Open Meeting about Overton Square Demolition Request

From Memphis Heritage:

Before the City Council hears the owners request for this demo permit, Councilman Shea Flinn, sponsor of the Resolution that passed requiring council approval of any demo permit for the Overton Square area, would like interested parties to meet.

This meeting is being held this Wed. Dec. 9th at 4pm at City Hall 125 N. Main in the 5th floor conference room.

We want our supporters and the community to know about this important meeting. This is an open meeting. The public is welcome to attend.

Sooner Investments, the proposed developers, have not submitted a plan for the site. Instead the owners' plan to demolish the buildings at Overton Square before a plan is approved. It is a possibility that the proposed development might not move forward and there would be an even larger parking lot.

Oppose the Overton Square Demolition

The owner of Overton Square wants a permit to demolish these beautiful structures without a plan for rebuilding. Memphis Heritage asks you to contact our City Councilfolk with your opposition.

There will be a meeting Wed Dec 9 @ 4pm City Hall 125 N Main St. 5th floor about the owners application for a demolition permit for Overton Sq. Please call City Councilmen Shea Flinn and Bill Morrison (901-576-6786) and let them know you do not want the CC to allow any demolition at OS until the developers have submitted their plans.

For me, this isn't about saving these buildings at all cost, but losing them without an approved plan for replacement.

I want to see the future.

1970's Parkway Village, 1980's Covington Pike and 1990's Germantown Parkway are not the future.

Start Defacing our Economic Advantage

During his 12 Suggestions talk last year, Jeff Speck made his audience gasp when he showed that Memphis had replaced the Masonic Lodge

with the Blake Building.

On Halloween I had a few minutes to ponder this very weird replacement while I waited for a bus on Second Street.

I pondered the Blake Building's rigid box form, the panels and ornamental grills aggresively enforcing opaque 2-dimensional facades,

the strangely placed fire panels,


the structure on top of the box.

Standing there, bored and a little liquored up, I wondered: is it possible that the original building is still there, hidden under a goofy modernist facade?

Then last week, I had the honor of talking with Keith Kays, the architect leading the charge for the protection and appreciation of Memphis' great modernist buildings. I mentioned the goofy building at 2nd and Madison and he said, "you know, the original building is under all the panels"

Wow! It is still there. Very, very exciting.

Except ... it isn't. The hidden building isn't the Masonic Lodge, the Victorian in the photo at the top. Unfortunately that really is gone. Speck's liner notes,

note that it was demolished in the early 20th century and replaced with the Germania Building that is now presumed hidden at 2nd and Madison. While I don't know what the Germania Building look/s/ed like, I do assume that a structure built on a prominent downtown corner in the early 1900s is probably still pretty beautiful.

Conceivably Memphis could have 2 good outcomes from this.

1. By removing the panels and grillwork, we can daylight the early 20th century Germania Building underneath
   
   
2. By re-forming the freed groovy modernist panels and grills in a more porous manner somewhere else on our streets, we can create urban space where there's only urban void now.
   

I'm hoping to get closer soon and see if I can get pictures, from inside or out, of the hidden building.

Place of Creativity

I love spots like these.

How can Memphis encourage, create, expose these spots?

Read the notes from last Thursday's fantastic Creative Conversation, Ideas that Work for some beautiful, mind-expanding answers.

Buildings to Cherish: the Memphis Police Station at Second and Adams

I've driven past the old Memphis Police Station a thousand times, but walks past it this fall have really opened my eyes to its beauty and power. It's a special Memphis building, a beautiful Beaux Arts corner companion to the 100 year old Shelby County Courthouse.

Unlike the Courthouse, it's empty. And since Memphis has preferred bland empty void over beautiful empty space for 50 years, we have to be vigilant.

A good use would be as hotel since the building abuts the Civic Plaza. Guests could move to and from the convention center through the Plaza, giving that public space much needed life.

A visualization of the hotel/plaza connection.

I also think, no matter the use, its front steps and wall-defined lawn could be a special mini-public space of their own.

Wall Cities

I saw a bunch of framed prints depicting scenes of nostalgic urbanism for sale at a strip mall thrift store last week.

A European village,

a European city,

and a New England village.


I only saw one print depicting suburbanism. It was an architectural visualization* for a suburban motel. Probably a Hampton Inn.


I imagine that visualization hung on the office wall of the motel's architect, developer or owner until they couldn't look at it anymore, while the former images hung on a living room wall of a home, perhaps not far from the strip mall.

You probably won't see the motel image on a living room wall in a house close to the motel. And you probably wouldn't see brick and mortar urban village neighborhoods on the streets close to the homes where their images hung.

We all might crave beauty in our built and natural environment, but flattened wall hangings appear to be one way (along with nostalgia, knicknacks, theme parks, vacations and migration) we can ignore its absence on our streets.

*idealized. The mature if boring trees in front probably wouldn't have made it through construction. The robust stand of trees in back would already have been whacked for a parking lot or speculative clearcut for more highway commercial use. And despite a hefty parking lot, there are no cars in front of the motel.

Innovation Should Become Deloach

Why does the incredibly wide Deloach Street, just across Central from the University of Memphis, prohibit parking on its east side? The neighborhood has a huge need for parking, historically satisfied with destructive surface parking lots, yet the east side of the street is roped off.

Why?

Possibly...

• public safety. Yet the street is incredibly wide and would almost certainly allow 2 cars to pass each other simultaneously. Public safety vehicles would have plenty of room to get in and out -- if they even used that path.
  


• to avoid competition with the parking fees of nearby institutions -- the University and the University Holiday Inn.
  


• use as an arterial road. It does have traffic lights on its Central end, where Innovation Drive empties out of the University. But there are no lights where it terminates at Poplar so it seems of limited use for that.
  


• the residents don't want the parking. But the east side is the increasingly institutional and decreasingly residential, side with the Holiday Inn taking up a good half of the block. The west side is still completely residential and allows parking.
  

Here's a chance to freely add ~50 parking spaces to the area without building an expensive parking garage, or ripping up more of the University District's neighborhood. An urbanism approved solution that would only require a few revolutions of a screwdriver.

Also, people walking down the east side of the street would be an opportunity for the Holiday Inn -- the lone commercial presence in the neighborhood -- if the hotel had fronted their part of the street with a hotel rather than a storm water mud grass pit.