will anybody go there?

On a balmy March morning, I strolled across Legislative Plaza with Mayor Bill Purcell and his chief policy aide, Patrick Willard. We were in search of civic space.

Even though the air was warm and the sky cloudless—and the legislature in session—the plaza was empty, except for us. “I lived and worked here for 10 years,” Purcell recalls of his days in the General Assembly. “And I never heard a soul say, 'Let’s go out and sit on, walk through, Legislative Plaza.’ ”

The mayor notes that denizens of the Capitol avoid the plaza even if the alternative is lousy. “When the legislature lets out, [members] go down in an elevator into a hole in the ground, and they proceed through some of the ugliest space in the world,” he says. The lawmakers could walk out the doors of the Capitol and onto the plaza, but they don’t. “Unconsciously or consciously, they are choosing against this plaza. There used to be a set of gardens here that addressed people, that drew them in. Now it repels.”

We stand at the top of the steps, with the classical temple front of the War Memorial at our backs, and gaze east down Deaderick Street. It’s potentially a magnificent vista. The eye rushes down the channel of large, bland facades lining the street. The terminus, however, is anticlimactic: the Metro Courthouse parking lot. But the mayor plans to fix that.

Last May, in his State of Metro address, Purcell announced his intention to bury the parking lot and create some kind of civic space in its place. Hizzoner envisioned “a public square that is once again a place for us to gather, relax and rejoice that we live and work in Nashville, or for any other reason that we choose to celebrate.”

The mayor’s goal—to retrieve “public works” from the desert of street paving and maintenance—is a laudable one. The question is how we’re going to get there.

“Given a fine location, it is difficult to design a space that will not attract people,” writes William H. Whyte, the pioneer observer of urban life, in City. “What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

The transformation of the courthouse parking lot into a public square is the most important urban design project this community will undertake for a long time. In the process, Nashville can reclaim its heart, lost when our historic square was annihilated by urban renewal—the sacker of cities that also produced Legislative Plaza—for car storage and wide roads.

Once upon a time, the public square was where blocks coalesced into town. “The entire city was planned from the square,” says Mark Schimmenti, director of the Nashville Civic Design Center. In 1784, before Tennessee was even a state, the North Carolina legislature passed an act laying out Nashville in 200 one-acre lots, with a four-acre public square on the bluffs above the Cumberland River, near Fort Nashborough. “It’s only a short period of time—30 years out of 200—that the square wasn’t the center of the city,” Schimmenti notes. “So it’s important to restore it—and in a way that when you stand there, you know you’ve arrived in Nashville.”

This is the vision thing. But there are practical underpinnings to the public square. The new square will follow other developments south and north of the courthouse—the rehab of the Stahlman building on Union Street for residential use, and the construction of a new criminal courts building behind the Ben West building. There is also the renovation of the courthouse itself. These buildings will need parking. The city will lose 260 spaces with the removal of the courthouse surface lot, and the new criminal courts building will go where the 500-space garage behind Ben West now stands. To replace those spaces, a new garage with 1,400 spaces is to be built underneath a public square.

The land available for the new civic space is large for an urban square—four acres, or almost 200,000 square feet, comparable to a super Wal-Mart—and lies east and south of the courthouse. This configuration is quite different from that of the old public square.

Our old square ran along the lines of courthouse squares found in many of Tennessee’s county seats. The county building lies in the middle of the square, surrounded by streets calmed by parallel or angled parking, with the edges defined by walls of human-scaled—two or three-story—buildings. But Nashville’s was not the picturesque postcard courthouse set in a shady lawn, with old timers gossiping on benches. Our square was paved and lacked all but minimal landscaping. The area was used as a weekend farmers’ market until after World War II, when the market was relocated north of the State Capitol to Sulphur Dell. Our old square was where the action was, but it wasn’t pretty.

The north side of the square was taken away with the construction of the Victory Memorial Bridge and James Robertson Parkway in the 1950s. The rest was lost to parking lots in the 1970s. Before then, drivers could pass right in front of the courthouse—and actually see water spraying in the fountains—when Deaderick Street continued through what is now the courthouse parking lot to the Woodland Street Bridge. But this connection was eliminated by the parking lot. Also eliminated were two blocks of buildings that ran along both sides of SecondAvenue between Union Street and the courthouse. This resulted in the loopy—in more ways than one—road between the western end of the Woodland bridge and Union. All the parking, Purcell points out, “worked to the advantage of political leaders who preferred, consciously or subconsciously, that the people not gather too close to the seat of their government.”

