One of Nashville’s newest downtown residents is a fellow named Mark Schimmenti. An architecture professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Schimmenti moved here recently to head the Nashville Civic Design Center. Located smack in the middle of downtown, the design center walls are alive with aerial photographs, street sketches, cool maps and the sorts of things that give rise to the Possibility of Grand Urban Projects.
Schimmenti would be satisfied with a decent bar and grill. “As a downtown resident, I don’t have a real destination down here,” he says.
Schimmenti is the type of person for whom such statements are not just a matter of trifling irritation. Urban planner that he is, Schimmenti is speaking about something that goes to the heart of the city. “I don’t have a place that isn’t a temporal hangout for people, except for maybe Robert’s Western Wear. At so many of the other places—Big River, Merchant’s, Market Street—I don’t see the same people working there over and over, and I don’t see people who will be there again the next day.”
So, when he wants a bite to eat, surrounded by locals, with friendly servers who know his name, where does Schimmenti go?
“Hillsboro Village,” he says.
Let’s face it: Only 2,000 people live downtown in some 1,100 living units. No wonder we don’t have our own Cheers. No wonder that so much of what we have downtown seems to have been premanufactured in a corporate marketing department somewhere else. (OK, Wolfy’s on Lower Broadway is an exception.)
During the past year, a cavalcade of bad news has been spilling out of the Second Avenue/Lower Broadway strips. Three high-profile restaurants—Planet Hollywood, the NASCAR cafe and Mère Bulles—have folded. Business owners are up in arms about a lack of parking; store owners on Second Avenue are still steamed about Second Avenue having been turned from a one-way street with on-street parking to a two-way street without it. Everyone agrees that something is wrong in the mix on Second Avenue and Lower Broadway, which is to say it may not have really found its shtick yet.
The tourism hit the city has taken ever since the 1997 closing of the Opryland theme park has been unkind to the merchants in the area. The tourism part of the equation certainly needs addressing. But there is, as well, another issue that needs attention to ensure the long-term success of downtown. That is downtown residential, which in many ways is the quintessential silver bullet.
The next time you’re walking along a downtown street, take a look at the first-floor storefront, and then look up at the second, third and fourth floors. Often, you will find that those higher floors have boarded-up windows, indicating that the space is empty. Those spaces are prime for residential living, but until recently, codes requirements made it economically difficult to convert those spaces into residential units.
A month ago, the Nashville Downtown Partnership convened a day-long “Downtown Residential Summit” at the Civic Design Center, with speakers from Charlotte, Denver and other cities that have had success with downtown residential. The summit agreed to set a goal of doubling downtown residential units in the next five years. A committee at the Partnership is exploring codes regulations to see what else might be done to help residential development.
In fact, according to Jeff Reynolds, the outgoing director of the mayor’s affordable housing office, regulations were relaxed in 1998 to encourage the development of downtown residential, so the picture may be brighter than some think it is. But it’s going to take quite a bit of campaigning to convince entrepreneurs to put their money into residential build-outs.
Our hope is that one day downtown building owners will realize that empty space is an unused asset. The empty floors they own could become perfect loft apartments. It may not even take much of an investment, because the urban pioneers interested in moving downtown don’t need the suburban amenities of a 4,000-square-foot rancher.
For downtown Nashville to thrive, it needs to fill in the blanks, which are, unfortunately, increasingly prolific. Then we’ll bet the merchants will find a new kind of customer—the downtown dweller. And Schimmenti will get his bar and grill. The city must certainly address the plight of the merchants who cater to seasonal tourists, but it needs to build a strong skeleton for downtown 365 days a year. Ultimately, that will only come with people living there.
