When Urban Renewal hit Nashville in the 1950s, the city must have felt that something exciting was afoot. Federal money was poured into the slum area around Capitol Hill, the downtown red-light district was literally bulldozed, and the residents of shantytown were relocated to government housing projects. It seemed like a moment of promise and progress. Nashvillians envisioned heroic public places and clean, sweeping boulevards.

Nashville stands at the same sort of juncture again. Metro currently owns 17 acres south of Broadway surrounding the new arena. It is a tract of land that is part of an urban landscape that stretches from the Cumberland River to the railroad gulch. For the moment, it is pretty much a clean slate. It is a place of metal sheds and warehouses. Its few lively landmarks include recycled spaces such as 328 Performance Hall and Music City Mix Factory. With the coming of the Nashville Arena, it is an area that will inevitably be rebuilt.

Because the area is a place of opportunity, it is being called “Gateway,” a name that suggests new beginnings and wonderful things. Here downtown Nashville might finally realize its potential and create an urban neighborhood.

On the other hand, we could also end up with another James Robertson Parkway, a Gateway that leads to nowhere.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. In the case of the glamorous master plan published by The Gateway Partnership, the cover is what the book is all about. Even though the Gateway development is one of the most important projects ever begun in downtown Nashville, copies of the plan are hard to find. Produced at a cost of $200 each, the 100-page volumes come with snappy corrugated paper covers and tasteful accents of teal, plum and black. There are full-color illustrations, printed on glossy paper, and there are diagrams tinted in gentle rainbow hues.

The Gateway prospectus can afford to be elaborately produced. It is not intended to be a public document. Instead, it is a marketing tool. Portions of the plan were reprinted in The Tennessean to suggest what downtown Nashville could become, but the real target market for the plan is not the everyday citizen. It is aimed at potential developers.

The Gateway plan is meant to attract big spenders, investors with up-front money and hair-trigger investment temperaments. The strategy goes back to the swashbucklers who colonized the New World. Captain John Smith wrote colorful copy about his adventures in Virginia to convince Englishmen to invest in the Colonies. Smith’s plan worked.

If the Gateway plan sounds more like the scheme of a private real estate operative than the carefully planned vision of an urban designer, that’s because a marketing brochure is what the Gateway plan really is. That’s also why, tasteful though it may be, it could easily turn out to be a blueprint for urban failure.

Nashville is spending $120 million on the new arena. As part of the long-term project, Metro Mayor Phil Bredesen says he “wanted to acquire a buffer of land around the arena, to ensure control of what would surround it.” Bredesen recognized that it was important to shore up Metro’s investment by encouraging complementary new construction that would reinforce the arena’s function as the anchor for a new urban life south of Broadway.

To transform Bredesen’s dream into reality, the Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) began acquiring land around the arena. Eventually, the cost of the arena “campus” came in at close to $20 million, considerably more than the $12 million-plus that had been budgeted for land acquisition. Initially, MDHA dipped into the arena budget to pay for the land, but before long every penny will be needed to complete the construction job, and MDHA will have to borrow $7.5 million to make up the difference.

Clearly, MDHA does not want to tote this note for very long. The challenge is to convince private developers, sooner rather than later, to purchase large parcels of land and get MDHA off the hook. Hence, the multicolor pages of the Gateway plan, published with impressive slickness by the members of the Gateway Partnership.

The Gateway Partnership consists of well-known local names: The Mathews Company, Central Parking and Gaylord Entertainment, working with the development firms Crescent Resources and Faison Associates, both of Charlotte, N.C. The Gateway Partnership team has a combined net worth in excess of $5 billion. The packaging of their plan confirms that they are major players capable of playing in the major leagues. The medium is a big part of their message. Unfortunately, the medium may be all there is.

The “Planners”

Because MDHA wanted to market the land it bought, it advertised for some help. In April 1994, the agency issued a “Request for Qualifications,” hoping to find developers and investors who would help “facilitate Arena- related private facilities.” The RFQ stated that the development team would be expected to negotiate agreements that might lead to construction of a new Country Music Hall of Fame, a home for the Bernstein Center for Education Through the Arts, and parking areas for the arena. The RFQ also mentioned a regional art museum, a hotel, residences, additional parking, and retail centers.