To build the nearby Criminal Justice Center, the AmSouth tower and the linear parking lot known as the Gay Street Connector, we destroyed the Victorian commercial buildings that had formed the walls of our civic living room. The only good thing you can say about all this rape and pillage is that it opened up a striking sightline between the courthouse and the East Bank.

It would be impossible to restore the original square—even if it was desirable. What is desirable is to shape the new square in a way that recognizes what makes civic space work. But the preliminary planning is skirting this issue. And time is getting short.

As part of the courthouse renovation, tenants there will depart their offices in April. Construction of the garage will begin in early summer, so there will be storage space for cars when they return in the summer of 2005, the same period when the Stahlman and Criminal Courts buildings are expected to open for business. Walker Parking, the Georgia-based consultants on the design of the garage, must have a plan in place before the digging starts.

Due in part to the tight time constraint, planning for the underground garage was proceeding independently of the planning for what would go on top—because the garage has to come first. Then last fall, policy aide Patrick Willard explains, Metro’s planning chief, Rick Bernhardt, pointed out that the design of the two needed to be intimately interrelated.

To pull above and below grade together—and to consider how the square can fit into the larger landscape of downtown—Metro hired Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), a Philadelphia planning and design firm. WRT had developed the master plan for the city’s parks, so the city could merely extend this contract rather than go through a lengthier competitive process.

In January, WRT produced a report that considers present and future civic design in the central city. The overview describes the new public square as “the critical link between the complex of buildings and spaces around the State Capitol and the Cumberland River waterfront.” The report also includes three examples of garage configurations and schematic patterns of landscape and hardscape that could go on top to compose the square.

In a financially constrained world, designers of squares over parking put the least weighty elements—grass and pedestrian paving—on top of the garage. They cluster heavier elements—such as trees and buildings and streets—on solid ground. The point is to minimize the costs of waterproofing and structurally reinforcing the garage.

“It’s critical to identify the shape of the garage, know where the hole for the garage will go,” says Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, WRT’s lead landscape architect for the square. “Once you commit to a shape, that limits what you can do on top.”

Garage ingress and egress routes also shape the surface. WRT estimates that three to five elevator and stair towers will be necessary. These should be incorporated into the square’s design without looking like glorified Port-o-Lets. As many as 12 ventilation shafts—each 15-feet-square—must be inserted into the skin of the square. Entrance/exit ramps for cars should be placed in ways that minimize their impact on pedestrian access to the square, and their visual impact on the streetscape.

Accomplishing good design over a garage isn’t easy, and it’s expensive—witness the inert Hall of Fame Park next to the Hilton Suites Hotel in SoBro. This park is stark, with prosaic landscaping and hardscape dominated by concrete—no fine stones such as granite or limestone for textural variation. “What you see is an armature for something else to happen if money becomes available,” explains Gary Hawkins, the park’s landscape architect.

The stripped-down approach for that three-acre Hall of Fame Park was necessitated by the budget: $2.5 million. Almost $700,000 of that was absorbed by waterproofing and reinforcing the garage to take landscaping on top. The $3 million allocated for the surface of the public square—$17 per square foot—is less than the $19 per square foot for Hall of Fame Park. And like the garage under the Hall of Fame Park, the $22 million budget for the public square garage does not include any costs for necessary waterproofing or additional reinforcement, according to Victor Iraheta of Walker Parking. The funds for these will have to come from the $3 million allocation for the square.

Bunster-Ossa admits that the budget is “tight,” but says the design team will present the city with fiscal alternatives. “We’ll look at several scenarios—this is what you can do with $3 million, this is what you can do with $6 million. And we’ll also include incremental designs—this is a way to build some now and add more later when money is available.” According to Willard, these scenarios, and the designs they produce, will be reviewed by a committee of two local design professionals: architect Kem Hinton and landscape architect Kim Hawkins.

The problem is that, with the clock ticking, the nature of the square still seems muddled. According to Bunster-Ossa, “Once we sign a contract, get the green light [for specific designs, expected to be within the next month or so], we’ll consider the program for the square— whether it’s to be primarily passive and focus on the splendid views of the river and the magnificent architecture of the courthouse, or if it’s to be more of an activity space.” Some form of building to provide a sense of enclosure “is a possibility at some stage. But sometimes wide open spaces can be magnificent.”

