Open space is an increasingly endangered species in our sprawling megalopolis. Our green pastures are rapidly being gobbled up by subdivisions and strip malls, Wal-Marts and Willow Pointes.
Urban open space is an even rarer breed. Nashville’s founders didn’t plat any open blocks in their town plan to serve as public commons—unlike Savannah, Memphis, and other Southern towns. Finding available land to retrofit parks into areas that were settled in the dense patterns of the pre-automobile age is a lot like discovering a living mastodon. Since the 1940s, little urban greenspace has been added to the public property rolls, until now. As we head into the next millennium, Middle Tennessee is experiencing a new golden age of public parks.
On February 6, three park designs—the World War II Memorial in the Bicentennial Mall, the Stones River Greenway, and the Shelby Bottoms Greenway—received top honors as part of the 9th annual Excellence in Development awards program. The competition is sponsored by a committee composed of representatives from Nashville’s development community. A jury composed of Wichita Falls architect Charles Harper, who is assisting in East Nashville’s tornado recovery planning, Atlanta engineer Ed Ellis, and Charles M. Elam, a developer from Cary, N.C., selected 11 winners. The fact that three of these winners were civic open spaces indicates that our concept of development excellence is expanding to include more than buildings on discrete parcels of land.
The World War II Memorial lies within Nashville’s most urban park and is, appropriately enough, the most obviously architectural of the three park spaces. Designed by Tuck Hinton Architects, the memorial is an outdoor room set on the western edge of Tennessee’s Bicentennial Capitol Mall and adjacent to the Mall’s history walk. Ten black granite pylons engraved with black-and-white vintage photographs of the war partially enclose the memorial plaza. An eight-ton granite globe rotating on a cushion of water at the northern end of the plaza indicates the sites of important battles and illustrates the world-wide nature of the conflict. Holly trees provide an evergreen backdrop to the sphere and allude to the sacred ilex groves of Greece and Rome. Dedicated on Veteran’s Day, the World War II Memorial—and the Mall within which it rests—recall the Acropolis of Athens, the Forum of Rome, and other ancient sites that used civic monies to sanctify places of collective gathering, commemoration, and ceremony.
The Stones River Greenway is also rooted in history. Envisioned nine years ago by the National Park Service as a pedestrian link between its Civil War battlefield sites, the Metro Greenways Commission has expanded this linear park in length and concept to serve as a car-less route through the heart of Murfreesboro. According to Greenways director Shain Dennison, ”every weekend thousands of walkers, bicyclists, and in-line skaters“ hit the five-mile trail that weaves along the river. The self-propelled travel from subdivisions and apartment buildings and trailer parks, and pass by industrial and commercial sites as well as battlefields. ”Someone can go from home to the Burger King and the Courthouse Square without ever having to get into a car,“ Dennison says.
The landscape architecture firm of Lose & Associates carefully crafted the Stones River Greenway to avoid wetlands and to preserve existing vegetation along the river corridor. ”We wanted it to be a green project in every way,“ says Lose’s Chris Camp, ”so we used recycled lumber for the signage, the benches, and even the trash bins.“ Because the Park Service wanted to preserve some visual distinctions between its sacred ground and the new greenway, Camp and his team used paving materials and fencing that compliment, rather than duplicate, those used on the battlefields . The Stones River Greenway ties history into the post-modern age.
Nature seems to be in its most ”natural“ state in East Nashville’s Shelby Bottoms Greenway. But landscape architect Gary Hawkins, the project’s lead designer, cautions that those appearances are deceiving. Archaeological studies indicate that people have been roaming through the 800-acre site lying in the Cumberland River floodplain since the Paleoindians of 10,000 B.C., Hawkins says. ”And the Mississippian Culture of a thousand years ago probably farmed the bottoms and used the trees for firewood and buildings. The design challenge was to explain that complex history of human manipulation to teach the ecology and the archaeology, the pre-history and the history“ to powerwalkers and joggers.
The Hawkins team’s master plan laid out a 3.5 mile asphalt trail to run from Shelby Park to Cornelia Fort airport along the Cumberland. A series of signs flanking the trail and river overlooks explain everything from tree rings to Timothy Demonbreun’s cave. A new wetland was created to attract waterfowl from the river, and an observation platform provides birdwatchers with easy sightings and non-birders with an unobstructed perspective on the topography. From the platform, one can view a series of rooms walled by tree lines, reflecting the site’s long history as crop land.
In the Greenways Commission’s 20-year plan, a car-less corridor runs from Percy Priest Dam to the Cheatham County line, passing through the Stones River Greenway, the Shelby Bottoms Greenway, and the Bicentennial Mall along the way. Like green fingers, these linear parks reach into our communities, linking our neighborhoods and our town centers with each other, and with the past. We can hardly wait.
