The Gates of Memphis

Memphis First

2012-01-17T08:15:00.000-06:00

I had the real privilege to help with the Memphis First Robotics competition Quick Build session this past Saturday at the University of Memphis. Students from Memphis high schools came together to begin building robots as the first part of the competition.

The instruction manual

The hardware

Students from the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering begin work on their robot frame.

Craigmont High puts the motors on their assembled base.

Teams work on the programming and electronic components

It was wonderfully rich mix of young, middle, old, female, male, black, white, Asian, Latino, student, teacher, parent, mentor, sponsor, friend coming to together to learn, build, do, redo, make, program, share, talk, meet, eat, compete, cooperate, collaborate and create with each other. Most surprising to me was the growing enthusiasm from the student teams as the day progressed. By the end of the build at 4 p.m., teams from Hamilton, St. Mary's, Manassas, Craigmont and Memphis Business Academy had their basic robot going, and the rest were very much on the way.

While it was a scheduling coincidence that the build happened on the Martin Luther King birthday weekend, the event still demonstrated a great new Memphis that MLK's legacy is helping build.

The Weal of Memphis

2012-01-01T00:05:00.000-06:00

This is the second part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis. It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write. Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail. Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface: As it's heavily focused on possibility, much of what I write here may not be on anyone else's list as a good Memphis thing. But they are the soil, seed and climate for a great Memphis if we want to grow it.

The Weal

Grassroots creativity, of business, art, film, music, food, and so on. Wherever it comes from, everything in our civic power should be set to grow it. Every Memphian a Creator.

Guerrilla street sign in Cooper-Young

Modern change. Newcomers, oldcomers, hybrids, their ideas and acts are creatively colliding in ways probably unseen since the founding of Memphis. Geographic sprawl and and the ungainly heft of Big Memphis threaten to swallow the seedlings of change, but dynamic change has a workaround for both in the live web.

Bike lanes on Madison

Room to experiment. An advantage to our existing urbanized sprawl is our ability to use the under- and unused for experiments in urbanism, agriculture, art and hopefully all 3 at once. Always at risk of being pushed out by speculative hoarding by dull and unimaginative public and private owners, but there's more where that came from.

Small enough to change -- stolen from Corey Booker. Memphians, especially natives like me, tend to think of Memphis as bigger than it is. It's not so big, however, and we can change its trajectory (whatever that is) so much easier than other cities can. If we want to.

Low cost of living. A pro that is only in combination with other pros. Therefore a pro.

The food. Whenever I've lived in other places I've missed our food. It was great then and it's only gotten better (to our old school comfort food restaurants we've added the breadth of international and heights of fine). The local food movement promises to make it only better.

The music.

The water. This includes not only our excellent tap water but the abundance of the stuff that flows past and falls on us. We are rich in the stuff of life and it's tasty too!

The thunderstorms. The west to east suspense of these cataclysms is for the ages.

A beautiful, rich, fertile, exquisite natural environment.

Good bones -- stolen from Jeff Speck. Memphis remains a well laid out grid until it reaches the far edges of Cordova and Hickory Hill.

A Name. Memphis. I'm a citisan but I believe Memphis is one of the great city names of the world.

A River of inspiration. The Mississippi River.

Texture. The intersection of our built form and a hot, humid and rich natural environment. It's there in a million details but still remains to be created as the Memphis Look.

African-American foundation and majority. The struggle for freedom and prosperity, and the creativity, of African-Americans has made Memphis a better city. It's also a huge reason that the name Memphis resonates

Creativity of our myths. When we get past the corporate genuflection, the myths and legends are ours to build on. Build on.

Kid created mural in the Children's Museum of Memphis

The Ill of Memphis

2011-12-31T23:55:00.000-06:00

This is the first part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis. It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write. Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail. Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface: Modern Memphis started in a hole and now we're filling it slow. Officially slow.

The Ill

Low density and physical sprawl. Memphis' biggest meta-problem, (compounded by near zero civic awareness of this as a problem -- see below), makes so many other solutions difficult. For instance the economic dynamism of entrepeneurship is so much harder to bootstrap in neighborhoods of few.

Prescott Memorial church demolished for a university surface parking lot.

Official neglect of Memphis as a city of place and form. There's been much work in changing this but it's my belief that the leaders of Memphis still overwhelmingly think the city can succeed in an underpopulated landscape defined by brownfields and parking lots, an atopia strung together by asphalt, long car trips and marketing.

