It’s called 12 South. It’s also called urban renewal—the real thing, not the misguided and misnamed version that has sacked so many American cities since World War II.
The recently completed changes to the stretch of 12th Avenue South between Halcyon Avenue and Sevier Park include new sidewalks and trees, stylish streetlights adorned with banners, and artsy trash cans. Less obvious are the narrower traffic lanes, the fewer and taller utility poles, the on-street parking, and the sidewalk bulbs at the corners that shorten the distance for pedestrians to cross the street. The purpose of the rehab is to create a playing field where economic development can take place.
The plan for the makeover was commissioned by the Metro Development and Housing Agency from a team of designers led by Hawkins Partners landscape architects. The Hawkins crew worked in consultation with Everton Oglesby Askew Architects, civil engineers at Barge Cauthen and Associates, and demographic specialists at Centennial Inc.
Phase one of the plan is the part you see today. The cost was $775,000, with Councilman Mansfield Douglas chipping in $168,000 of his district’s infrastructure dollars, and Public Works contributing $200,000 for a new storm water drainage system that drove up the original cost estimates. The rest of the bill was paid by MDHA. Phase two, a $2 million plan which extends the renewal north to Ashwood Avenue and south to I-440, has yet to be funded.
“We were originally just asked to design some basic streetscape improvements,” says Gary Hawkins, “but we really turned over the rocks.” The design team began the excavation with a steering committee composed of the property owners in the study area, but quickly realized that they needed to reach beyond the merchants into the surrounding neighborhood. They conducted public meetings and a door-to-door survey, asking area residents what was and what wasn’t working.
“We found out that during rush hours there was a constant stream of speeding cars that made it almost impossible to cross the street, and uncomfortable waiting for a bus,” Hawkins says. “What sidewalks were there were too narrow, the street was excessively wide, and there was nothing to break the rhythm of the traffic.” A multitude of utility poles had turned the sidewalks into obstacle courses. The only street lights were high, cobra-headed monsters, and they were few and far between. “We also had to convince the business owners that they didn’t each need all their own parking in strips right out front, that with shared on-and-off-street parking and wider sidewalks, people could walk from place to place and the ambience would be more like Hillsboro Village,” he explains.
The key to the plan was to let traffic go through, but to slow it down. The team was unable to convince Public Works to install a traffic signal or crosswalks of textured paving to alert drivers that they need to pause for pedestrians. But they pinched the travel lanes down to 11 feet wide—the traffic engineer’s standard is the 12 feet of an interstate lane—which causes drivers to ease off the gas pedal a bit. The extra space was given back to the pedestrians in the form of 6-foot-wide sidewalks.
The team had hoped to get the utility lines buried underground, but had to settle for fewer and taller poles restricted to one side of the street. The higher lines enabled the installation of trees and streetlights of a pedestrian scale beneath the wires. And Kirkwood Avenue was realigned to allow for a more welcoming entrance into Sevier Park.
All the design decisions were guided by Hawkins’ metaphor of the “cultural marketplace, an area of vibrant colors and rich patterns where people can feel safe to gather. We all agreed that it was important to weave the ethnic mixture of the neighborhood into the physical fabric,” he says.
The weavers used the loom of a civic art program. Armed with a small grant from the Metro Arts Commission, arts consultant Susan Knowles organized a design competition for the benches and banners that define 12 South’s visual identity. Competitors were provided with collages of images representing the various ethnicities of the area—African, Middle and Far Eastern, and the Americas. Art professors Terry Thacker of David Lipscomb University and Lanie Gannon of Belmont University made the competition a class project, and the winners were selected from their students’ entries. Artist Mary Lucking Reilly worked with the staff artists of Metro Parks to coordinate the design of the trash cans. At the Sevier Park community center, children and senior citizens wove telephone wire donated by Bell South into the multi-colored mesh that decorates the sides of the receptacles.
The results of the planning and the competition, of all the meetings and surveys, have begun to transform a drive-through strip into a destination. Joel Solomon, an investor in 12 South property, says Metro’s expenditures have stimulated private spending to the tune of 100 new jobs, $1 million to $1.5 million in renovations, a large increase in property values, and an upsurge in demand for homes in the surrounding neighborhood.
With 12 South, MDHA has proven that the agency has learned what the traffic engineers still largely ignore: that dollars spent turning streets into roads must be followed by more dollars spent turning pass-throughs back into places. For decades, Metro’s planners and developers believed—and some still do—that moving the maximum numbers of cars in the shortest amount of time was the key to commercial success. As a result, the pavers cut wide swaths of asphalt through neighborhoods like those along 12th Avenue South. This old-style urban renewal eroded the framework that made these places work, a framework that balanced the needs of cars and foot trade. Lower income neighborhoods have born a disproportionate share of the paving. Now 12 South has gotten a share of honest-to-God urban design, and East Nashville and Jefferson Street are waiting in the wings.
Hawkins credits Nashville’s Urban Design Forum with teaching the design team much of what it needed to know to do 12 South. From 1995 to 1997, this group of design professionals and preservationists, engineers and transportation planners sponsored a series of classes in urban design, taught by University of Tennessee professor Mark Schimmenti. “We were taking the class when we began to study 12 South, and for the first time we were all talking the same language,” Hawkins says. “The class gave us the confidence to convince Public Works to turn an arterial back into a street.”
On Friday, June 18, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the merchants of 12 South are hosting a dedication ceremony and sidewalk sale. There will be food and music, the usual speeches by men in suits, and the neighborhood shopkeepers will offer their wares. But what 12 South really has to offer to Nashville is a model of reclamation. The neighborhood has taken back its street, with the help of MDHA and some dedicated designers. It’s a good time for all of us to celebrate.