MDHA received responses from two development teams: The Nashville City Partnership—headed by developers Richard Fletcher and Richard Fulton Jr.—and the Gateway group, headed by the ubiquitous R.C.H. “Bobby” Mathews and parking mogul Monroe Carell. In June 1994 the Gateway Partnership got the job.

Bobby Mathews speaks for the Gateway team, and with good reason. He once owned large chunks of Second Avenue—Gaylord’s Wildhorse Saloon stands on property that was once Mathews land. His headquarters is an unpretentiously unrestored yellow brick building at the corner of Third and Broadway. His name figures in almost any downtown land deal.

Back in 1989, the Mathews-Carell-Gaylord troika joined forces as the Ryman Group. Together, they produced the Ryman Redevelopment Plan, a mega-proposal for use of land to the east of Ryman Auditorium. The plan envisioned a veritable village of high-rise towers and 2 million square feet of new construction. Fortunately for Nashville, the bottom fell out of the office-tower market before the monster development could be realized.

After MDHA chipped in some tax increment financing and wrote down the cost of the land, the Ryman plan took a new direction. Nashville ended up with a restored Ryman Auditorium and the BellSouth building. In part because of the Ryman redevelopment, the Mathews-Carell-Gaylord triumvirate was awarded “the exclusive right to redevelop the Gateway Project.”

Thus, the Gateway group gets first crack at any or all of the land within the project’s boundaries. For their part, the partners have agreed to pay up to $300,000 for “predevelopment activities” that include the formulation of a master development plan, the preparation of schematic drawings of the plan, and the development of market, traffic and funding analyses for the project. The Gateway Project could make millions, but there are risks involved. That’s why the Partnership prospectus needs to look so slick. The Gateway Group is cruising for additional deep pockets to help spread the risk around.

MDHA’s executive director, Gerald Nicely, explains that there is a precedent for giving such a small group of citizens so much control of the future of Nashville’s downtown. “We did the Ryman redevelopment this way. The Gateway group is not paid by the city, and it pays the up-front costs of the plan. We no longer have the federal funds to do this sort of thing ourselves.” Nicely estimates that, eventually, “the split on the redevelopment costs will be 10 percent public funds and 90 percent private. It’s a good deal for the city.”

The investors in the partnership have relied on their own expertise in development, marketing and funding. But when it comes to the schematic drawings and traffic analysis, Mathews says, the Gateway group requested proposals from a “selected group” of Tennessee architectural firms. Earl Swensson Associates was chosen to head the support team; Gresham Smith & Partners came on board to handle the traffic engineering.

Still, no real urban planner is involved with the project. Swensson Associates has a long history of involvement with Gaylord’s Opryland complex, but the Swensson firm is known more for architecture than for planning. Its reputation is built upon the design of individual buildings rather than cities.

Mathews sees no problem. Asked who the urban planner on the team is, he replies, “I am, I’m the visionary. When we hired Swensson, we wanted people who could visualize our ideas, put them down on paper.” In short, it sounds as if he merely wanted people who could draw.

According to Mathews, the plan almost designs itself. “Our land was limited to 17 acres,” he says, “and the mixture of uses was dictated—the Country Music Hall of Fame, a park and parking. We didn’t need much planning.”

Representatives of the Swensson firm did approach two urban planning professionals about the possibility of participating in the proposal. Mark Schimmenti, an urban designer who teaches at the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture and Planning, agreed to submit his résumé but was later told “that the developer had simplified the team.”

Philip Walker, partner-in-charge at the Nashville office of Community Planning and Research Inc., a firm that also maintains offices in Princeton and Seattle, says he was asked to submit his credentials. According to Walker, “At first Swensson seemed to want our input, but then I was informed that the developer wanted to start off working with the architects. It never evolved beyond that.”