Big Memphis, the powerful keiretsu of corporate, political and cultural leaders, that slowly push the big and the usual, and neglect the small and unusual. Its inability to see the small and different makes it all the more likely that the newborn sprouts of creativity and enterprise will wither not from malice but ignorance.

Leadership that is socially, economically, geographically cutoff from creative grassroots culture. The small, the funky, the casual, the natural, the random don't fit the hygenicized corporate model.

Steep hierarchies. The slow and privileged movement and blocking of information, action and people up and down our steep pyramids zaps Memphis' entrepeneurial dynamism and grassroot energy. Ideas become stale, creation is marginalized, people leave. We dissipate and lose civic energy on the incredibly inefficient ascent. So unnecessary in a city of Memphis' size.

Hugh McLeod, Gaping Void

Creaky hierarchies, or the slow turnover of leadership. Big names in Memphis in the 1980s are still the Big names in 2010s -- Smith, Hyde, Herenton, Ford, Wharton. Even poor dead Elvis still lords it over Memphis.

Our heavy-rotation legends. We're just another consumer of our biggest legends. Creatively sterile and boring.

Cult of personality approach to problem-solving makes solutions unsustainable. Rather than looking for the replicable how-tos and lessons of successes and failures, Memphis lionizes or demonizes the person who did it. The person will leave, die or just fade away, but systems (good or bad) they build can endure.

Social density and the the zero-sum mentaility. The creatively destructive "I win, you lose, I'm in, you're out, you're up, I'm down" mindset is easy into lapse into in our dense thickets of off-line, non-serendipitous relationships. Plus bad stories and ideas get stuck in the thickets.

Fear of failure and forgotten beginnings. Forget the heroic stories of the cherry-picked best, and anything else that demoralizes the start. Begin. Every Memphian a Creator.

Lack and/or exclusion of capital. Without its flow, the ill-heeled, smart and ambitious will leave Memphis, if they ever arrive.

A history of violence. Memphis' levels of violence have been high throughout its life. In fact, it's possible that we're moving past that history with recent drops that have set 40 year lows for violent crime. But this reputation precedes us and it shapes both the global and more importantly local vision of Memphis as a dangerous place. It may take many years or decades of lower levels to move past it.

Poverty. The chicken and egg of many of Memphis' greatest ills (like racism, sprawl, etc.)

Racism. Beyond the fear and spite that splits Memphis from its suburbs, race remains a excellent tool for unimaginative politicians of all stripes to game for their own personal ambitions while neglecting real problem-solving.

The Children's Page, 1925

2011-08-02T07:30:00.005-05:00

I found this drawing on The Children's Page of the August 2, 1925 Commercial Appeal. If this is the Eudora Welty, she would have been 16 at the time.

A weird coming together of the native talent and inbred evil of the South.

I'd been looking for a Commercial Appeal editorial putdown of H.L. Mencken (remembered by Richard Wright), which was probably a response to a Mencken putdown of William Jennings Bryan which was probably a response to a Bryan putdown of Charles Darwin. I'm still looking for the editorial.

World Reusers

2011-07-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

I love the World Redeemers church on Lamar between Park and South Parkway. They have redeemed a defunct mid-sixties auto dealership with a new use, and with touches and flexibility that make it a model of hackitecture, mixing imagination, architectural reuse, personal taste and economic necessity together into a simple and visually evangelizing complex.

They haven't added any new buildings to the complex, with the exterior show lot still intact. However, they surrounded everything (including a much less visible side street boundary) with a wrought iron fence painted in the church's theme colors, purple and gold.

Up against the sidewalk, the fence gives definition to the complex and the street, as well as security; The wrought iron fence, which I'm fairly certain is a new touch, gives a a traditionally ecclesiastical presence to a car lot form.

But it's the reuse of the showroom and signage where WRC really shines. First they changed the string of roadside signs along Lamar from huckstering messages of "Used Cars" and "We Finance" to

and

They also left the Service Entrance sign on the side of the showroom/sanctuary.

At first I thought they left it there due to its height -- too hard to take down. However, they painted around it and above it and so I figure they could have removed it if they wanted. I believe it was it was left there intentionally, as that's part of the sanctuary. It continues the transformation of the commercial huckstering into religious evangelism.

The sanctuary is the original lot's main showroom (I actually looked at a car there when I was a teenager).

The show windows are gone, bricked in and embedded with gothic-arched stained glass. The form of this building is very much the same however.

Without a doubt, the most creative reimagining is of the 3 tailfin beams supporting the west wall and roof of the sanctuary.

To the 3 they added a 4th, a mirror of the original vertical beam, and completed the Cross.

