Tag: urban planning

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Alex Garvin,

The scenery in Shelby Farms is reminiscent of a car commercial — open road, an expanse of green space, rolling hills, buffalo. Other than in a few small areas of the park, people are a rare sight.

But park advocates are hoping to change that. Two recent decisions by the Shelby County Commission have advanced plans to transform the 4,500-acre site into a “world-class park.”

Last December, the commission approved an easement that will limit development on the land for the next 50 years. Then last month, the commission voted to turn the park’s management over to a private, nonprofit entity.

Though that entity has yet to be named, Alex Garvin, the consultant hired last year to create a vision for Shelby Farms Park, believes it’s the first step in transforming the former Penal Farm into the county’s main attraction.

— by Bianca Phillips

Flyer: What will a nonprofit bring to the park?

Garvin: The park happened almost by accident. There’s never been any conscious decision made about how to operate a 4,500-acre facility. The amount of money currently spent on operating the park is less than one-tenth of what is spent on managing and operating Bryant Park in New York, which is only six-and-a-half acres.

The single most important thing about this decision is that the County Commission has decided that it’s important to transform this from a set of accidental happenings over time into a real public park. They want to turn over the exclusive management of the park to a nonprofit entity that does nothing else but take care of the park.

What can be done with that much land?

In some cases, what has to be done is to take care of what’s there already. The trees have just been left to grow without any attention. We need to make sure the trees are pruned, fertilized, and that they don’t die.

The one thing I dream about for that park is a place where people can go swimming. There are all these lakes, but nobody can swim in any of them. I think you could do something really wonderful without spending a lot of money.

Large areas of the park are rarely used. How do you change that?

There’s no circulation system to get around the park, whether you’re doing that on foot or in a car or on a bicycle. There has to be better ways to get into the park and better ways to get around in it. For example, there’s no bus service into the park. There’s no bike system, and I think that’s a priority.

What’s the next step?

The next step is to create a master plan for the park. We hope to have an open competition for design of the park. We’ll select a small number of teams that would come up with ideas. We’ll look at them and then finally hire one of those firms to do the work.

We keep hearing comparisons to New York’s Central Park. How does Shelby Farms currently compare?

Shelby Farms is 4,500 acres. Central Park is 842. So Shelby Farms is more than five times the size of Central Park.

At the moment, on a typical afternoon on a weekend, there are a quarter of a million people in Central Park. On a typical afternoon on a weekend in Shelby Farms, you may have a few thousand people. While I don’t think it’ll ever be the center for a quarter of a million people, surely this is a facility that could accommodate much more than it is now.

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Opinion

Playing Placemaker

A visionary is someone with a healthy ego and big ideas who agrees with you.

In its never-ending efforts to better itself, Memphis has engaged at least a half-dozen consultants in the last few years to tell us what to do with our parks, downtown, Shelby Farms, waterfront, and bike paths. Whether any of them are visionaries depends on where you happen to be standing.

Want to tell Memphis what you think? Get in line. Recent visitors and their sponsors include city expert Ken Jackson (Urban Land Institute), park experts Alexander Garvin (Shelby Farms) and Charles Jordan (Friends for Our Riverfront), and waterfront experts Cooper, Robertson & Partners (Riverfront Development Corporation, or RDC).

Last week it was Fred Kent’s turn to take a whack at the waterfront. A New Yorker most of his adult life (he organized Earth Day in 1970 when John Lindsay was mayor), Kent’s Project for Public Spaces has turned Placemaking with a capital “P” into a brand of sorts. Sixty-something, easy-going, and casually dressed, Kent and his son Ethan, who is in the family business, log something like 150,000 miles a year compiling lists of places good and bad. Their big idea is that big ideas for city improvements are often wrong, especially if they’re architectural monuments. The Kents think a lot of little ideas from a lot of “stake-holders” usually produces a better result. They call it the “power of 10,” as in 10 destinations that each have 10 things to do

Not surprisingly, Fred Kent is no fan of The Pyramid or the proposed $27 million Beale Street Landing with its floating pods in the Mississippi River at Tom Lee Park.

“That will be one of the great design disasters that will haunt you for 20 years before you have the guts to take it out,” he predicted. “And The Pyramid — what a bad symbol for a city. I would tear it down. The only question is, will you do it 10 years from now or next year.”

The Kents came to Memphis at the invitation of Friends for Our Riverfront and Memphis Heritage to tape a television interview and run one of their patented Placemaking workshops for about 140 people last Saturday. We split up into groups and headed via the trolley to seven downtown destinations, pencils and report cards in hand. It was Saturday morning, and the rain hadn’t blown in yet. The COGIC funeral and the ballgame at AutoZone Park were far enough away that they didn’t interfere. The downtown parks looked like they usually do — generally well kept but lightly used except for the Kemet Jubilee parade that was winding down at Tom Lee Park.