In its response to Metro’s RFQ, the Gateway Partnership originally pledged to beat the bushes for “the best urban planner possible” to work on the project. Promises, promises, promises.

The Plan:Déjà vu all over again

Stroud Watson, the director of Chattanooga’s Riverfront/Downtown Planning Center, was asked to review the Gateway proposal. “The plan does not have a very fine grain,” Watson observes. What he sees on the pages of the Partnership’s plan is a coarse compendium of large boxes of new construction. It is to urban design what headlines are to a news story.

Phase 1 of the plan deals with the future of the 17 acres surrounding the arena, the land MDHA owns, the land MDHA wants to sell. The plan proposes an L-shaped hotel across Fifth Avenue from the arena and immediately behind the low-rise buildings on Broadway. Farther down Fifth Avenue, another oversize block would make room for the Country Music Hall of Fame, a meandering stream, and a triangular building intended to house generic entertainment or retail enterprises. The stream flows atop a sewer line.

Between the hotel and the Hall of Fame is the grassy “Commons,” which occupies another city block. Actually, the Commons is a landscaped park that covers a subterranean 600-car garage serving the hotel and the Hall of Fame. The two-block parcel immediately south of the arena would be devoted to a 3,000-car garage; half of its 10 levels would be constructed underground.

Phases 2 and 3 of the plan are concerned with the subsequent development of adjacent land closer to the river. This is property that Metro does not currently own. These phases suggest a block-sized “Civic Center”—a possible euphemism for the Bernstein Center—and several additional structures for entertainment and retail.

The Gateway plan has obvious problems. First, everything in it is big. “Big things generate a certain energy,” says Chattanooga’s Stroud Watson, “but they tend to be places that people only visit for special events. It is the finer grain of infill that people really use.” No one hangs out at the Nashville Convention Center. Tourists go in and out its doors for flower shows and tractor pulls, then they head to Second Avenue to stroll and shop.

In the District they discover the basic building blocks of a city: a straightforward architecture with a sense of entry and a clean edge that defines the street and establishes a rhythm and a sense of human scale. Second Avenue’s architecture is built of durable materials that have credibility and suggest a promise of continuity in time. Historic districts like Second Avenue are architecturally attractive to people, not merely because they are old but because they are built along traditional lines that have been proven and tested for centuries. There is no reason that we cannot build this way again.

The Gateway plan, however, is built along lines that have failed our cities. There is nothing wrong with the basic placement of the proposed Country Music Hall of Fame or the Commons. Both could help attract more continuous pedestrian activity than the special events at the arena ever could. But beyond park and museum, the plan offers yet more buildings with the big footprints of anchors. It is as if a shopping mall were to be constructed with Dillard’s and Castner-Knott in the middle, on the expectation that the lingerie store, the jock shop and the hat place would organically grow at the edges. That kind of growth doesn’t happen.

What’s more, the plan suggests a fundamental failure to grasp how streets and buildings interact. There is barely a right angle in the book. Each corner is eroded by open space described as “pedestrian gathering spots.” When’s the last time you saw a bunch of walkers hanging out on the corner by the BellSouth building? Remove the distractions of color, reprint the illustrations in stark black-and-white, and the Gateway Partnership’s buildings take on the look of a suburban office park.

The siting of the hotel is also questionable. Mathews explains that experts in the hospitality business determined that the hotel needed to be as close as possible to Broadway, The District and the Convention Center. “But if the market tells us to put it someplace else, we will,” Mathews concedes. What the market won’t tell him is that a nine-story structure immediately behind the buildings on Broadway will block the downtown view from the Shelby Street Bridge—obliterating the best sightline in Nashville. Metro is spending $120 million for an arena with a flying-saucer profile, a new icon for the city. Now Metro seems prepared to allow the construction of a hotel that will disrupt that same visual dynamic.

The Gateway plan does nothing to restore the damaged grid of streets and blocks south of Broadway. City blocks are of a certain size because they form a comfortable pedestrian rhythm between architecture and open space. A grid of streets also diffuses traffic, allowing the driver several options. Traffic in a downtown grid doesn’t move quickly, but it moves. Driving east/west in a plan like this, the options are Broadway, Demonbreun Street or the Franklin Street corridor. Traffic is concentrated rather than dispersed.

