If you’ve got the wits God gave a jaybird, these days you’re avoiding Second Avenue. The street is a mess. Cars and pedestrians lurch through a maze of workers who are frantically digging, planting and paving—going through the rites of spring in preparation for the arrival of summer’s hordes of tourists. The inescapable chaos of construction, however, is temporary; the project is scheduled to be completed by June 1. What is less apparent through the whirling clouds of dust is a muddle we’ll be living with long after this summer’s tourists have come and gone.

The city is spending $1.5 million to enhance the “walkableness” of Second Avenue. For once in our civic life, we are actually planning for pedestrians. On the recommendation of Gresham Smith and Partners, an architectural, engineering, landscape and planning firm that serves as consultant to the Second Avenue project, the street’s traffic pattern is being changed from one-way to two-way, complete with on-street parallel parking. Both the two-way traffic and the on-street parking will force cars to slow down, thus making the street more pedestrian-friendly. Wider sidewalks—doubling the span in some places—and new trees—48 replacements for the original, scraggly dozen—are also well-intentioned gestures that could make life more pleasant for the foot traveler. So what’s not to like, aside from the transitory turmoil? Not to put too fine a point on it: What’s not to like is the new sidewalks and the new trees.

The sidewalks are to paving what plaid pants are to a striped shirt. The new bricks used to expand the width of the sidewalks don’t echo the original ones, either in type or in pattern. The old, smooth-finished bricks are laid in groupings of two-brick squares, alternating horizontal and vertical placements. The new, rough-textured bricks have all been laid horizontally, alternating full-size and half-size bricks—a traditional pattern known as “Flemish bond.” The two generations of brick are divided by a strip of pavers, along which the street furnishings of benches and lighting fixtures are to be clustered. The result suggests the fashion sense of a severely nearsighted dresser.

The mismatch is not the slipup of some hapless contractor crew working against a tight deadline. According to Mickey Sullivan, a former Metro Public Works official who is now director of civil engineering for Gresham Smith, the contrast was a deliberate design choice. “You can never get an exact match of brick. Rather than make it look like we tried and it didn’t work, we decided to celebrate the difference.”

A wake would be a more appropriate celebration. The old and new bricks are fairly close in color now and will get even closer with weathering. Visually, the color seems to pull the two sections of paving together. Meanwhile, the two sections seem to be pushed apart by their contrasting surface finishes and by the patterns in which they’ve been laid. This yin-yang design statement suggests that Grehsam Smith didn’t try very hard to solve the problem. What’s more, their make-do solution didn’t work.

The new trees have been criticized, in part, because of the varieties used. Randall Lantz, who will be responsible for tree maintenance as superintendent of horticulture for Metro Parks, says of the street’s willow oaks and lacebark elms, “Quite honestly, they are not varieties we’d have chosen, but we weren’t consulted. I don’t know why willow oaks were used. They have been tried downtown and have not done well.”

Nashville’s urban forester, Joe Willis, recommended two varieties of multi-trunked maples, “because they give a mature look at an early age and have great fall color.” Willis says Gresham Smith rejected his suggestions in favor of taller trees; in the end the oaks and elms were substituted. “The problem with lacebark elms is that they are very wide trees, which can be a problem with pedestrians on sidewalks,” Willis explains. “The willow oaks have a fine leaf, which doesn’t need much raking, but they tend to turn yellow under all the alkalinity of street conditions.”

Doug Sharp, Gresham Smith’s landscape architect, defends his choice of oaks and elms as “appropriate urban trees” and says “it is not the case at all” that his choice of tree varieties has been widely challenged. Sharp admits, however, that both oaks and elms have a low-branching growth pattern which seems to mitigate their value in a tight setting.

City Parks, a primer on the planting of trees in urban locations, written by local landscape architect Gary Hawkins, recommends a tree type with “an upright or vase-shaped canopy” for the close quarters of sidewalks and streets. This shape allows a tree to grow naturally and does not require drastic pruning to keep branches out of the faces of passers-by.

To the practiced eye of forester Joe Willis, the new trees on Second Avenue are “junk.” Apparently, that is not what Mayor Phil Bredesen ordered.