And then they framed it in neon, again in the same color theme, for souls passing by in the dark.

This complex is hackitecture at its best -- reused, imaginative, visual, eccentric.

A city like Memphis that is poor in resources but rich in imagination is the perfect studio for works like this church.

Memphis could be, should be, the world capital of hackitecture.

Thank You Thurgood!

2011-03-03T08:00:00.003-06:00

40 years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling on Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe.

The ruling spared Overton Park and saved Memphis.

What I wrote 5 years ago.

Wolfside: Landscape Urbanism and Shelby Farms

2011-02-07T08:15:00.004-06:00

A very interesting and unnoted fact about the Shelby Farms Park Master Plan: James Corner, the architect chosen to make it real, is a key theorist of the growing and increasingly controversial Landscape Urbanism movement.

I know next to nothing about Landscape Urbanism (because I haven't read their key work which includes Corner's essay "Terra Fluxus") except that they and those other ascendant urbanists, the New Urbanists, don't like each other's ideas and have set themselves up in Enemy Urbanist camps. The LUers want "to prioritize the natural ecology of a site over the built environment" in explicit opposition to the NUer's emphasis on the city's built form. The other charges that LUrbanists have surrendered to suburban sprawl and NUrbanists have gone nostalgic about city living.

(Meanwhile back here in Memphis, the differences are nothing compared to the condemned-abandoned-megamall-parking lot that separates both from Memphis' default camp, the AntUrbanists. The AntUrbanists destroy both our natural and built environment with equal apathy.)

At this point, Landscape Urbanism has few finished projects. In my strong opinion, the successful metamorphosis of the massive, formless and sprawl-adjacent Shelby Farms Park would emphatically demonstrate that Landscape Urbanism is worthy of greatness.

Shelby Farms should be the Seaside of Landscape Urbanism.

Memphis Builds a Hole

2010-10-20T08:15:00.001-05:00

My long-simmering, near burnt thoughts on August's stunningly lopsided 10-2 City Council vote, clearing at least the political path for CVS to demolish the Union Avenue Methodist Church:

The vote's a template for future defeats that advocates for a better built Memphis can't ignore. Organizational unity, education of both leaders and citizens, and political advocacy for both candidates and systematic change are important to avoid a thousand defeats and an uglier, less livable Memphis.

A big mistake for the built community would be to try and pin the defeat on Memphis Heritage. In voting for the CVS anti-design, The Council ignored the Office of Planning and Development, the Land Use Control Board, the Memphis Regional Design Center, the Commercial Appeal, the Central Gardens Neighborhood Association, Playhouse on the Square, the Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the district's councilmen, Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn, and Memphis Heritage. It was a blow for preservation, smart growth, urbanism, walkability, planning and Memphis' built environment.

Urbanists can separate themselves from preservationists in fast growing cities. In Memphis, preservation is a necessary tool of urbanism. We can say, "I don't care about saving that building, I care about good design", but as a practical matter 9 out of 10 people who don't care about re-using a good building also won't care about good urban design.

I heard someone say that the defeat was due to poor lobbying by the opponents of the CVS design. I don't know enough about political campaigns to know the truth to this, but it does scare me that our Council could be so lightly principled that some special political ingredient -- beyond the public pleas of the staff, boards and associations mentioned above -- could have turned a 10-2 defeat into a 7-5 victory. Anyway, even if extra special lobbying could have made a difference, it strikes me as a very expensive, unsustainable, politically exhausting way to move toward a better built Memphis. A thousand city-wide mobilizations for a thousand buildings and designs that start at the bottom of a 10-2 hole won't work.

The Council made it clear in their words and horsetrading what they would do the next month -- gut the Midtown Overlay.

I don't think the Councilpeople who voted for CVS are clueless or idiots or [insert your insult here], but I do believe that the issues of smart growth, walkability, good design, much, much less preservation, have made little inroad into our city's political leadership. At this point, the great majority of our Council don't care. Their apathy is a core smart growth problem in Memphis.

City Council meetings are like a game show hosted by the Great and Mighty Oz. Citizens stand below the raised, intimidating dais of the Council and are given a ticking 2 minutes to speak. Instead of a screamed "Silence!" a buzzer goes off when the speaker's minutes are up.

Near the end of the debate, Councilman Bill Boyd let the crowd in on a dirty little secret. Numbers of supporters or opponents in City Council chambers don't sway their vote. Perhaps this where the off-the-clock lobbying comes in and citizen advocacy gets the buzzer.

If you need political support for regression in Memphis, get yourself a spokeschristian. Very effective.