What is most disappointing about the Gateway plan is that it is not a plan at all. It’s a scheme. It is one giant missed opportunity.

The Gateway area presents Nashville with a real chance to build an urban neighborhood. Such a neighborhood offers a mixture of large public buildings and smaller-scale commercial and residential developments set in a continuous network of streets that encourages sidewalk traffic. It is the sort of neighborhood that allows the average citizen to invest in the city.

“The public realm isn’t just one block with the name ‘Commons,’ ” says Stroud Watson. The plan lacks any opportunity for commoners to buy a 50-foot parcel and build a structure in which they can live and work. There are experts in this sort of planning, people who design neighborhoods the way a couturier designs a wardrobe. Nashville just doesn’t have one of those specialists on the civic payroll.

Jeff Browning, executive director of the Metro Planning Commission, freely admits that his staff has “traditionally not gotten into design issues. We often ignore design because we have our plate full with planning policy.” His office is concerned with land use, not with how that use will work in three dimensions.

MDHA is an implementing agency; they don’t do visions. Nicely and his crew are highly effective at getting the job done. If the mayor says, “Buy an arena campus,” they buy it. But their jobs seldom have much to do with designing a city.

The Gateway plan is a full-color illustration of Nashville’s lack of urban ambition. MDHA could use some of its tax increment financing to hire a real urban designer to develop the guidelines that will help us develop into a real city. Instead of such a plan, we have a developer making deals with pretty pictures.

Aside from the pretty pictures and the text that explains them—written in a sort of design-firm public-relationese—the Gateway book is a document oddly at war with itself. Sections of the book present the plan and the strategies for its implementation; then there are illustrations of decent urban design principles, the very principles that have not been followed in the plan itself. It is as if the folks at Swensson wanted to show that they knew better, that they turned out Gateway dreck at the dictation of a higher power.

For example, a chapter on design guidelines and standards presents streetscapes composed of straightforward buildings with relatively narrow frontages, coming together in normal-sized blocks that form a clean edge at the sidewalk. These are the kind of subdivided blocks and human-scale buildings we see on Second Avenue, not the mega-blocks with big-footprint buildings proposed in the Gateway plan. Apparently, the Swensson firm remains content with the plan as it is. Speaking for the firm, Swensson staffer David Minnigan said he sees “no necessity to discuss the plan further” and declined to be interviewed for this article.

Perhaps the self-contradictions of the Gateway book are a necessity, given MDHA’s need to get out from under its $7.5 million debt. A “finer grain” might make that escape more difficult. Gerald Nicely admits that his agency might have considered a small-parcel growth redevelopment, the sort of pattern by which our cities developed in the first place, “had MDHA not ended up buying the land.” He notes that development in smaller increments “takes longer” and that MDHA “has to have big dollars up front to carry the whole project.”

The need for big dollars requires big developers, and that’s where Mathews and company come in for a share of the blame. One observer in the construction industry says that big buildings may be the only kind of buildings that Mathews and company can understand. “It’s partly an ego issue,” the contractor explains. “Big buildings say big success, and perception is a big part of the development game. That kind of development also reduces the competition. Each member of the team has greater weight.”

The contractor claims that “urban design, the kind of thinking that recognizes the need for a mixture of big anchors and small infill, is not in most developers’ minds.” In recalling famous instances of past urban planning, he notes that, during the 16th century, Pope Sixtus V, Western civilization’s first urban planner, brought in Egyptian obelisks to serve as urban focal points for the city of Rome. “But he was starting with a lot of coffee bars in between. Most of us would rather hang out in a coffee-shop than around an obelisk.”

