Five post-Music City Center decisions that will affect how South of Broadway shapes up
by Christine Kreyling
No urban designer would put a convention center at the top of her wish list. That's because it's fiendishly hard to fit one into the cityscape. To grasp the size of the Music City Center, imagine if the existing convention center grew west to Eighth Avenue and north all the way to Church Street. In a 2006 New Yorker piece, architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote, "Putting one of these megaliths into the heart of a city is like trying to dock the Queen Mary in the local marina." Well, Capt. Karl Dean is steering Nashville's own Queen Mary into SoBro — in the blocks bounded by Fifth and Eighth avenues, Demonbreun Street and Korean Veteran's Boulevard (KVB). Everyone in the city is understandably suffering from convention center fatigue. But a laissez-faire approach won't mitigate the megabox impacts. So how do we grow a SoBro that's something more than a land of tourist hangars and parking lots?
"A down market is a good time to plan," says Rick Bernhardt, Metro Planning's executive director. "We've all been concentrating on if the convention center would happen. Now we should figure out how to take advantage of the convention center to fill in the fabric of SoBro." Bernhardt says that center construction will bring with it infrastructure improvements — the extension of KVB to Eighth Avenue, the roundabout, underground utility lines and sidewalks — "that could be assets to a nicer neighborhood."
In Bernhardt's opinion, "I don't think we're going to see a lot more public investment in SoBro anytime soon." But "there are decisions out there the city still has to make." Some are more immediate than others, but all should be considered within the broader context of SoBro and focus on the long term, not the quick fix. Here are five:
The site of the new NES substation
For Gary Gaston, design director of the Nashville Civic Design Center, this is "a critical issue." The existing substation will be displaced by the new convention center. The Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) is currently fixated on the Sixth Avenue parcel on the south side of KVB currently occupied by Rocketown. "Korean Veterans' is intended to be a major boulevard, and Sixth Avenue will become more important because Seventh Avenue will no longer be a through street," Gaston explains. "Ideally, the substation would be in the center of a block, wrapped by other uses, because you want activity generators on major thoroughfares," not another dumb box.
The location of the convention center hotel
Some planners like Fifth Avenue and proximity to the Country Music Hall of Fame, a unique tourist draw. Others prefer Eighth Avenue because of downtown views and the potential to energize the west end of the convention center and the roundabout.
Music City Center expansion space
Planned for the blocks between Fifth and Sixth Avenues south of KVB stretching roughly to Peabody Street. "But what happens to that land before it's needed — if it's needed — in the next 20 years?" asks Seab Tuck, a member of the convention center design team. "Owners will be inclined to just sit on their property or do tear-downs for surface parking," thus reducing their property taxes. "That's not a good scenario for growth in SoBro."
The best location for a baseball stadium
Because the Sounds play more games than the Titans, a new baseball stadium could be a more consistent energizer for the central city. The idea of putting the ballpark in Sulphur Dell, the area north of the State Capitol and the historic home of baseball in Nashville, is often floated. So is the East Bank, because of all the existing parking. And then there's the SoBro riverfront.
SoBro streets
The texture of SoBro's streets — their irregular frequency, length and termination; intersections where more than two streets cross; triangular lots — makes the area difficult to navigate. "We need to look at rationalizing and regularizing the road patterns as we develop there," Tuck says.
The arrival of the Music City Center is a game changer for SoBro. The scenario presented in the 1997 Plan for SoBro, of a fine-grained urban neighborhood that would serve as "the living quarter for downtown," needs some tweaking, to say the least.
Such tweaking, Bernhardt says, should involve "an organic evaluation, block by block, looking at ownership patterns. Are they fragmented, meaning that infill will probably be in smaller increments, or is there the possibility of assemblage?" He says land values must be studied. "If they're too high, people will just sit on their property, nothing will happen. So we need to ask: What are the obstacles to private investment, and what would incentivize it?"
All of which argues for another Plan for SoBro. And the process should involve not merely property owners and city staffs but also outside experts and anyone interested in the future of the area.
Comments (2)
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As far as the location of the hotel is concerned, it needs to be as close as possible to existing attractions. The hotel will not be a magnet to future development; it has to feed off of current development. Head over to Google Books and read the section on convention centers in "The American City: What Works, What Doesn't" by Alexander Garvin.
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why doesn't the city acquire the future expansion land now... a park could be built with a stage for local artists to play...would be a draw for the MCC...and would encourage development surrounding the area for the next 20 years, increasing property tax revenue over the next two decades... plus the city owns the land when time comes to expand...