Never mind that you can’t even see the Cumberland River from the courthouse parking lot. Never mind that gazing at the courthouse seems a less than compelling reason to visit the square. And never mind that “wide open spaces” in a city sounds like Tiananmen Square—bring on the tanks! Metro seems to be pushing forward with the square without a full and thoughtful consideration of what draws people to civic space—and what doesn’t.

For months, urban advocates have worried about the planning and design of the public square, amid rumors that Metro finance director David Manning—not the city’s planners—was really the guy in charge. On a day-to-day basis, that’s probably true. “Manning’s office is in charge of Metro property,” Willard says, “so in that sense, they’re in charge.”

But make no mistake, Purcell himself holds the reins on the team driving the public square. The mayor is clear on what he doesn’t want for the square—paved and isolated space, another Legislative Plaza. But just what is his vision for the space?

The mayor wants a park. He has wanted a park since he first announced his public square initiative. And despite advice from some local design professionals—and the evidence from a basic bibliography of civic spaces—that a park is not enough, he wants a park still. He feels we need more green space in the city.

The mayoral attitude is reflected, not coincidentally, in the three square designs sketched in WRT’s report. The sketches are rudimentary, and highly preliminary. But they indicate the direction in which we are heading. Each features a memorial garden to the east of the courthouse and a place of public assembly out front. The rest is pretty much leaves and lawn and paths. Two have fountains and special events pavilions. Each shows a pedestrian ramp leading down the bluff to the river. Each also shows the existing road configuration around the courthouse.

“I’m feeling very good about the suggestions made by the designers so far,” Purcell says. “And I like the three options I’ve seen. Every design presented is park-like. We have a parks consultant doing the planning.”

The mayor explains that the consultants are “not looking at the square in isolation, but how it addresses the river, the [greenway] along the river and ultimately how it addresses other green spaces downtown. They’re working hard to establish a notion of open and public spaces—which we haven’t had before in this city. The spaces are green, by and large, that fit together and connect in some way for people who feel the urge to come to the city, be in the city, move through the city.”

Purcell doesn’t want any vehicular path to mar square-as-park. He scorns any suggestion to reconnect the western edge of the Woodland Street Bridge with Deaderick Street. “I get the grid,” he says. “I like the grid. But the grid is not mentioned in the Bible. It’s not the grid above all things, above trees. That’s why we got into this damn problem in the first place, from the whole notion of highways and roads determining everything else.”

Purcell’s anti-vehicular stance, he says, is not determined by the cost of making the connection. “From a design standpoint, and I’ve been listening, I don’t think anyone has yet made the case for why—when we finally have the opportunity for a large contiguous space in the center of downtown—that we’d do what some previous generations did and pour a lot of asphalt there.”

In a presentation and discussion of WRT’s report at the Nashville Civic Design Center in February, the firm’s professional in charge of the project, Jonathan Barnett, concurred with the mayor. In Barnett’s view, any path in front of the courthouse should “preserve the pedestrian connection to the river from Deaderick Street.”

With all respect to the brilliant Barnett, it’s a curious position to take. After all, why would the only people who regularly populate the Deaderick canyon—the bus riders—feel the urge to rush like lemmings across the square and down a high bluff to look at concrete bridge piers? And if they did, the slope is so steep the city would have to build them something to stand on when they got to the riverfront.

Of course, no one in their right mind—I haven’t queried the traffic engineers—wants the city to run the four lanes of Deaderick Street right through the square. But several connective schemes emerged during a forum on the square at the Civic Design Center last spring, and from a committee subsequently appointed by the mayor to study the square further last summer.

The schemes in general picture a narrow, two-lane connection. Suggestions include paving the street with cobblestones or some other slow-down material, and lining it with some parallel or angled short-term parking flanking the courthouse steps. Some also include a small traffic circle. The connection would allow people to drop off a passenger at the courthouse, or park for a few minutes to run in and drop off a document or pick one up. The connection could be closed off for special events, such as concerts—or protests.

Ultimately, a reconnection of the grid may not prove to be the best design. But the concept deserves further exploration, rather than knee-jerk auto-phobia. Cars and streets are not part of the axis of evil. It’s only when they come to dominate—by the car’s speed or the street’s obstructive width—that they threaten the human condition.

What’s more crucial to the use of the square is that the roads around it get some attention. It seems illogical to view the internal combustion engine as a threat at the courthouse itself, yet fail to include in the scope of planning for the square any gestures toward the traffic calming of James Robertson Parkway and Union Street. These two pedestrian-unfriendly barriers between the square and the new courts to the north and Stahlman to the south could nullify all the park-like virtues Purcell wants.

