Tag: Jeff Speck

Categories
Opinion

Reactions to the New Riverfront Report

CREDIT: John Branston

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Memphians with a stake in the riverfront have had time to consider the six “quick fixes” for the riverfront proposed by urban design expert Jeff Speck this week. Here is some of what they had to say.

Henry Turley, developer: “I thought the quote of the night was Paul Morris (head of the Downtown Memphis Commission) saying “plan less, do more.” I have long thought there was a battle between river access and expressway on Riverside Drive. Jeff Speck hit that right. On Bass Pro, I think he hit that right too. It is turned south and therefore does not significantly impact The Pinch. Several years ago I asked the McWherter administration not to put the state welcome center in Arkansas. The idea was to develop those sites, where the parks and development sites would go together. Overall, I didn’t find much to pick at.”

Charlie Ryan, partner in Beale Street Landing restaurant. “Wow. Wow. We already don’t have enough parking. So what else can I say. It is difficult to get to the building. It’s as simple as that.”

Bud Chittom, partner in Beale Street Landing restaurant: “Once the smoke clears there will be parking at the end of the park. We’ve got to have that little parking lot.”

Burton Carley, minister of Church of the River, called “the church of None Shall Pass” in the report. “It would cost the city millions for the river walk to come across our property. We spend a lot of money maintaining it.” Carley said the church has talked with the city and railroad about doing something to help the bike path to the Harahan Bridge without putting it in front of the church, with its big windows looking out over the river. “We are not obstructionists. The renewal of the riverfront began with the Church of the River.” Nor is he alarmed by anything in the report. “What I have learned in my 30 years here is not to pay attention too much.”

Tom Jones, who introduced Speck, wrote this on his Smart City Memphis blog, which includes links to the full report. Jones has been a close observer of downtown projects for more than three decades.

Jimmy Ogle, Beale Street Landing. “Taking out parking at Tom Lee Park would be tough right now. How do you get to the park?” Ogle said he is “lukewarm” to making changes in Riverside Drive.

Jim Holt, executive director of Memphis In May: “I met with Mr. Speck. Tom Lee Park has been our home for 37 years. Part of the magic of the event is the river. Every modification has an impact. We have been flexible.”

Greg Maxted, The Harahan Project: “The idea I liked a lot was Riverside Drive, adding a bike lane and parallel parking, and removing the parking lots and adding more green space.” As for the bridge project and the church, Maxted said the design utilizes Virginia Avenue for access and will not impact the church.

Virginia McLean, Friends For Our Riverfront: “I think what he had to say about Bass Pro Boulevard was a strong and good suggestion. If they would listen again they might have a chance of developing that little part. But if nobody listens now and they go ahead with their large sign and lights, then I don’t think there is any possibility of mixed-use going in there.”

While it is true that downtown has a lot of plans on the shelf, it also has a lot of riverfront projects costing many millions of dollars. Most of the projects since 1980 have expanded public parkland and amenities and deemphasized cars. A partial list includes:

Mud Island River Park, now entering its fourth decade and closed half the year. It has had two full-service restaurants in addition to a snack bar. It has been managed by the city and the Riverfront Development Corporation. At various times, it has had paid concerts, longer hours and a longer season, free concerts, a swimming pool, kayaks, paddle boats, air-boat rides, a museum, playground, overnight camping, and free admission.

Tom Lee Park was expanded to more than double its acreage, with a broad sidewalk at the edge of the river from just south of Beale Street to the top of the hill at Ashburn-Coppock Park. The sidewalk was extended south behind the Rivermont apartments to Martyr’s Park, which has the highest viewpoint of the river in Memphis.

A lighted sidewalk on the west side of Riverside Drive above the Cobblestones Landing.

The Bluff Walk from Beale Street to the South Bluffs, including a pedestrian bridge over Riverside Drive and staircases to walkways across the road to Tom Lee Park.

Henry Turley

Greenbelt Park on Mud Island, with a lighted sidewalk above the flood plain and paths and benches on the grass near the river, and room for several special outdoor events including a bike race.

Harbor Town was developed as a walkable residential community that now has thousands of residents.