Saving the Union Avenue Methodist Church

2010-05-26T21:00:00.001-05:00

Memphis Heritage is holding a meeting tomorrow, Thursday, May 27th, at 6 p.m. at their headquarters at 2282 Madison, to discuss the possible sale and demolition of the Union Avenue Methodist Church by pharmacy chain CVS. The church, built in 1923 and listed on the National Register, anchors the southwest corner of Cooper and Union, diagonally across from Playhouse on the Square's beautiful new theater.

Random notes:

There's precedent for CVS to preserve a historic building due to public outcry -- the Scherer Building in Chicago. In fact, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has a complete initiative dedicated to the issue of chain drug stores destroying historic buildings.

If you don't think the church is that great, worth preserving, then advocate for a quality new urban design that complements Playhouse, rather than ignores it. CVS also has precedents for that.
Just saying "tear it down!" is to cede to the default -- anturban blight. Progress in Memphis' built environment is to be fought for, never assumed.

We need to stop bashing Germantown Parkway to make points about Union Avenue. Let's stick closer to home and talk about the Medical Center from I-240 west to Dunlap. Devastated by hordes of parking lots built as enticement to commuters who didn't want to be there, and eventually weren't, the result is arguably the worst commercial strip in all of Memphis

Crappy development threatens Playhouse on the Square's investment of money and vision in that spot of Memphis. Especially a crappy development in the literal center of their vision.

See: A 270 degree panorama I took from the front steps of Playhouse on the Square.

The threat to this vision should be enough to stop a bad outcome, except it's not.

Preservationists and urbanists could combine forces with CVS to cajole or force Ike's/Walgreen's to sell CVS the soon to be vacant Ike's store on the southeast corner.

Join the cause via the Save Union Avenue Methodist Church Facebook page.

5 Years at the Fairgrounds

2010-04-14T08:10:00.000-05:00

On the grounds that were fair, I like the idea of Pretty Decent Lawn that will create a green axis connecting the old Fairgrounds gates* with the Liberty Bowl.

As a lover of gates, and those in particular,

I can't help myself.

Yet the larger Fairgrounds project is not only unbuilt, but under-demolished, under-visualized and incredibly under-imagined.

By fall 2010, we'll have the Lawn, the Liberty Bowl, parking and trees, the latter 3 of which we've already had for 40 years.

But we still don't know whether we'll keep the Coliseum, the Arena (along the axis of the Lawn), the Creative Center, the Pipkin Building, or what we'll do with all the empty space we will have even if we don't demolish any of those structures.

I don't think I'm just being an itinerant civic butthead to say that after 5 years of public meetings, public input, studies, committees, RFPs, ignored RFPs, demolitions, closings and evictions that we would should have a much stronger sense of what the Fairgrounds will become.

I know that large tracts of empty real estate render Memphis catatonic before their highest-and-bestest radioactive mega-value, but 5 years and counting and waiting should be a sign that we need another way to rebuild our city.

* In this rendering (the only one I've seen), the present gates don't appear. I don't know what to make of that except to say that I can't believe Fairgrounds nudgers and shruggers would have such bad taste as to not use them.

anturban

2010-03-04T07:55:00.002-06:00

I propose that we stop calling energy-killing, car-addicted, city-uglification

suburban

and start branding this destruction

anturban.

Use anturban to describe the intentional voids left where place and nature once existed and use suburban to neutrally describe settlements that exist on the fringes of major urban centers.

While modern suburbs may be mostly anturban in layout (because they've been built during the last 60 years, anturbanism's Pyritean Age), they don't have to be, or remain, that way.

And many urban areas far from the suburbs have devolved into the anturban during the same 60 years (see the horrendous east side of Memphis' Medical Center).

It's better if we can insult dysfunction without insulting our fellow citizens.

Mind over Memphis: Enter the Wellness

2010-02-16T07:55:00.001-06:00

I had the good misfortune of running into illthcare professional Dr. Harold Toboggans at the Old Forest Jamboree. As tireless promoter for his patented brand of street quackery, he let all know about his latest work, Enter the Wellness.

A Cliche for the Wrecking Ball

2010-01-12T07:55:00.001-06:00

We're not so far from our annual demarc between Future and Past that I can't sling a cliche back over into auld lang syne:

preservationists can't let go of the past.*

Like any cliche, you can find someone who fits it. But I've found that that nostalgia for the past can coexist happily with the complete physical destruction of its artifacts. People can easily talk about happy memories in places being pulverized around them.