“The road system around the square and courthouse really needs calming, rationalizing,” Schimmenti says. “You might look at narrowing the roads into streets, making medians and better crosswalks, making cars turn at a right angle rather than swoop around a curve. If a new square still has major traffic around it, accessing it from any place but the garage below will be like visiting the middle of a traffic circle.”

Yet according to Walker Parking’s Iraheta, all planning for parking and square assumes that the configuration of the surrounding roadways will remain the same as they are now. And when suggestions to do otherwise were made to Barnett at the Civic Design Center in February, his response was that time and money didn’t permit. “It’s too late in this movie,” he said. “You could change the road alignment, but it would be expensive, require new capital and send us back to the drawing board.”

That’s exactly where they should go.

Unlike large parks—such as Nashville’s Shelby Park and Bottoms or the two Warners—smaller civic space is not primarily recreational or aesthetic, but social. Confusing the character of the two is a common failing. “Today, many public spaces seem to be intentionally designed to be looked at but not touched,” says a report by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), a nonprofit organization providing technical assistance, research and education to communities trying to revive or create good civic space.

Legislative Plaza looks like fine Beaux Arts planning from the windows of the Hermitage Hotel. But it’s not a successful social space, except for one weekend in October when it hosts the Southern Festival of Books. The plaza’s failure is not because it’s mostly hardscape. If that were the case, every piazza in Italy would be vacant. What the festival brings to the plaza is what it lacks the rest of the year—a reason to be there. Actually, several reasons, and they’re all social: hear a reading, buy a book, meet an author, run into a friend and have a lemonade or sandwich.

At the old War Memorial Plaza the gardens might have been nice to look at, but if people used them—and let’s say for the sake of argument they did—they had more reasons than rose bushes. The central bus queue for the city flanked one side of the plaza, and there was on-street parking at the edges. In the historical photographs of the plaza I’ve examined, people are hanging by their cars, talking or sitting one by one on benches, waiting for a bus. I’ve seen no evidence that people used the gardens as a destination in and of itself—say to cluster for lunch or coffee—perhaps because there was no place in or near the plaza to buy either.

“Activities are the basic building blocks of a place,” says a report on making successful places by PPS. “Having something to do gives people a reason to come to a place—and to return.” And they return primarily because other people gather there.

After three years of watching and recording how people used the plazas and sidewalks of New York, William H. Whyte came up with the principle he calls “self-congestion” to describe outdoor urban behavior. In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, he writes, “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.” He noticed that people use terms like “retreat” or “escape” or “oasis” when talking about what they’d like to find in urban space. “What people do, however, reveals a different priority.” That priority is other people.

So who are the people who would use a public square in Nashville? “I see the primary users as downtown workers and residents,” says Steve Gibson, interim director of the Nashville Downtown Partnership. “The square could be an important piece in growing downtown residential space. But we need a people place, not just green. It will be too passive if it’s just landscape.”

WRT’s preliminary sketches for a square display little more than landscape—and an events pavilion. Gibson’s advice is that concerts and festivals are fine, as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. “To animate the square, it should be well-programmed for daily human activity: a coffeehouse, restaurant, book and news store,” he says. “And don’t let the occasional need to assemble a couple of thousand people drive the design. A built-in performance space will be counterproductive. The square will be harder to use the rest of the time and will sit vacant. Not that you can’t have events, you just bring in a stage three or four times a year.”

Given the typically tight-as-a-tick Metro Parks budget, three or four times a year is about all the juggling acts and face painting and musicales the city will be able to afford. Besides, special event stuff, frantically programmed in parks and plazas just to get people to come to the city, is a sad substitute for daily life in public places.

Public places fail, according to a PPS study, because of difficult pedestrian access and a lack of “gathering points”—everything from a bus stop to a newsstand to locations for food and drink. “Bland walls or dead zones at the edges” also impede their success. Civic spaces are outdoor rooms, and rooms need walls.

In his presentation at the design center, Barnett acknowledged that the space for our square “is bigger than the traditional square enclosed by buildings,” and that “here the buildings are far away.” What WRT sketched to supply a sense of enclosure for the park is a system of trelliswork. This seems, to put it mildly, inadequate. Trellises are too visually lightweight and permeable to counteract, for example, the brutality of the edge made by the AmSouth garage to the west.

