A River Runs Through It

The paths Nashville and Memphis have taken toward downtown revitalization are about as different as the calm flow of the Cumberland River and the willful current of the Big Muddy. “The way Memphis moves is atomistic, individualistic—the cowboy way, the frontier way,” drawls Memphis developer Henry Turley. “As opposed to Nashville, which moves methodically, thoughtfully, according to a plan, and with some consensus.”

Turley, like many Memphians, admires that much of Nashville’s recent downtown development has been driven by Metro Government. Church Street Centre, the downtown arena, the Batman building, the Cumberland tower, the Magnatek building, the downtown library—all have been prodded along by the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) or by Mayor Phil Bredesen. At the same time, some critics would argue that Metro has failed to knit these big boxes into the fabric of an urban lifestyle.

“We’ve never had any strength here in urban design,” acknowledges one Metro insider. “Neither MDHA nor the Planning Commission has ever encouraged it, or educated the public about it. And private developers haven’t stepped into the void.”

In Memphis, however, private citizens have stepped into the void. Armed with the instincts of riverboat gamblers and a sense of civic purpose, they are doing urban design. They are doing it by restoring historic structures, and constructing new ones using the old-fashioned building blocks of urban places. They are doing it with 4,000 downtown residential units (Nashville has 1,000). They are doing it with a new minor-league ballpark adjacent to the Peabody Hotel, at the center of a whole new neighborhood that will include a new elementary school. They have done it in response to the civic nadir of the King assassination, and they have done it with a local government that has been, according to Turley, “only reasonably supportive. Memphis doesn’t have civic leaders, we don’t have a Bredesen or a Fulton,” he says. “We have entrepreneurs.”

Turley is certainly one of those entrepreneurs, perhaps the most influential as far as downtown Memphis is concerned. He says he realized in the 1970s that “no downtown could retain its validity as a CBD (central business district), which was really office towers surrounded by parking lots. Office parks [in the suburbs] will out-compete because of their proximity to people’s homes and the lower costs of development. It seemed that downtown would be lost to us unless we created a real urban experience, a place where people could do a little of everything—live, work, drink, eat. To make that kind of place, we needed to do more housing in downtown.”

Turley started with The Shrine, a 1923 building that had once housed the Shrine Temple. Unlike Nashville, the market for office space in Memphis in the early ’80s was so poor that developers like Turley could afford to buy downtown property for residential conversions. Also, unlike Nashville, the zoning code didn’t forbid downtown housing. “The Shrine had what you need for success in a downtown—great views and unique architecture,” says Memphis architect Frank Ricks. “It proved that the downtown rental market would work.”

Too bad Nashville developer Tony Giarratana didn’t realize that unique architecture was part of the urban living equation before he tore down the Art Deco Sudekum building and replaced it with the Cumberland apartments. And too bad that MDHA didn’t recognize the same thing before forking over a $6 million subsidy for his building, which looks as if it belongs more in East Germany than Music City.

Turley then moved on to another downtown project, the River Bluff co-op. Then it was loft apartments at Paper Works, a 1913 warehouse in the derelict South Main district, which he bought for 83 cents a square foot. “I remember jerking straight up in bed one night, crying out loud, ‘I have built $4 million worth of lofts, and I have never before seen a loft,’ ” Turley recalls. “I’d never even been to New York.”

To be certain, the development of downtown Memphis didn’t rely solely on private initiative. Tax incentives and revenue bonds made financing downtown projects more attractive. The Center City Commission (CCC), which was founded in 1977, administered these programs and provided other assistance for developers downtown.

The CCC recently commissioned downtown design guidelines from Philip Walker, with the Nashville office of Memphis-based Looney Ricks Kiss Architects. A design review board uses these guidelines to advise developers on how buildings should look in each district in order to make them contribute to the urban fabric. MDHA also has a design review process, but lacks Memphis’ detailed guidelines for assessing the urban design values of individual projects.

While Turley was rehabbing The Shrine, other developers were making progress in downtown Memphis as well. Memphis businessman Jack Belz was saving the Peabody Hotel from demolition. Belz purchased the historic hotel in 1975 for $75,000, then spent six years—and $24 million in federal and private funds—restoring the Spanish fantasy to its status as the Alhambra of the Mississippi Delta.