“You guys are going to come up with all these amazing ideas,” Kent said.

Well, maybe. At the cobblestones, my assigned destination, I trekked along the sidewalk on Riverside Drive and down the steps, averting a thrown-away sanitary napkin. I crossed the stones that group leader Susan Caldwell told us were once used to balance the loads in riverboats. A few cars were parked near the tour boats, and two powerboats and a kayak glided through the brown water of the harbor.

“It’s not attractive to the eye,” said Sybil McCrackin, from the Kemet parade.

That was the consensus of our group, too, when we summarized our scribbling at lunch. Short-term suggestions were to remove the utility poles, put in historic markers, eliminate parking, add a patch of grass, and put public art on the long gray wall beneath the sidewalk. Long-term ideas included a floating restaurant, Wi-Fi, paddleboats, and concession stands. As RDC president Benny Lendermon told me later, however, a floating restaurant failed several years ago, MudIsland is experimenting with boat rentals, and the Landmarks Commission objected to painting the wall.

“We wanted all of that,” said Lendermon, who also played the game and met for an hour or so with the Kents. Beale Street Landing, the RDC’s signature project, is still a go, but the underground parking garage has been scrapped.

There was much similarity to the seven groups’ suggestions (seewww.friendsforourriverfront.org) — vendors, bathrooms, and street performers, which made me wish Flyer columnist Tim Sampson (All Mimes Must Die!) had been there. No one pledged the first $1,000, but the total bill wouldn’t have approached $27 million.

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News The Fly-By

Urban Suburban

CREDIT: Soupstock | Dreamstime.com

It looks like downtown Memphis’ housing market may be getting some new competition. And it comes from a reliable, even traditional, source of real estate competition: the suburbs.

Germantown presented a Smart Growth Plan draft last month for its 700-acre central commercial and government district, complete with a new logo, wi-fi hot zones, and central city condos. It is, in short, a plan that puts the urban back into suburban.

The draft, created by the Lawrence Group, follows Germantown’s recent Vision 2020 plan, one of the goals of which was mixed-use redevelopment in the heart of the city.

According to community input from the Smart Growth draft, the public wants to see Old Germantown preserved and enhanced, a walkable/bikeable community, and more housing options, with mixed-use condos the most often cited. In fact, 95 percent of study respondents said they wanted to see townhouses, patio homes, and condominiums in the $150,000 to $349,000 price range, indicating to the consultants that there is a market for housing types not currently available.

The study even mentions installing countdown timers at pedestrian crosswalks!

If you’re not familiar with the timers, they tell pedestrians how many seconds they have left to cross a street. They’re simple and very helpful, especially on heavily pedestrian thoroughfares. But … they seem sort of out-of-place for a traditional, vehicle-driven (ahem) suburb.

Smart Growth itself seems an interesting choice for Germantown’s future. The design movement encourages compact, mixed-use communities in which people can walk to a variety of destinations.

Under its recommendations, the draft says that “buildings should always frame and enforce pedestrian circulation, so that people walk along building fronts rather than across parking lots or driveways.”

Now think about Germantown Parkway. I don’t even like to drive it; I definitely don’t want to walk across it.

In other ways, the Smart Growth Plan may not be that surprising. Germantown doesn’t have a lot of open land left; it needs to utilize what it has in a way that brings in the most tax dollars.

Despite growth in its retail and medical sectors, Germantown is still very much a bedroom community. Eighty-five percent of the city’s total tax revenue is residential. An inefficient land-use plan, like the one it has currently, is a loss of potential tax revenue. And urban properties are hot.

Twelve miles to the west of Germantown, the downtown Memphis renaissance, facilitated in part by Peabody Place, AutoZone Park, and FedExForum, has followed the rest of the country in an overall condo-fication. Why shouldn’t the suburbs follow suit?

About a year and a half ago, The New York Times even ran a trend story about “the loft look,” fake lofts (flofts?) being built in gated, suburban neighborhoods. The “flofts” have the same brick, the same exposed ductwork, and the same open floor plan as historical downtown buildings that have been converted to condos, but they’ve been built from scratch.

Unfortunately for Germantown residents, however, the plan has encountered one hitch: Like overgrown grass and visible trash cans in Germantown, it’s illegal.

“The development concepts in this plan are currently illegal under Germantown’s existing zoning and subdivision regulations,” reads the draft. “In fact, the current standards are completely antithetical to the urban design principles of this plan and the city’s vision of a ‘mixed-use,’ ‘pedestrian-friendly’ central district that would ‘create sense of place for the community’ as articulated in the Germantown Vision 2020 document.”

The consultants assume that the existing code will be changed. If so, this just may prove the old axiom: The grass is always greener, especially when there’s less yard.