Real enclosure could come at the southern corners of the square, in the form of two- or three-story structures, with retail at square level—possibly fronted by arcades for shelter—and office or residential upstairs. Buildings, in addition to buffering the traffic and giving the space walls, could contain reasons to go to the square on a daily basis. According to Iraheta, the garage configuration currently receiving most of the planners’ attention keeps free the southeast and southwest corners of the square, where development could go.

The mayor, however, is reluctant to have architecture intrude into the precincts of the square-as-park—at least right now. “I see the need for retail—lunch, coffee—in proximity to people,” he says. “And it makes sense to make provisions in the design for that evolution over time. But I think you should start with a larger canvas and not, from the beginning, alienate chunks of it away that can’t ever be recovered. No more open space is going to be created in the center of the city, so I think you should go slowly with what you add to it.”

The mayor is also relying on existing buildings to boost patronage of the square. “There’s a fair amount of potential retail space at the edges—such as the first floors of the Stahlman and American Trust buildings—that’s available right now,” he explains. “We should give it a chance before the government comes in and induces more.”

Without dealing with the five lanes of Union Street, however, traffic will inhibit pedestrian movement between retail and square. And those buildings housing retail may be too far away to do much for the square. “I see retail across Union as way too remote, and there’s not enough sidewalk there for outdoor cafes,” Gibson says. “You need retail uses in the square, with tables and chairs that can be moved around to allow people to form their own social groups.”

Some point out that the central city is already awash in ill-defined and unbuilt space. “There’s so much open space in downtown Nashville—surface parking, parks and plazas without programs,” says Marleen Davis, the dean of the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture and Design. “And in most cases, space needs to be defined, rather than just be 'open’ or 'green.’ ”

Nashville’s public square seems ready to fall into the fallacy that has dominated the planning of civic space in America for a long time. The fallacy is rooted in Romantic ideology, which contends that a human being is at his or her best when closest to nature. “We have very ambivalent feelings about city life as a general proposition, and view rural landscape as the sovereign antidote to the baneful necessity of urbanism,” James Kunstler writes in The City in Mind.

The impulse to import the country into the city fabric was born in the 19th century, when the city was a pretty squalid place. Landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted was the pioneer practitioner, and his Central Park—with its picturesque hillocks, lakes, and curvy roads and paths—is a textbook example of our thinking about urban parks. Olmsted’s purpose in bringing rural forms into the city was to relieve the congestion, lack of air and sunlight and monotony of the relentless grid of New York. It’s important to remember, however, that Olmsted’s methods don’t work at all scales. When the picturesque tradition is applied to smaller urban spaces, you get cartoon nature, something like our Church Street Park, with its berms, curvy paths, shrubs and flowers—and limited usage.

The classical style of our courthouse demands a square in the classical spirit, a spirit that believes in the city as a place that can bring out the best in people. Classicism celebrates the obviously manmade in a formal language of right angles and symmetrical facades. But the manmade is a hard sell these days.

So much of what we made in our cities in the second half of the 20th century was so inept—wide swoopy roads, stand-alone buildings that fail to relate to street or pedestrian, windswept empty plazas. We’ve lost confidence in our ability to build anything worthy of our civic aspirations. In the public imagination—and, apparently, our mayor’s—streets and architecture are risky ventures. Nature is safe, because it’s never let us down.

Hence the American fixation with “open space” and “green space” to cure the decline of our cities. Invoked as abstractions, however, “ 'green space’ or 'open space’ essentially means build nothing,” Kunstler writes. “It is a rhetorical device for putting city land in cold storage, in the only currently acceptable form, that is, covered by grass and shrubs, a.k.a. nature.”

What Nashville needs is more urbanity, not less. A new public square should, of course, include landscape—but as an amenity, not as a be-all and end-all. There are good examples of how this is done. Some of them are from the 19th century such as New Orleans’ Jackson Square. Some of them are much more recent: Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, the transformation of Bryant Park in New York. WRT surely knows these success stories and many others. They’ve designed some themselves, including Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. WRT can design a success story here if we as a community have the self-confidence to tell them to.

Anyone who cares about downtown Nashville strongly supports the mayor’s effort to raise the city center to a higher level through the re-creation of a public square. But just how high a level is still in question. “It’s important for the city to raise the bar of what it will accept as civic space with this square to the major leagues,” Gibson says. “There’s no reason why not.”

And there’s no reason to wait. Nashville has so few good urban places. We don’t need a square that slowly evolves—like some prehistoric amphibian climbing out of the water onto the shore. We need to demonstrate in three dimensions, right now, that we can make a public square as good as—no, better than—our old one.