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.

It Matters

As Memphis and Shelby County prepare to take up the Unified Development Code, we should take to heart and law fearlessvk's wisdom, based on her first trip to Memphis:

...the physical landscape of space matters. It affects first impressions - and sometimes it's exceedingly difficult to put aside those first impressions. When you drive aimlessly around midtown for the first time, you can't tell how cool and creative the people are or how interesting some of the places are. You come to discover that later, but none of it is apparent from the window of your car. Coming from a dense city with a lot of pedestrian activity, midtown feels like a suburb. Its physical landscape doesn't do justice to its countless virtues - it sells itself short. They say you can't polish a turd, but perhaps you can do the opposite: midtown is like a golden nugget coated in shit.

The space created by Memphis' built environment matters.

That's why you need to come down to show your support for the UDC

By the way, I've discovered a summary of the code that might fill the void between the code itself and a brochure.

SK8Mud

The second round of public meetings for the Mud Island River Park Land Use Study are comingup this week. The actionists from Skatelife Memphis are asking that skatepark supporters, be they skaters or not, turn out. The meeting details:

1.Memphis Botanical Gardens
Tuesday May 12th, from 5:45 - 7:15 pm
Location: Memphis Botanic Gardens, 750 Cherry Road (near Audobon Park)


2. Downtown Meeting
Thursday May 14th from 5:45 - 7:15 pm
Location:MIRP Harbor Landing, 101 Island Drive (gate security will give directions) Basically drive to Mud Island and go through the security gates. It's on Mud Island.

Plus check out the findings from the first round.

To me these reports look like the skatepark supporters are making their voices heard loud and clear. There's opposition from Park Services (fearing competition for their much anticipated neighborhood skatepark) and the Regional Chamber (for reasons unknown) to a Mud Island skatepark but every other stakeholder group appears to support or be neutral on it. And the support for it at the open meetings has dwarfed every other idea.

I don't know what will be presented on Tuesday and Thursday but I think skatepark's too big to completely ignore. But look for the machinations of a powerful and secretive cabal of NIMBY geezers if the study recommends putting the skaters under the I-40 bridge, or some other unvisible location.

Bands and Bikes Not Bombs

The Bands part is outside Lifelink Church (formerly Galloway Church), a favorite Memphis place for me.

Forgotten No. 5

Fred Smith recently laid out an excellent list of core public responsibilities that Memphis should focus on:

1. Public safety
   
   
2. Education
   
   
3. Efficiency
   
   
4. Economic Development

I got one more:

5. Physical Form -- the built, cultivated and natural form of Memphis.

Beyond the effect it has on Mr. Smith's 4 areas (for instance, sprawl's effect on safety and efficiency, blight and banality's effect on safety and development), I simply believe our streets should radiate Memphis' humble greatness.

In Place Pillowfights and Putridity

Last weekend's Pillow Fight in Overton Park's Greensward:

Next month's Memphis Zombie Walk on Beale Street.


They're placemaking showmanship meets participatory culture.

Memphis and its places could use more of their fun, goofy, golden touch.

Master Plans and Public Participation

I want to clarify my attitude towards plans and participation.

I'm for 'em!

but...

• we have to have everyday, always-on principles and visions of our natural and built environments. For instance, Sustainable Shelby's top recommendations and Jeff Speck's first six suggestions for Memphis. We can't use master plans to outsource, offload, avoid, postpone, ignore or forget these principles and visions, or their defense.


• Public participation and input happens all the time, and has always happened all the time. We now have the collaborative, visual, ubiquitous, sometimes place-based, sometimes asynchronous, usually inexpensive tools to capture the ideas, moods, uses, input of citizens. Discrete meetings in discrete places should always be one of the tools, but exclusively it deludes rulers leaders that the public is something you give 2 minutes to stand up and speak, and 5 seconds to sit down and shut up.

With

John Weeden of the Urban Art Commission has a great post, Without, on his personal blog. It's a visual statement of the art and design challenges facing Memphis' public realm, a prelude to the "With or Without" campaign that UAC will be re-launching soon.

I wanted to add these 2 thoughts.

