Developers Steve Armistead and Bill Barkley, with investor Steve Turner, are panning for gold in the Union Station railroad gulch. Unlike most prospectors, they have a map—a master plan for the redevelopment of the Gulch that could turn an industrial graveyard into an honest-to-God urban neighborhood.
The plan focuses primarily on the area of the Gulch south of the Demonbreun viaduct—approximately 30 acres, of which the development team currently owns or has under contract 19 acres. The financial scope of the redevelopment project is big ticket: $350 million. The projected build-out period is 10-15 years.
The development program for the approximately 3 million square feet of building space features an integrated mixture of land uses in structures averaging four to five stories. Of that total, two-thirds is residential—1,800 units—a combination of rental and for sale, lofts and townhouses, as well as typical apartment blocks with structured parking. Barkley says the projected rent range is $750 to $1,500 per month. Some units will be dedicated to affordable housing to encourage the kind of economic diversity lacking in the typical class-segregated subdivision.
Almost 22 percent of the building space is for office use, with retail at 12 percent. The goal for retail is to attract a few specialty stores as anchors—Barkley mentions Crate and Barrel—supported by small shops offering products and brands unique to Nashville, along with basic services to support the residents, such as a dry cleaner and drugstore. “We’re also looking at a boutique and a movie house: five to six screens in various sized theaters,” Barkley says.
One example of the scale of proposed retail development is the 35,000-square-foot grocery store, which is slightly larger than the Harris-Teeter planned for the corner of Blair Boulevard and 21st Avenue South, but much smaller than the 55,000-square-foot Harris-Teeter in Brentwood. “We don’t want to overwhelm the plan with big boxes,” explains Hunter Gee, who, with Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK) colleague Phil Walker, developed the master plan.
Segments of the plan ready to come on-line feature makeovers by architect Manuel Zeitlin. Offices in the old Braid Electric Building are 70-percent leased. In December the restaurant Six Degrees will open in the former Javanco Building. After the first of the year, in the old Waggoner warehouse across from the Station Inn, 32 loft apartments will be up for grabs, and Provence Bakery will begin turning out its crusty Tuscan loaves. “We’re rehabbing the building so that people can actually see, as well as smell, the bread baking,” says Barkley. To prevent people from salivating all over the windows, “we’ve asked Provence to have a small retail shop in front, with just a few tables, so that people can buy their baked goods.”
In addition to LRK and Zeitlin, the Gulch design team includes Hawkins Partners for the urban landscape, Bob Murphy of RPM & Associates for traffic engineering, Littlejohn Engineering, and consultants for parking and infrastructure. But Barkley wants to avoid the monochromatic face of so many new large-scale developments by inviting other developers, using other architects, to take a piece of the Gulch pie. “We don’t want it to look like an office park,” Barkley explains. “We want a variety of heights, styles, and materials, keying off the industrial look that tells the history of the Gulch. And we’re trying to work with what’s down there now—not only buildings, but things like old stone walls.”
To allow for some architectural flexibility, the Gulch master plan is not so much a specific blueprint but a set of design guidelines. The emphasis in the site plan is on the restoration, or in some cases, the creation, of a street network. Because the site is irregular in shape, the typical urban rectangular grid is not possible. But LRK and Hawkins have carefully delineated a system of primary and secondary streets—mostly two-way avenues with parallel parking and bike lanes to calm traffic, and all with sidewalks for pedestrians. Townhouses are concentrated along the narrow Gleaves Street. A linear greenway buffers the remaining railroad tracks. Small urban plazas, and a triangular park dividing a reworked Industrial Boulevard, provide some breathing space.
The master plan has been two years in the making and began as a much smaller concept. Armistead and Barkley already owned the Braid Building when a sign was posted by CSX offering eight acres for sale. “I told Bill about it,” Armistead says, “and he said, ‘Let’s look beyond eight acres.’ ”
What the partners saw beyond the Gulch horizon was the Metro Development and Housing Agency’s redevelopment plan for Demonbreun Street west of the viaduct, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts going into the Post Office, and the great wall of the Country Music Hall of Fame rising near the Gaylord Entertainment Center. What they sighted in the Gulch was reasonably priced land with proximity to the central core, to the Clement Landport, and to future commuter and light rail lines. “It seemed to us that the Gulch was suddenly real important to the city, as a link between all these things,” Barkley explains.