The A. W. Willis Jr. Bridge opened Mud Island to private development. The bridge has protected sidewalks on each side.

Mud Island River Park is accessible by bike from the bridge or the sidewalk above the monorail, which can be accessed by elevator. Bikes are allowed in the park.

A landscaped median and crosswalks were added to Riverside Drive to make it more pedestrian friendly.

The Main Street Trolley goes north and south on the pedestrian mall. Cars are banned. The Riverfront trolley line carries passengers from Auction Street to the train station.

A pedestrian bridge was built to connect the University of Memphis law school with the park north of it.

Bike lanes on Front Street.

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New projects or additions to what urban experts call “the built environment” are often premised on the idea that people would walk and bike more if they only had more places to do it. I am unable to associate myself with this thesis. Most people bike for recreation, not to get somewhere for a specific purpose. And we love our cars. There is no better illustration than the bike racks and parking lots at Rhodes College and the University of Memphis, the very demographic that is supposed to be hot for bikes. One is packed, the other isn’t.

Categories
Opinion

Expert Suggests Six Quick Fixes for Riverfront

CREDIT: John Branston

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Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time, suggests six quick fixes for the riverfront.

At the request of Mayor A C Wharton, Speck reviewed some 20 riverfront plans dating back more than 30 years. He gave a nice straightforward 90-minute talk to about 125 people at the Memphis Cook Convention Center Monday. Speck showed familiarity with the past, present, and future of the riverfront. He was last here for an extended visit in 2008, but also remembers the 2002 grand vision that included a land bridge and high-rise buildings on Front Street. He called it “as imaginary as it was imaginative.”

“The last thing the city needs is another plan,” he said.

Here are his six suggestions, along with my comments.

The Pyramid: Its connection should be to Main Street, not Front Street. The Pinch should focus on attracting people from conventions, not travelers on the interstate. Bass Pro “still has a long way to go” to understand the city. Speck suggests selling off four acres on Bass Pro Boulevard (the southern entryway next to the state visitors center) for private development and turning the boulevard into two or three lanes of car traffic and a lane for bikes and pedestrians.

Comment: I watched the Tunica casinos come out of the ground in 1994-1995. There was an incredible sense of drive, mission, and urgency. The Bass Pro Pyramid does not have that. I doubt it will meet the 2013 opening deadline. The boulevard is small change.

Mud Island Park: Still disconnected from the rest of downtown. Needs stairs to the monorail from the visitor center. Speck suggests a water taxi from Beale Street to the tip of the island. He thinks the park should be open year round. Speck did not comment on the naming controversy over Jefferson Davis Park, which is just south of the visitor center. He said this park is “the next great waterfront opportunity.”

Comment: Visitor experts overestimate Mud Island River Park every time. Memphians are bored by it, and it attracts very few tourists. It is closed six months for a reason.

Riverside Drive: Shrink it from four lanes to three lanes or two lanes. Include a buffered bike lane and a lane for parallel parking. Take the parking lots out of Tom Lee Park and next to Beale Street Landing. Keep Memphis in May in the park. Break the park up into small areas separated by trees.

Comment: A $42 million boat dock with a restaurant with no parking lot. Yikes.

The Cobblestones. Speck said it is about impossible to make it usable and historically accurate at the same time, given the demands of accessibility and preservationists. He said the RDC should finish the project and add light structures “draping” on it.

Comment: The man has done his homework.

The Riverwalk: By this he meant the sidewalk and Bluff Walk going from the Pyramid to Martyr’s Park. It now leaves the riverfront and goes behind the law school and into South Bluffs residential development. Speck suggests making it more linear and always within sight of the river. The walk should be extended between the Church of the River and Channel 3’s offices to the French Fort area south of the Harahan Bridge.

Comment: The section along the railroad tracks between Union and Madison is a pain, but I like the dogleg through South Bluffs. Those who want to stay in sight of the river can take the 84 steps down from the Bluff Walk to Tom Lee Park at Huling Street and follow it south to where it ends near the church.