1. I hope the WorWO campaign is place-based. The public's visualizing With will be much easier in the actual public spaces. Pay for artists to transform, if just temporarily, those spaces. Advertise With art and architecture, in place.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. The ugliness of Memphis owes so much more to the dystopic land use and anti-design of politicians and developers than to graffiti taggers. So even if we could convince taggers to put down their cans, or pick up their skills, Memphis' blight of ugly would continue. The UAC, rather than just a arts sub-contractor for buildings pre-designed, could/should start influencing this world.
   
   Take a look at this UAC piece by Mark Nowell at A.B. Brewster Elementary School, a block from the UAC's headquarters.
   
   
   
   
   
   It's really cool, but as you might be able to tell, it's in the middle of a street-fronting parking lot, where it competes with the clutter of street lights for attention. So in addition to destroying the school's visual and urban presence, the street-fronting lot hides the power of the art piece.
   
   In this case, the UAC could have been, perhaps, a public advocate for moving the parking lot to the back of the building and creating a space near the front of Sam Cooper which would include Nowell's piece integrated into a grand, inviting entrance for the backpacked kids walking down Sam Cooper towards their school.
   
   As dystopia goes, A.B. Brewster is fairly mild. But it shows the visual and built oblivity of Memphis power elites that pushes much of the city and region to ugly. Other examples are speculative demolition and neglect, white flight abandonment and environmentally nasty clear-cutting.
   
   The Powerless With Spraycans is not the real Without.
   
   The Powerful With Vision is the real With.

Personality of the City

As a side effect to the buzzing around keyinfluencer's infamous Memphis tweet, I present these ideas:

1. Memphis has personality. It's the sum and greater of the wisdoms, confessions, truths, flatteries, stories, lies, mistakes, delusions, recriminations, insults, abuses we share with and about each other.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Presently, Memphis' personality is the sum and greater of the wisdoms, confessions ... insults, abuses, that we share verbally and textually.
   
   
3. We have yet to create Memphis' personality in built form, athough we have so many prototypes on the ground.
   
   
4. Consequently Memphis' personality is lost to casual visitors and new residents. People like keyinfluencer.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. A new greatness, a new weirdass Memphis greatness, awaits if we build our city to its personality.
   
   

How do we do this?

Jefferson @ Main

Some thoughts about the new Courtyard Marriott going up at the corner of Jefferson and Main

• This is what the hotel will look like.
  
  
  I think it will give great visual presence to a long empty corner.
  


• That neighborhood's after hours density is about to skyrocket. You will also have the developing Court Square Center project and the Renaissance Apartments on 2 of the other 3 corners. That's in addition to the nearby
  
  Exchange Building,
  Madison Hotel,
  Goodwyn Institute,
  Porter Building,
  Claridge House,
  Springhill Suites,
  Sleep Inn,
  Comfort Inn,
  Marriott Residence Inn,
  67 Madison,
  Shrine Building
  University of Memphis Law School
  
  providing after hour residents, tourists and students, all within a 2 minute walk of each other.
  
  
  This could be the greatest density in the city.
  
  It's an opportunity to resurrect the center of Main Street, around Court Square, with street-level opportunities that can create an active, healthy, even transforming street life in an area affected by a disproportionate number of homeless and/or panhandlers.
  
  I think to restore a healthy, safe citizen mix, the Center City Commission must explicitly architect an active Main Street life. It can't expect that it will happen as a matter of course. It should encourage businesses -- bar, bistros, coffee houses, etc -- to open and to focus on the street with placement, use and hours. For instance, with the Courtyard visualization, the Jefferson side doesn't appear to have any entrances or exits, but the Main side does have umbrellas which hints at a commercial presence. But will it be a dull smoking plaza rather than street-level business that attracts nearby residents and tourists?
  
  Pretty blank walls, deprecated smoking plazas, and business-hour sandwich shops haven't, and won't, create an active street life. They are a real waste of this unprecedented density.


• Could the Center City Commission convince the 2 grocers at the northeast corner of Jefferson and Main to upgrade their wares and make the combination (and perhaps a 3rd in the empty corner) the promised downtown grocery store rather than a suburbish, pedestrian-unfriendly, downtown-fringe supermarket?


• While the block is finally looking urban again, Memphis has had to sustain a massive grayfield at this site for nearly a quarter of a century. It's taken that long for the Main, Jefferson, Front, Court block to return to an near urban form.
  
