Urban Front
If you want evidence that urban design gets no respect in Metro, you need look no further than the Metro Development and Housing Agency’s plan for Church Street Park. If this inept design becomes a reality, it could botch a golden opportunity to repair the badly damaged urban fabric of downtown Nashville.
The park is proposed for the north side of Church Street, between Sixth Avenue and Capitol Boulevard. The Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) is using $1.5 million in federal funds to pay for land acquisition, demolition of two buildings, and construction of the park. MDHA hired the local branch of HNTB—a massive architecture and engineering firm headquartered in Kansas City—to design and manage the project. Heading up the project for HNTB is Lenny Arnold, a civil engineer who is working with Mike Wolf, a landscape architect at HNTB, as well as staffers from Metro’s Department of Parks and Recreation.
The park’s location was established by the Church Street Master Plan, a script for kick-starting Church Street redevelopment. In 1996, MDHA commissioned the plan from a design team headed by the local firm of Tuck Hinton Architects. Because the area studied by the master plan is part of Metro’s Capitol Mall Redevelopment District, MDHA can underwrite new development there by providing tax-increment financing (TIF). MDHA also has the power to exercise design-review controls over specific redevelopment proposals in the Capitol Mall District.
The master plan recommends adjusting Church Street’s personality. The preponderance of retail businesses would be mixed in with a variety of other establishments. There would be a strong residential component. To encourage residential initiatives on Church Street, MDHA is providing $6 million in tax-increment financing for Tony Giarratana’s 23-story Cumberland Tower apartments at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Church, as well as $1 million of TIF incentives for the Bennie Dillon Building’s rehab into living quarters. MDHA intends Church Street Park as an amenity to urban living. The purpose of the quarter-of-an-acre rectangle is to open up some much-needed greenspace for downtown dwellers.
In HNTB’s plan, pedestrians stroll into Church Street Park along six-foot-wide brick paths that curve in from the four corners and meet at a central single-jet fountain. Raised brick planters fill in the eastern and western quadrants defined by the paths. Another brick path bisects the park, leading north from Church Street to the fountain and terminating at a small stage at the opposite end.
The plan envisions people watchers sitting on the walls of the raised planters or spilling over onto additional seating on benches scattered along the paths. Plantings in the raised beds include small trees, shrubs, and flowers. The open space between the paths, on the Church Street side, is seeded with grass.
According to Arnold, the blank wall of the building on the northern edge of the park “will be painted and cleaned, to make the wall blend in with the park.” In the future, he suggests, the wall might be decorated with some sort of mural.
What is most obvious about this plan for Church Street Park is that its designers just don’t understand urban space. The site has all the elements that could encourage outdoor social life, and the designers have ignored them.
First off, the site has a southern exposure, with the sun’s rays bouncing off the wall of the building to the north. A park with large deciduous trees would provide a sunny setting on mild winter days, and a shady refuge in summer. The Church Street Park plan, however, is a hot spot in the making. The site offers enough ground for the root mass of shade trees, but HNTB’s plan only gives us small ornamentals. In response to suggestions from members of the Nashville Urban Design Forum, an organization of design professionals and developers, Arnold says his team “is looking at the question of bigger trees.”
This one should be a no-brainer. Small trees will shade plants, not pedestrians. In Nashville summers, only masochists and lizards sun themselves on hard paving. We’ve been there and done that—look at the SunTrust plaza.
The site of the Church Street Park is bordered by sidewalks on three sides—a ready-made pedestrian system. Yet HNTB’s design features a maze of brick paths. The plan is all circulation—and little destination. It offers a variety of ways to get through the park, and very little space, or reason, to pause there.
On the north side of the park, the building’s flat wall defines one side of a three-dimensional space. The designers treat the wall as a negative to be mitigated—painting it “to make the wall blend in with the park.” The plan doesn’t integrate the park into the surrounding architectural fabric; instead, it tries to deny that the architectural fabric exists.
For centuries the Italians have been taking advantage of the kind of opportunity offered by the Church Street Park site. A Guido or a Giovanna would recognize the wall as a backdrop for a fountain, making the wall a focal point and opening up the central space for people. HNTB puts its fountain smack in the middle. “In that context,” one local landscape architect comments, “a 10-foot jet of water will have about as much impact as a drinking fountain.”
Small, well-landscaped urban parks are scattered throughout the U.S. Manhattan’s Paley Park is probably the most famous example. Enclosed on three sides by buildings, Paley Park’s fourth wall is a wall of water. This water wall is the park’s one expensive feature. Otherwise, it consists of little more than shade trees scattered amidst stone pavers and lots of movable chairs and tables. It’s simple, but it’s an intimate space that works for 100 people—or for two. Paley Park shows us that urban theater doesn’t require a special-events stage. What we need is an outdoor living room.
Weekend gardeners may be excused for thinking that it’s possible to create a park by throwing bricks and benches, a fountain, and some flowers into a blender, and then pushing a button. Professional designers should know better. The designers of Church Street Park aren’t creating a comfortable, inviting spot where people will want to hang out. They seem to be more concerned with picturesque horticulture. This is misguided urbanism. It’s the work of people who have been driving by the branch bank’s Bradford pears for too long.
MDHA’s objectives in constructing Church Street Park are clear, and they’re worthwhile. The agency’s design sense is less clear, and its memory is obviously faulty.
Church Street is paved with well-intentioned mistakes. In the past, we turned a city street into a traffic lane. We replaced vacant department stores with the covered mall of Church Street Centre. We tried suburban solutions to urban problems, and we were wrong in every case.
Apparently afflicted with amnesia, MDHA officials hired a team headed by a civil engineer—a man who designs bridges and highways—to design a park alongside a street that needs all the help it can get. According to MDHA executive director Gerald Nicely, his agency gave the job to HNTB because HNTB has a contract with Metro to do relatively low-budget projects. MDHA could have staged a competitive process among local landscape architects, but the agency took the speedier option instead. Explains Nicely, “We wanted to get something out of the ground as soon as possible.” Construction is scheduled to begin in early August.
If MDHA officials want to do Church Street a favor, they’ll put this park plan in the landfill. The budget for Church Street Park may be relatively small, but the design impact is enormous. A good pocket park can’t anchor civic redevelopment, but a bad one can sabotage it. An unsuccessful park will be a misleading billboard, advertising that city centers just don’t work anymore.
