Kids have always swapped things. During the Depression it was marbles; in the ’60s it was baseball cards and Barbie togs; now it’s anything related to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. These days, some Nashville powerbrokers are talking about trade-offs, but the stakes are far more important than anything you’d find in a bubblegum wrapper. The Implementation Committee for a Nashville Center for the Visual Arts, chaired by Dr. Thomas Frist Jr., is determined to pry the Broadway post office out of federal hands in order to transform it into a home for the center. The urban chatline is hot with the latest suggested means of making the deal work: a trade for the city-owned Customs House.
The deal has historical precedent as well as current logic to recommend it. After President Rutherford B. Hayes laid the cornerstone for the Customs House in 1877, the structure became universally known as “the federal building.” According to Metro Historical Commission executive director Ann Reynolds, the building housed “the federal courthouse, the main post office and all the regulatory agencies.”
By 1977 the Kefauver Building next door on Broadway had supplanted it, and the feds donated the Customs House to Metro Nashville under the terms of a 1973 law that allowed for the transfer of historic federal monuments to other government entities in order to encourage their preservation and redevelopment. The city stabilized the Gothic revival building with the help of a $500,000 grant from the Economic Development Administration and, in 1979, granted a 50-year lease to Customs House Associates, a limited partnership that poured millions into renovations and subleased the structure’s offices to Metro, state and federal agencies, as well as some private businesses.
According to Customs House manager Jerry Kirkpatrick, the Associates, after pumping another $1.5 million into a second renovation, have received most of the historic preservation tax credits that the building is likely to yield. The Associates are currently renegotiating a lease arrangement with the city. Such facts have led to speculation that the Customs House Associates might consider renegotiating themselves out, while the feds may consider moving back in as managers.
In the meantime, the main post office’s operations have been moved from the 1934 Art Deco structure to new quarters near the airport. What’s more, U.S. Postmaster General Marvin Runyon now wants to unload the white elephant on Broadway and build new facilities elsewhere.
Meanwhile, civic leaders are envisioning the old post office’s empty space filled with art. In the minds of some, it would be natural for the city to say, “We’ll give you our 116,000-square-foot Customs House for your 92,000-square-foot post office.”
At one time, the Customs House itself was being considered as a possible home for the Nashville Center for the Visual Arts. A quick walk- through, however, leads to the inevitable conclusion that, as an art space, the Customs House is less than ideal. In the 1870s and ’80s buildings were supported by the masonry of their own walls; steel-frame construction was just a gleam in a few engineers’ eyes. A lot of the load-bearing walls holding up the Customs House are interior ones. To open up that interior for the kind of flexible gallery space required by a modern art facility would leave little more than a costly shell of the building’s former glory.
The downtown post office is a steel frame structure with a largely open plan. It already has the kind of loading docks and freight elevators that are the stuff of art handlers’ dreams. That’s why the Action Team on the Arts, headed by HCA Foundation president Ken Roberts, zeroed in on the post office building in the first place. That is why the Action Team’s implementation committee, of which Roberts is a member, is now negotiating so hard to move into the post office.
“I have heard conversation about a possible trade,” says Roberts, “but the Customs House is not presently a part of our negotiations with the U.S. Postal Service. At this point we’re looking at all the options, be they a buy or a lease or whatever.”