Beale Street to Beale Street Landing: Needs “edging” — development along Beale Street by the parking lots near the river, once envisioned as the site of One Beale, a tall hotel and condo. The Harahan Project needs something on the West Memphis side in the floodplain, maybe just a loop trail and a pavilion, because Main Street West Memphis (the other half of the “Main Street to Main Street” idea) is too far away.

Comment: The fact that there is basically nothing on the bluff at the corner of Beale and Riverside Drive, a pretty famous American intersection, is sad. This corner, like the Pinch on the north end of downtown, actually had more activity 30 years ago when Captain Bilbo’s was around.

To learn more about Speck and his 74 pages of observations and proposals, visit the city of Memphis website.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Complete Street

CREDIT: Mary Cashiola

Trolleys and cars once traveled along Main Street together. Then the trolleys went away, leaving only the cars; later the cars went away, leaving only the trolleys.

And now urban planner Jeff Speck says the street — like the current Main Street loop — should go full circle and be open to both trolleys and vehicular traffic.

“I’m perplexed when people say you shouldn’t bring cars back,” he said. “There are so many people trying to do great stuff with [Main], and it’s unfair to them to leave it the way it is.”

Putting cars back on Main Street was one of 12 modest suggestions that Speck, former director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts, presented to a crowded Christian Brothers University auditorium last week. Speck co-authored Suburban Nation with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two leaders of the new-urbanist movement. Like Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Speck believes a successful city is a walkable city.

“The pedestrian is the canary in the coal mine,” he said.

So it might seem odd that he advocates returning cars to downtown’s pedestrian mall.

“There’s very little stopping you from driving down Main right now. It happens already,” he said, showing a slide of a car parked on the mall. “You don’t need to change much if the cars drive slowly. … It’s ready made for the right speed of traffic.”

Under Speck’s plan, which he estimated would cost about $50,000, a few curbs would have to be removed and a few “teaser” parking spaces would be created. If cars used the current narrow trolley lanes, pedestrians would still feel comfortable on Main.

Studies have found that lane widths and speeds correlate closely. If a lane is eight feet wide, for instance, most drivers won’t feel comfortable going over 20 miles per hour. Get drivers in a lane 14 feet wide, and they feel safe doing 70.

“We don’t drive the speed marked. We drive the speed we feel safe,” Speck said. “If you’re a teenage boy, you drive the speed you feel dangerous.”

Center City Commission head Jeff Sanford said the city would not make any decisions about Main Street without public input, but he was happy to hear Speck echo what other experts have told the commission.

“I have to say, I couldn’t find anything to disagree with,” Sanford said. “In the main — no pun intended — I thought he was dead on.”

That was a vote of confidence, especially since many of Speck’s suggestions centered around downtown. They included both the very general — build Memphis for people, not cars, and plant trees — and the very specific — fix what Speck called the “Main Street knuckle.”

“South Main is struggling a little. That’s good. That means the chains will stay away for a little while,” he said. “But it breaks down at one key connection spot.”

That spot is the area between the Main Street Mall and South Main, where the Chisca Hotel sits empty and the MLGW headquarters looms.

“The biggest insult to your city is the MLGW headquarters,” Speck said. “Who would think to take a suburban office park and drop it in the middle of the city?”

Other suggestions included creating a more urban waterfront, building a Martin Luther King monument, and stopping what he called “diminishing your economic advantage.” Memphis Heritage, currently trying to save the almost 60-year-old Cumberland Presbyterian Center (see page 9), might call it saving historic buildings.

In a world of cities competing for workers and visitors, Speck said architecture is important.

“The differentiated product attracts the customer,” Speck said, comparing cities to retail. “Since the ’60s, cities all look the same. The older buildings are the ones creating your trademark.”

Speck said he chose modest proposals that could be enacted within a year or so, because he knows Memphis doesn’t have a problem with planning. Large-scale coordinated planning goes on all the time. But large-scale coordinated planning can take a long time.

And sometimes, like the lanes on Main, bigger simply isn’t better.

For more of Mary Cashiola’s take on Jeff Speck’s presentation, visit http://inthebluff.blogspot.com.