoning is that local business leaders, many of whom are disenchanted with Herenton, may decide that neither Morris nor Chumney are the right candidates to displace the incumbent and that Wharton is the only candidate who could.

    Wharton, however, said Tuesday that he was “fully occupied” with his present duties and would never run in opposition to Herenton. He might, he said, reconsider a race if the incumbent for any reason decided not to run.

  • Former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson, who has spent his time since leaving the U.S. Senate in 2002 as a principal on NBC’s Law and Order, may be a candidate for president in 2008. “I’m giving some thought to it. I’m going to leave the door open,” Thompson told host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, thereby confirming a spate of recent rumors on various blogs.

    Republican Thompson, a 1964 graduate of the University of Memphis, acknowledged that his friend and mentor Howard Baker, another former Tennessee senator, had seriously promoted such a candidacy on the grounds that no acceptable conservative was so far in the running.

    Quoting Adlai Stevenson, a Democratic candidate in 1952 and 1956, Thompson said the paradoxical task of a candidate was to “do what’s necessary to become president and still deserve to be president.”

    In answer to Wallace’s questions, Thompson said he was pro-life, “tolerant” of gays but opposed to gay marriage, anti-gun-control but supportive of campaign finance legislation, and flexible on immigration law. He also said President George Bush‘s surge policy in Iraq should be given a chance to work and called for a pardon of vice-presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted last week of several counts of lying to a federal grand jury in the matter of “outing” CIA agent Valerie Plame.

    Jackson Baker

    Newsmakers Flinn and Kurita on the Senate floor last week

    Thompson opined that he would safely be able to wait as late as summer before deciding on the matter of a presidential run.

    Nashville blogger Adam Kleinheider suggested strongly last week that state senator Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, had made a deal in advance with current Republican Speaker Ron Ramsey to acquire her current position as Senate Speaker Pro Tem.

    Kleinheider asked rhetorically if this fact was not indicated by Kurita’s support for longtime Speaker Wilder, rather than party opponent Joe Haynes, in a Democratic caucus straw vote before the Senate showdown between Wilder and Ramsey. Kurita’s vote for Ramsey was the decisive one as he narrowly ousted Wilder.

    Interviewed in Nashville last week about Kleinheider’s speculation, shared by many on and off Capitol Hill, Kurita said: “That’s a nonsensical question. I voted for Ron Ramsey because I thought he would do the best job for the people of Tennessee. The basic tenet of a democracy is that the majority rules. It’s not about putting together 17 votes to pretend we [the Democrats] are in charge.”

    The import of her answer would seem to be that the principle of majority vote superseded that of Wilder’s suitability to lead — or Haynes’, for that matter.

    Kurita declined even to discuss the option of voting for Haynes, the Democrats’ caucus chairman, rather than Wilder in the party caucus. “That’s a ridiculous question; that’s hindsight. It doesn’t have any bearing on how we do good for the people of Tennessee.”

    Concerning blogger Kleinheider’s suggestion concerning a deal, Kurita said, “He must be projecting the way he operates. It’s not the way I operate.”

    While presiding in the Senate last Thursday, Kurita’s floor duty required her to have brief pro forma interchanges on Thursday with both Wilder, now an ordinary senator in the body he led for 36 years, and Senate Democratic leader Jim Kyle, who has made no secret of his discontent with Kurita for her vote on Ramsey’s behalf and who recently dispatched a critical letter to statewide Democrats challenging her bona fides.

    She recognized Wilder to note the presence of visitors from Fayette County in the balcony and acknowledged Kyle for the purpose of his making a motion. (Note: Former Lt. Gov. Wilder suffered a fall later Thursday at his Fayette County home and was treated at The Med over the weekend before being released.)

    Asked about Kyle’s letter, Kurita shrugged and said, “Well, you know, Senator Kyle’s a smart guy, and he’s a good senator, but I think anybody who knows him knows that when he’s angry, he will lash out at people. And that’s what he did. And hopefully in time he won’t feel that he has to lash out.”

    As for Wilder, who (to put it mildly) had also been unhappy with her, Kurita said somewhat ambiguously, “There’s no difference in the number of times we communicate now from a year ago.”

    Kurita had some kind words for the former Speaker’s method of presiding over the floor: “He tried his very best to be fair to everyone in terms of letting everyone speak.” Voters in state Senate District 30 and state House District 92 went to the polls on Tuesday to decide on successors to 9th District congressman Steve Cohen for the Senate seat and county commissioner Henri Brooks in the House. (See Political Beat for results and analysis of those special-election races.)

  • Although considerable doubt existed as to exactly when they were required to leave office (estimates varied from Tuesday evening at 7 p.m. to certification of election results by the Election Commission, and the state Attorney General’s Office was being asked to rule on the matter), both interim state senator Shea Flinn and interim state representative Eddie Neal were obliged to move on.

    Flinn, especially, made an impact during his several weeks of service, managing congenial relations with legislators in both parties and both legislative chambers while introducing enough pieces of controversial legislation to delight the progressive Democrats who were the core of predecessor Cohen’s constituency.

    “Really, that was my main motivation, to conduct myself as the voters who elected Steve would have expected,” said Democrat Flinn, who consulted with Cohen to that end.

    Among other things, he sponsored bills to legalize: casino gambling (this would require a constitutional amendment); wine sales in grocery stores; sales of package liquor on Sunday; voting by mail; and optional state license plates advocating equal rights for gays. Flinn also has been instrumental in crafting a compromise on medical tort reform.

    The youthful lawyer is the son of Shelby County commissioner George Flinn, a Republican, but was the subject of a brief boomlet for Democratic chairman in Shelby County before disavowing interest in the job.

    He also was talked up by fellow Democratic legislators (notably Senate Democratic leader Jim Kyle and House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh) to serve as interim House member in Beverly Marrero‘s seat, should she win her Senate race. Though he has considered that idea, he is leaning against it.

    The one option he has expressed most interest in? Service as a member of the county Election Commission, to succeed Greg Duckett, the body’s chairman, who is leaving to become a member of the state Election Commission. (Longtime Duckett friend Calvin Anderson decided to step down.)