According to mayoral staffer Vicki Oglesby, Bredesen has been adamant in his desire for greenstuff that’s top of the line. “During all the discussions about the budget, the one area the mayor refused to cut was for landscaping. He said, ‘I don’t want to spend all this money and not have nice trees.’ When he walked down there and saw what was in the ground, well, he was not pleased.” Since the mayoral site visit, Willis and Lantz have tagged a number of the planted trees for replacement. More will follow.

The mooring lines and chains surrounding some of these pitiful specimens are a source of much amusement on the street. Their massive size has prompted one Second Avenue wag to suggest that signs be hung from the chains reading: “Please, don’t feed the trees.”

The pits in which the trees have been placed are controversial too. The grate-covered planters are 5 feet wide and 10 feet long. Mark Wariner, construction manager for Metro Public Works, says the pits “are not the greatest in the world—all the utility lines in there restricted the size—but they have enough room in them for the trees to do well.”

Others are not so sure. “Some of the root balls of the planted trees are already hitting the sides of their containers,” says Willis. “Any time you reduce the dimensions in which a tree can grow, you make it harder for the tree to survive. The average life span for street trees is about 15 years; I doubt these on Second Avenue will make it that long.”

What does seem to thrive in Nashville is a planning and design process that produces a less-than-first-rate result and leaves all the participants blaming one another and chugging Stress Tabs.

“I’ve been frustrated with the whole project,” says Joe Willis. “It’s going to be better than what we had, but it’s sure not state of the art.”

Vicki Oglesby echoes those sentiments. “I have spent the last four months working out compromises on what has not been carried through on the mayor’s instructions,” she says.

Urban design is always a compromise between the ideal and the possible. But in Nashville, the ideal won’t have a fighting chance as long as we continue to accept a reality that substitutes cut-rate for first-rate as a matter of course.

Parking brake

The apparently endless destruction of old buildings on Church Street by fire—and by other unnatural disasters such as surface parking—has been halted, as least for the moment. Oglesby of the mayor’s office confirms that the demolition of the former Harvey’s building, scheduled for last week, has been delayed until July 1.

Responses to a request for proposals for the adaptive re-use of the building must be delivered to the Metro Development and Housing Agency by that date. Monroe Carell of Central Parking has agreed to call off the bulldozers until then so that MDHA can attempt to scare up a buyer/developer for the property.

MDHA head Gerald Nicely says his agency is “willing to go up to $1 million, as a tax increment incentive, to find someone with an offer to save the building.” MDHA uses this kind of financing in its redevelopment districts to make projects more palatable to potential developers. This sort of dealing was used to encourage the construction of the BellSouth building.

Metro insiders say that Nicely and Mayor Bredesen accompanied Monroe Carell on a tour of the Harvey’s site, where they lobbied the captain of parking to give the historic structure a chance. The hope is that two-and-a-half months will provide chance enough. An MDHA-commissioned master plan for Church Street is currently in the works; its completion date is scheduled for early to mid-May. Right now the planning team is studying the marketability of the Harvey’s building as a mixed-use structure, with the street level devoted to commercial uses and the upper levels recycled as loft residences.

The planning team is also discussing the possiblity of a new public library or a new Cumberland Science Museum on Church Street. The latter has been proposed for Church Street Centre, as a means of salvaging a retail operation that is now on life-support. Both the library and the museum have commissioned studies for future space needs, and both studies are expected to be completed in June. As an added incentive to would-be developers, Tony Giarratana is reportedly close to completing the financing for a Church Street residential tower to which the Harvey’s lofts would serve as a complement.

Architect Seab Tuck, a member of the group crunching the Church Street master plan, calls the stay of execution “a real positive” in what has been a constantly worsening pattern of negatives. “July 1 is probably a little tight, but it’s a good compromise if the alternative is tearing [the Harvey’s Building] down right now. I have always felt that demolishers should at least wait until our plan is completed, to let us paint the picture. If one good thing falls into place, a lot could start happening within the next six months.”

Let’s just hope that what’s happening by then isn’t more asphalt. Nashville has until July 1 to stem the tide of “$1 for the first 30 minutes; $1 each additional hour; $5 all day; $5 after 3:30; Saturdays and Sundays $5.” Start counting.