Remember When Ugly Was a Parking Lot?

While it dreams of a world-class Beale Street Landing, the Riverfront Development Corporation plans a surface parking lot for the entrance.

The original design is arguably great! horrible! okay. Build it and we will see. But this revised plan to pave part of Tom Lee Park shows no faith in the design, and no vision for the riverfront's future that hasn't been discredited in Memphis' recent past.

RDC President Benny Lendermon's statement of his problem -- that it's too far to walk from the nearest parking lot, especially for excursion tourists -- may be reasonable. But his solution is the same old gray slab. One more anti-urbanist, drive-up experience, another atom in a disconnected downtown. It will disconnect BSL from Tom Lee Park, the Bluff Walk and their hordes of walkers. It will frame the architect's vision with SUVs hidden behind remedial crape myrtles.


If you're to sponsor talks by urban visionaries who place walking at the center of city livability, you can't respond with walk-killing asphalt. Its time to build the new world. Right now.

For instance, why not allow on street parking on Riverside? Riverside is presently a launch pad and tail hook for I-55. Memphis has no need for that much speed in that spot. If it can survive a month completely blocked, Riverside can survive year-round with 30 mph traffic. Allow on street, parallel parking from Beale Street to Coppock Park. It will provide convenience at no cost, other than the salary of the guy who has to unscrew the No Parking signs and screw in the 2 Hour Parking signs. It will slow the traffic on Riverside, creating more (or impeding less) pedestrian flow between Downtown and the Riverfront, which can only be good for Beale Street Landing.

If you want to read/hear about the parking lot and more about our riverfront, go to the Memphis Cobblestones. Its author, Mike Cromer, has been attending, recording, transcribing (!!!), then posting the City Council's budget hearings with the Riverfront Development Corporation.

Where Do We Deserve an Urban Waterfront?

Wagner Place.


The Bluff and flooding have always separated downtown Memphis from the River. However, this location could very much satisfy Jeff Speck's suggestion for these reasons:

• Closest that urban downtown comes to the river.
  
  


• Smallest Bluff drop to the Riverfront.
  
  
  
• City of Memphis owns the property.
  


• No easements as with the Promenade, so it can be developed commercially.
  


• Adjacent with the Promenade so public developments like the University of Memphis Law School and extension of the Bluff Walk are perfectly complementary.
  


• Will create back-and-forth walking continuity between downtown and Tom Lee Park/Beale Street Landing/Cobblestones.
  


• It's presently a surface parking lot so (almost) any urban development is a step forward.
  


• If Memphis is serious about 2 other Speck suggestions -- fixing the 3rd St. Promenot and the Main/South Main knuckle -- we would have a continuous downtown from Autozone Park to Peabody Place to Beale Street to Main Street South Main to the Riverfront.
  


• Because the Cobblestones are a man-made extension onto the River and this site is in front of the Cobblestones, this would be very much an urban waterfront.
  


• Because it would be between the River and Autozone Headquarters/Waterford Plaza, any development would have to be the 3 or 4 story buildings that Speck used as in his presentation (example). Which for me is an advantage.
  

What are the downsides?

Another chance to be heard on Beale Street Landing

Received the following last night from the Friends for our Riverfront:

Although funding was approved for Beale Street Landing, Councilmembers are going to take another look at the project.

In an unprecedented action, Councilmember Dedrick Brittenum has asked that information about the $29.4 million new boat dock be presented to the Council CIP budget committee
this Tuesday (June 19)
at 12:30 p.m.
on the 5th floor of City Hall (125 N. Main).

Brittenum sent letters to those who spoke at the last Council meeting, stating that the public will have an opportunity to speak at the committee meeting.

If you have questions that you’d like answered or comments you’d like to make about the new commercial dock, you may
* attend the meeting Tuesday
* contact Councilmembers
by phone at the Council office, 576-6007(You will be able to leave messages),
by fax at 576-6796,
or by e-mail at:
ec.jones@memphistn.gov
brent.taylor@memphistn.gov
madeleine.taylor@memphistn.gov
dedrick.brittenum@memphistn.gov
carol.chumney@memphistn.gov
edmund.ford@memphistn.gov
barbara.swearengen-ware@memphistn.gov
joe.brown@memphistn.gov
myron.lowery@memphistn.gov
scott.mccormick@memphistn.gov
tom.marshall@memphistn.gov
jack@jacksammons.com.

Councilmembers Sammons, Chumney, and Jones voted against the boat dock. Councilmembers Brittenum, Brown, Ford, Lowery, McCormick, Marshall, and Ware voted for the project. Councilmember Madeleine Cooper Taylor abstained. Councilmember Brent Taylor was absent.

Virginia McLean
President, Friends for Our Riverfront
www.friendsforourriverfront.org

So if you like Beale Street Landing, or love it, or hate it, or just think the money would be better spent elsewhere, this is one more chance to be heard and to change minds.

Greenway 2074!

Budget item from Tuesday's City Council session:

$400,000, reduced from proposed $1 million, to start work on Wolf River Greenway.

Believe it or don't, but I wasn't going to say anything much more about Beale Street Landing until I read that.

We're going to spend $19 million of Memphis' money and $10 million of federal and state money, for a project whose popular support rivals the new stadium. Meanwhile a very popular project, a project that spans the length of the entire city, that will promote our health, recreation, environment and almost certainly our economy, is reduced to 4% of the funding of BSL. Since the project will cost around $27 million in 2007 dollars, we only have to wait 67 years in 2007 appropriations to walk the Greenway.