  Speculative demolition does not magically regenerate the urban landscape -- it leeches value from it.
  

The Concept or the Particulars

"I'm having a hard time following the whole concept and the particulars of it. We've been talking about this for a month now, and I don't feel like I know more now than I did at the beginning."

City Councilman Jim Strickland
talking about the plan for Fairgrounds redevelopment

The vision gets fuzzier with each published piece of information.

Overton Square Meeting this Tuesday

Memphis Heritage is hosting a 2nd meeting about the future of Overton Square. Be there-- because your voice makes a difference!

December 2, 2008
3:30-5pm @ MHI Headquarters, Howard Hall, 2282 Madison

Bring your thoughts, ideas and creative minds. Bring along your neighbor and let's put our heads together to save what was once and can be again the heart of Midtown!

I believe any project built in Overton Square should, at the very least:

• increase the walkability of the neighborhood.
• preserve and restore the urban form to the Madison and Cooper sides.
• build to an aesthetic standard equal to the Idlewild and East End neighborhoods (not Union!!!).
• build to a aesthetic and urban standard that complements the investments made by neighboring businesses, like Playhouse on the Square, Bosco's, Maggie's Pharm, Mr. Lincoln's Costume Shop, etc.
• build to a aesthetic and urban standard that strengthens the Heart of the Arts.
  

Magic: the Art Installation

Update: well this is a lot different than what I had assumed. I still love unexpected public art.

Go see the recently installed portals to the Overton Park greensward, I assume by an artist from the nearby Memphis College of Art.

Here I Rule . Com will take you to a website about the game Magic: The Gathering, of which I know nothing except that some friends play.

I had a puppy with me when I took the pictures so I didn't try to walk through the doorway, or look through the peepholes.

What would I see?

I love unexpected public art.

5 Un/der/used Outdoor Spaces in Memphis

Memphis' urban outdoors has to be more than a smoky space between car and building.

I offer 5 heavily underused outdoor spaces in downtown and midtown that could be that more, places you'd want to stop and places you'd want to walk by (just so you could look at those who stopped). These places and others like them could be social anchors for our city's new street life.

As you can see in the photos, they are underused to the point of unused. They have the stuff to attract (including shade because outdoors should also be more than a spring and fall), but they need people, and the uses that attract people.

This is my imagining a social life for each of these spaces.

1. Civic Center
   
   I hadn't originally considered Memphis' official public place for this, but when I asked for recommendations, several people pointed it out. A subsequent visit on a beautiful sunny day brought me around to the possibilities. Memphis' great trees are growing up here and softening this modernist, concrete plaza, which actually contains multiple spaces, including the center fountains,
   
   
   
   
   
   the wall fountains
   
   
   
   
   
   and the magnolia-shaded gallery around City Hall.
   
   
   
   
   
   Realm: Public
   
   Pros: public space with increasingly mature trees, activity from public buildings, fountains that children love.
   
   
   
   Cons: cold modernism, hot concrete, single use.
   
   Challenges: No use-mixing during business hours, no use at all after office hours. And it's big. Of the 5 spaces, the most problematic.
   
   Possibilities: small vendors and markets catering to workers, tourists and residents. Mixed private uses, including housing, to provide mixed, around the clock uses.
   


2. Cossitt Library Fountain Area
   
   
   
   
   
   A low space defined by the walls of the original Cossitt Library walls and the newer modernist library.
   
   Realm: Public
   
   Pros: shaded from the east by highrises, from the west by the library and beautiful trees; visible from Front Street but separated by wall and sunken location; a fountain (although not operating now); soon to have lots of law students, faculty and staff walking by. Maybe art lovers too.
   
   Cons: the Cossitt has become a vector of speculative fever, which has perhaps led to poor maintenance, which has led to public disdain (which isn't helped by a 50 year old demolition that knocked out the stunning original Romanesque library).
   
   Challenges: to do anything small and simple when we just know that the site is worth at least a bazillion and a half dollars.
   
   Possibilities: with the fountain fixed, a breakfast/lunch/coffee area especially geared towards law students, and later a watering hole for visitors of the Memphis Art Park.
   


3. Chicago Pizza Factory patio
   
   A nice patio directly fronting Madison.
   