The Gateway document also seems schizoid because so much of it is mere filler, the regurgitation of an ill-digested urban design menu. There is a lot of fat in the Gateway diet. A chapter entitled “Travel” features urban views from many lands—one features Earl Swensson’s wife on a window-shopping excursion—but they have no clear relation to the downtown Nashville plan. The “Streets” section includes line drawings that illustrate the “design factors of great streets.” Although they are not attributed, the drawings seem to be identical to illustrations included in a volume published in 1993 by MIT Press, written by Allan B. Jacobs and called—perhaps coincidentally—Great Streets.

The Sacking of Cities

Spend an evening with the Gateway plan, and you may wonder why the city bought the land in the first place. In 1993, the Capitol Mall Redevelopment district was expanded to encompass 27 acres south of Broadway, including the arena and its campus. MDHA has the authority to enforce development and design objectives within the district’s boundaries. The city has the power over the land in the district whether or not the city actually owns the land.

Reading between the lines of the costly Gateway document, it’s easy to glimpse the ghostly but all-too-familiar specter of urban renewal. This ironically named movement—urban renewal renewed no urb—shaped American cities in the post-World War II years. It is rooted in a now antiquated urban planning philosophy that deems old buildings in small blocks as impractical because they are unmodern. Automobile transportation is the sine qua non of renewal planning, a result of its essentially suburban mind-set.

In process urban renewal assembles large parcels of land, demolishes what is on the land, and then builds large new buildings along wide new roads. The look is high, wide and not so handsome. Urban renewal gave to Nashville James Robertson Parkway and Deaderick Street, ventures that replaced downtown life, however squalid and messy, with the night of the living dead.

As the stream of federal dollars slowed to a trickle, cities were forced to create new strategies to finance redevelopment. In Nashville, Urban Renewal II used tax increment financing for ventures such as a wider Commerce Street, the Nashville Convention Center, Church Street Centre, the Stouffer Hotel (now the Renaissance Hotel) and the BellSouth building. Worthy as these individual projects might have been, they have failed to bring about true urbanity.

In 1961 Jane Jacobs criticized urban renewal in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She described the result of the billions that had been spent: “Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Commercial centers that are lack-luster imitations of standardized chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities.” In scathing tones, she demolished the demolishers. “This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities,” she wrote.

Gateway is not a plan for the sacking of our city but for the selling of a city to the highest bidder. It will not produce the kind of pillage Jacobs describes, because there are few structures of historical or architectural merit to be pillaged in the area affected by the plan. If implemented as suggested, however, it will ensure that the potential for a real urban neighborhood, which the area promises, will not be realized in our lifetimes. The Gateway plan sows salt on potentially fertile ground.

The Partnership has gone to great pains to learn what others of their ilk have said about how cities ought to work and about what ought to be good for people and businesses. They have accepted this conventional wisdom with such readiness that they have shrugged reality aside. The reality is that big-box development only creates life on city streets if it is used as an accent, if it is knit into a low-rise architectural fabric that makes citizens feel so comfortable that they use it every day. Big-deal developers don’t do this sort of thing. “When you look down the Champs Elysée toward the Arc de Triomphe,” says one local contractor, “you know that a developer didn’t say, ‘This is the way it has to be.’ ” Government decreed the plan of Paris. Government could make an urban neighborhood, if it had the patience. Nashville’s apparently doesn’t.

In the history of cities, the term “gateway” has traditionally indicated a transition between not-city and city. In the walled communities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, gateways drew the line between the danger without and the safety within. The Gateway plan draws a line in the sand between not-city and sort-of-city. In Nashville, the terror to our civic future lies within the gates.

Before we run screaming to our bunkers, let’s remember that the pretty pictures of the Gateway plan could stay inside their stylish cover—a sort of architectural Jumanji. Like so many other redevelopment schemes, Gateway as illustrated could become a curiosity, a relic, a vision considered but, fortunately, not realized. That has been the fate of the proposed addition of a tower to the top of the state Capitol, of the redevelopment plan derisively dubbed “The Ryman Under Glass.” The reaction to these two ill-starred ventures has changed from fear and loathing to giggles as the threat of their implementation has faded into the past. We can only hope that someday we’ll be giggling about Gateway.