Beware the new stadium! They'll lead with hype and hope we follow with apathy. And they won't take 67 years to build it.

4 Problems with Beale Street Landing

1. Memphis decays. Beale Street Landing in its pristine condition may have an allure, but what will it look like when the elements -- humidity, moisture, mud, vegetation, heat -- have had their way with it? How will that red paint (is it paint?) look if it's not touched up regularly? What if it has rust, mud streaks? Perhaps it will look like an abandoned piece of farm machinery out in the field. I like decay, so that sounds pretty good to me. But...
   


2. Memphis' support for modernist architecture decays even faster. Memphis likes bright shiny new things, and nothing looks brighter and shinier than a newly-minted modernist building. But once it's no longer bright and shiny, once it has heat-warped angles, or chipped paint, or rust stains, Memphis wants to trade it in for the next bright shiny thing and act like it never existed. This is true of non-modernist architecture as well, but there's something about the futurist promise of modernism that disappoints us so quickly as presentist decay sets in.
   
   Does this mean I don't like modernism? No, I love it. I could be the only person in Memphis who doesn't want to tear down the mid-century Modernist Cossitt Library downtown. It should never have been built on the destruction of the original Romanesque building, but here it is and I like it. The point is, it hasn't wowed Memphis with its new car smell in over 40 years and Memphis treats it worse than an abandoned '78 Chevette. Inserting the incongruously modern Beale Street Landing into our our muddy, green, rusty, classic Riverfront could follow the same arc of municipal love.
   


3. You still can't get to Mud Island. A trip to or from the Pyramid remains for trailblazers. And in the renderings I can't see the connections between Tom Lee Park, Beale Street, Jefferson Davis Park/Visitors' Center and Beale Street Landing. A strong supporter of Beale Street Landing, Aaron of SkatelifeMemphis makes this point,
   

   When the skate park is built we will have a big draw for the downtown and people will start hanging out more at the Landing as they can watch skaters skating just across the river at the River park.
   

   Or people might be hanging out cursing the fact they can't get to Mud Island. Aaron continues.
   

   Even more ideally, a bridge going from the Landing to the Skatepark would make a great combination and synergy between the two locales.

   To silence the curses, we'd have to add another capital project, a bridge. $29 million dollars and we still have to float to Mud Island!
   
   But if we were to instead build the pedestrian drawbridge, along with more modest improvements suggested here and here, we could make the foot of Beale a vortex of connection, rather one more disconnected place.
   


4. Civic hype precedes it:
   
   As the first major piece of the riverfront master plan to be implemented, this project will inevitably become the city’s icon...
   
   it would be a direct attack on the image of Memphis as a slow-moving, sleepy river town.
   
   Without this project, it would set us back a number of years.
   
   We have to have some vision if we are going to be on a par with Atlanta.
   
   Not as millenial as the hype heralding the Pyramid, but here we go again, overselling.
   

The Foot of Beale: An Alternative

The foot of Beale, at the cobblestones and the Mississippi, is beautiful.

Between the the Mississippi, the bluff, the cobblestones and other man-made details,



it has a very distinctive feel, a Memphis feel -- muddy and green, rough and rusty, classic.


It conjures the past


but creates no more a barrier to the future than Huckleberry Finn does.

Yet the foot of Beale is empty. No people.


Perhaps that's because:

1. there's no access. It's hard as hell to get from Beale Street, Tom Lee Park, Jefferson Davis Park, the Visitor's Center and Mud Island.


2. other than the River, nothing else is there.

So how do we solve the first problem, no access? By creating access.

1. We build stairs descending from the crosswalk at Beale and Riverside.
   
   


2. We provide a Bluffwalk alternate route that, instead of taking you to Riverside, takes you to stairs we build descending to the cobblestones.
   
   
   


3. We remove the parking lot between the buildings on Front and Riverside. Memphis parking lots do to walkers what Southern prison movie swamps do to bloodhounds -- lose them.
   
   
   Presently Gayoso empties into that parking lot...
   
   and runs straight into a lamppost.



4. We build stairs at the foot of Gayoso down to Riverside, that lead to a crosswalk, that lead to the cobblestone stairs. Presently you have to climb down an embankment to Riverside, then cross Riverside without a crosswalk. If you make it this far, there are some nice stairs to take you to the cobblestones and the River.

We solved the first problem, you are at the River. What about the second problem: what do you do when you get there?

1. You walk through, continuing the Bluffwalk or beginning the Wolf River Greenway. If you're coming from the Visitors Center/Jefferson Davis, you walk through on the way to Tom Lee Park; and vice versa, if you're coming through from Tom Lee Park. This might require some ingenious method of pointing walkers from the stairs descending from Tom Lee to the ramp ascending to Jefferson Davis, without modifying the cobblestones, but we can do it.
   


2. Go to Mud Island. One of the great ideas brought forward in the last 30 years is the pedestrian bridge spanning the Wolf River Harbor that Denise Scott Brown proposed 20 years ago.
   This will create a major flow of pedestrians down to the River. Kids love bridges. Never, ever underestimate the power of children to enliven Downtown. Here's a photo of a pedestrian drawbridge in the Netherlands.
   


3. Go to a restaurant, cafe, riverboat or other vendor moored or located at the foot of Beale. Yes, it's been tried before, it's time to try it again. But if tried again, it can't be tried without fixing the access problem. If it's hard to get there, people will not only not use it, they won't even know about it.