   
   Realm: Private, but public street and sidewalk adjacent and visible.
   
   
   Pros: great shade; directly on and visible from Madison; possible spillover from nearby restaurants, like Huey's, Molly's and the Blue Monkey.
   
   Cons: uncertainty about Overton Square's future, the major anchor to the east; vacant shops to the west; itself vacant for a long time.
   
   Challenges: opening a business in an area that has been very spotty for nearly a decade and counting.
   
   Possibilities: a restaurant where the patio is a centerpiece, for itself and reborn street life on Madison. Maybe there's hope.
   


4. Magnolia Room Patio
   
   
   
   
   At corner of Monroe and Florence in Overton Square, it's a sidewalk facing court, shaded and protected by a beautiful magnolia. This might actually be an operating business but the court doesn't appear to have a persistent life.
   
   
   
   
   
   Realm: Private, but public street and sidewalk adjacent and visible.
   
   Pro: a cool building and patio, which is shaded from the magnolia and the building itself. active neighboring businesses, including Mr. Lincoln's Costume Shop and TheatreWorks.
   
   Cons: location directly across from the world's ugliest parking lot; uncertainty about Overton Square development.
   
   Possibilities: always on patio providing and receiving street energy for adjacent businesses and, who knows, a vital Overton Square rebirth.



5. Abe Goodman Golf House porch in Overton Park
   
   Patio of a beautiful Tudor club house
   
   
   
   
   
   overlooking the Overton Park golf course, the greensward, the Old Forest and the walkers, bikers, artists, music, dog and nature lovers passing by on their way to enjoy all of the above.
   
   
   
   
   
   Realm: Public
   
   
   
   
   
   Pros: awning already there, shaded in the west by magnolias, already has a concession area.
   
   Cons: I don't see any.
   
   
   
   
   
   Challenges: Just doing it. Of all 5 spaces, this seems to me to be the easiest, lowest cost to transform (if we don't get distracted by grandness).
   
   Possibilities: Upgrade and extend the concession for more than golfers and more than tee times.
   

Because they are already fulfilling their public purpose, the public spaces can (and should) experiment with smaller ideas and smaller entrepeneurs. The private owners don't necessarily have that much leeway. Either way, I wouldn't think any would require massive renovations to be successful outdoor spaces.

An Unhappy Med City: No Pedestrians

A few weeks ago I wrote about HappyMedCity and Memphis' hopes to build a thriving medical district.

The UT Basic/Clinical Research Sciences Building, at the corner of Madison and Manassas is part of the new construction going into the rebuilt Medical District.

Visually, I like it. I also like that it filled an empty lot, and that it has a almost urban setback (although I never get the berms -- the berms! -- those 4 feet borders of boring, useless grass)

But as I've looked closer at the building, I've noticed that it has no entrances/exits on Manassas or Madison. All customer entrances appear to face the private drives or parking lots on the side or back. There are no public, street-facing entrances.

It's within walking distance of other medical buildings and directly across from a nice park*, but the building penalizes walking, rewards driving. And it's a half-block of uselessness for pedestrian passersby.

This visualization for the soon-to-be-adjacent Hope Lodge shows a similar problem.

No openings to Union. You do see some people sitting outside on the right, so maybe the builders are thinking about this. In the meantime, we do see the phantom walkers of classic architectural illustration, poor suckers walking down the street looking for an entrance, or a reason to keep walking.

So while I salute the filling of these brownfields with nice buildings, I believe if Memphis is serious about re/building an fun, energetic, vital, safe medical district, we have to build actively for pedestrians too. Otherwise, we might build a attractive, empty, unsafe, dead medical district -- the same as we have now but prettier.

Build to the HappyMedCity standard.



* The University of Tennessee has been negotiating with Memphis to take over Forrest Park's management. One of the reasons stated is for the University to handle security for the park. Of course, one way to do this is by stationing security officers in the park. A less obvious, but more sustainable, economical way is to have the buildings and businesses along the park's edge seed its active use and steady cross-traffic, discouraging criminals and encouraging law abiders by its vitality.

Beyond mundane crime prevention, if a worker were to actually witness a crime in the park from this building, it would take them 10 minutes to get out and around to the aid of a victim. If the buildings along the park aren't designed for pedestrians, they could end up being beautiful skyboxes from which to watch the ballet of the criminal, the homeless and the law.