It’s called the principle of prime infill. Entertainment anchors are fine, but without a support fabric of daily living, the big boxes merely make downtown a destination for the native tourist from the ’burbs. Metro originally planned to take a stab at such infill on 35 acres the city owned on Rolling Mill Hill. But a redevelopment plan for the Hill proposed by Atlanta apartment giant Post Properties fell by the wayside when Post could not reach an agreement with MDHA about the level of financial subsidy from the city. Now the Gulch may be the demo project for reinventing the urban wheel.
Wanted: Deep Pockets
Armistead and Barkley began by staging a charrette—an intensive planning workshop—with the help of LRK and planning consultants from Princeton. They did market research and conducted focus groups. But the partners realized that a development project of this scope required some financial backing. That’s where Steve Turner came in. Turner is one of the largest stockholders in Dollar General Corporation and already had a track record as an urban pioneer. In 1991, Turner and his wife Judy bought a building on Second Avenue and, with the help of architect Seab Tuck, turned it into Butler’s Run. Ground-level retail is topped by offices and capped by the Turners’ residence, one of the most dynamic living quarters—and site of the best Fourth of July party—in the city. “What we did with my residence is what we’re looking for in the Gulch,” Turner says. “Mixed use, vertically integrated.”
Turner was receptive to Armistead and Barkley’s pitch, because “the area has always intrigued me. Cummins Station has been successful beyond anyone’s expectations, and I’m on the Frist Center board. But what especially attracted me to the Gulch is that it’s a clean slate; we won’t have to displace people. So when Steve and Bill told me, ‘This is the time, and this is the place; the stars are in alignment,’ I believed them,” Turner says.
Turner stresses that his vision for the Gulch is of “a full community, with incomes all across the board.” But he hastens to add that the plan is “not for a social experiment,” but for a financially as well as civically successful place. To keep his head out of the clouds, Turner recruited real estate lawyer Joe Barker as a partner and hired his Vandy-law-grad son for legal legwork.
Turner points out that the Gulch site lies within MDHA’s Arts Center Redevelopment District, which makes the project eligible for tax increment financing (TIF) for infrastructure and land assembly, and brings the added benefit of land-use controls and design review for individual structures. “I think the Gulch plan would be a proper use for TIF, although we haven’t gotten into any details with MDHA,” Turner says. “The city isn’t receiving much in the way of property taxes right now for that land. I have talked to [Metro planning director] Rick Bernhardt, and he seemed enamored. And Mayor Purcell says it fits in with what the city’s trying to do with neighborhoods.”
When asked about his previous development experience, Turner laughs. “I have none; are you supposed to? Actually, I’m just the guy bringing the money. Steve and Bill are doing all the development legwork.”
More than Pretty Pictures
The illustrations in the Gulch Master Plan are the full-color photos of successes-in-other-places, or the visionary sketches that accompany all development prospectuses. The typical street scene shows the inevitable smiling faces, a couple pushing a baby carriage, and mature landscaping. But there are indications outside the covers of the booklet that the plan is not a pipe dream.
National real estate investment advisers are telling their clients that urban is hot, and they’re giving the cold shoulder to the kinds of suburban development that has dominated the Nashville market in the past few decades. Smart growth has become a mantra for investors as well as environmentalists.
Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2000, published by Atlanta-based Lend Lease Real Estate Investments and PricewaterhouseCoopers, warns potential investors that “the suburbs have peaked,” and that “suburban degeneration is increasing. Expect sprawl controls and congestion issues to push population back toward stronger multidimensional cores.”
The report explains, “Suburbanites are tired of traffic—the congestion, the pollution, and the hectic and unfulfilling lifestyle it brings,” adding that investors should “focus on the commercial markets with 24-hour fundamentals,” the basics to live-work-shop-and-play. “Now more than ever concentrate on the best locations. Twenty-four-hour cities and prime infill locations will be magnets for people and commerce.” The report concludes that it’s time “to start from scratch and design communities that integrate residential, retail, and office rather than segregating property uses.”
Sounds like a promo for the Gulch. The Emerging Trends report rates Nashville’s investment and development potential on the poor side of average for second-tier cities. What Armistead and Barkley and Turner are trying to do in the Gulch is add a component to the downtown equation that could assist with the development of Nashville as the kind of 24-hour place that makes good business sense for all investors.
A 1908 map of Nashville shows more than three dozen railroad tracks, and an enormous roundhouse for turning the trains, in the Gulch. Well, the Industrial Revolution made possible by the trains that once steamed through the Gulch is over. The wind that carried America’s manifest destiny outward along rails of iron is now blowing in a new direction—back to town. And Armistead and Barkley and Turner—with their prospecting pans and picks—are the gulch-diggers riding the locomotive, pulling the whistle.