Density of Creativity in Memphis

Not a week passes where I don't meet, almost at random, new people on the ground here in Memphis who are creatively working to make change happen.

Speaking as someone who by nature is neither extroverted nor connected, the frequency of these meetings has started to amaze me.

Is Memphis' creative density growing?

Random Thoughts Relating to the Pyramid

• While it's not my dream use, the Bass Pro development is a use that is a re-use, and that is good. At the very worst, Bass Pro will be a placeholder for great future uses that will happen if we don't do something stupid in the meantime.


• Some people think that demolition is to Memphis as magic beans were to Jack. In fact, demolition is to Memphis as the Luftwaffe was to Guernica.


• The Pyramid is a monument that we've been afraid to treat as a monument. Consequently, we've confused the means -- an arena -- with the end -- a monument. So confused, we think it has no use if it's not an arena.
  
  Thinking about it as a monument -- have we ever tried giving it to the National Park Service?
  


• Many people have noted the recent article about the Pyramid in the New York Times. Dan Barry's biblicalesque narrative of wandering in the Memphis desert captures well our local variants of the sacred and the profane -- the pompous and the goofy. Plus he called the Pyramid "glorious."


• From another NYT article:
  

  After a century of flirting with its version of the Great Pyramid of Cheops along the Nile at the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, pyramid power is coming to the home of Beale Street blues and Elvis Presley.
  
  The structure, which is expected to take two years to complete, is designed as a homage to the Egyptian namesake of Memphis and an eccentric coming-of-age monument.

  Forget coming-of-age, remember eccentric.


• The Pyramid is to monumental architecture as the Jungle Room is to interior decorating.


• The Pyramid was an acquired taste for me.


• The Pyramid is an ironic mullet. The world's largest ironic mullet.

Previous random thoughts on the Pyramid.

Memphis' Creative Conversation

Update: one of the panelists, entrepeneur Eric Mathews, has posted his answers to the Creative Conversation questions on his blog. As some of this great stuff didn't make it into the talk on Wednesday, it's a web extra, and a good example of the creativity of the discussion and the panelists.

Last Wednesday, Memphis held a fascinating Creative Conversation, Working Creatively, at the Memphis College of Art.

The panelists (and audience) discussed:

• empty buildings and creativity
• micro-finance
• muni wifi
• talent attraction vs talent growth
• creativity and poverty
• official Memphis' part in creativity (including a critical and balanced recap of that history by an audience member)
• models for best creative practices

It was a great mixture of the honest and the hopeful, the critical and the creative.

For your listening pleasure and our future creativity, here's the complete audio.

The entire conversation, including introduction.

Or if you want to take it a piece at a time, the conversation separated into 3 relatively equal pieces, plus the intro:

The conversation, part 1.

The conversation, part 2.

The conversation, part 3.

The conversation, introduction.

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?

Grow Your Soul: Share

Praises to Soul Fish Cafe and their very progressive attitude about parking.



Sharing helps optimize parking in Cooper-Young. This creates less pressure on everyone to have a proprietary parking lot. Less pressure is good for the district's other businesses and good for its space and architecture. The neighborhood texture is less likely to disappear in a cloud of parking-lot expired destruction. More density, energy and people -- customers -- in Cooper-Young, giving Soul Fish an attraction beyond its good food.

Contrast their sharing with the report of this Letter to the CA Editor:

I went to the Memphis Italian Festival on Friday, but as I pulled in to the Eastgate shopping center to park, as I have in past years, security guards ran me out. Have you ever seen this parking lot more than a quarter filled? I haven't, and over a three-day period, how much does it cost the shopping center's owners to pay for all that security, just to protect an empty parking lot?

Courtesy via the ever helpful Google, about quarter full might be right.


So they paid security guards, shunned patrons of a good cause and ignored those patrons' casual business (e.g., for this young man's employer, halfway between the Italian Festival and the parking lot), so they could stake a claim to their half-used asphalt heat sink.

Soul Fish's progressive welcome should be the vanguard for civic parking policy. "One business, one parking lot" development rips the texture and energy out of Memphis' districts and neighborhoods.