In my estimation, people dedicated to saving older buildings are motivated not by a fetish for the Past but by a specific and recent history lesson. The lesson that in America over the last 60 years, we have built bad where we have demolished great. We have destroyed and replaced visually exciting, energy creating buildings with walk-stopping parking lots, energy-draining setbacks and city-killing banality. Not always, of course, but 9 out of 10 times, if not 99 out of 100 times.

As urbanist James Howard Kunstler put it in this excellent podcast on preservation:

we're not capable of putting new things up that are as good as the old things we're losing. It's hard to account for that. We're not really dumber than our great-grandparents and we're certainly a lot richer than they were... But there were forces in our culture and in our economy that have prevented us from putting up buildings that are as worthy or as beloved or as lovable, as worthy of our affection, as these things we're losing.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was. It doesn't have to be that way, but it still is.

Until we can consistently replace good with better, or at least, as-good, many of us will see the approaching bulldozers as tools of regress, coming to wreck our neighborhoods, our districts and our city's Future.

* most recently penned by Commercial Appeal editor Chris Peck.

Open Meeting about Overton Square Demolition Request

2009-12-09T08:15:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-07T07:55:00.001-06:00

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

2009-11-18T07:55:00.010-06:00

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.

By removing the panels and grillwork, we can daylight the early 20th century Germania Building underneath
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

2009-11-04T08:15:00.001-06:00

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

2009-10-22T08:15:00.000-05:00

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

2009-10-14T07:40:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-01T07:45:00.002-05:00

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.

News from a Sustainable Shelby

2009-09-13T22:16:00.014-05:00

Chatting last Thursday night in the Bridges cavern with several people who were part of Sustainable Shelby's creation, I heard 2 pieces of good news:

MLG&W is collaboratively and successfully resolving its issues with the Unified Development Code. As our utility was the only public voice of opposition to the UDC at the Land Use Control Board, this hopefully means passage in the near future of this progressive development toolkit.

Rebuilding of the Greater Memphis Greenline's Wolf River bridge will start this fall and the Greenline should open, from Tillman to Farm Road, by spring 2010.

The Greenline and the UDC are just 2 of the many organizations and efforts that Sustainable Shelby has federated into a single plan. Movement sustainability comes from these orgs' independent devotion to an environmentally sustainable, urban future for Memphis and Shelby County. If the umbrella organization were to disappear tomorrow, the forward push into that future would not.

From the Overton Square Charrette

2009-08-25T07:55:00.001-05:00

Just in time for the second public meeting (tonight, Tuesday, August 25th, 6 p.m. at Playhouse on the Square), here are some random notes and thoughts from/about last month's Overton Square charrette.

The leaders of the charrette have created a great website, http://www.squaretalk.org, for the redevelopment effort. You can share your comments and ideas there.

The leader of the charrette, Chooch Pickard of the Memphis Regional Design Center, acknowledged that a lot of folk weren't happy that it was held on a weekday. He said this session was just a beginning and there would be more sessions at more publicly accessible hours (see top).

It was still packed.

The participants weren't all preservationists (although it did have substantial preservationist participation). All were advocates for a quality built environment in the area known as Overton Square.

Architects, planners, developers, businesspeople, students, preservationists, environmentalists and dumbass bloggers were there.

The morning session began with a walking tour of Overton Square, followed by a general brainstorming session. I missed both of these.

The afternoon session had the participants split into 3 groups:
1. those who wanted to save all the Overton Square buildings,
2. those who wanted to save some buildings and most of the facades,
3. those who considered the entire site as a tabula rasa.
The 3 groups (and sub-groups) brainstormed ideas for the area.

The Regional Design Center has now posted its summary of the charrette plus the specific plans from each of the 3 groups.

The original Overton Square founders were visionary businessmen with a great eye for Midtown commercial architecture but the monolithic ownership and regional parking lots they bequeathed are the root of the present problem.

A great comment I heard from a charrette participant: the size of the Overton Square footprint overwhelms us with big dreams. Just start with something small -- and good. Begin.

Monolithic ownership and dreams of the big score make the small, iterative difficult. In Overton Square, at the Fairgrounds, at the Pyramid.

I voiced what many?most?all? probably thought was a dumb idea: Overton Square should choose Cooper-Young as a model.

My explanation for my dumb idea: Overton Square should at least learn from its never so flashy, but ever so sustainable Midtown twin.

Lessons like iterative, piecemeal development; reuse rather than rebuild; mixed-use; strong participation and input from its neighborhoods; distributed leadership; diverse ownership.

Monolithic ownership, dreams of the big score and the urban scars left from a viral parking lot make following the Cooper-Young model difficult. But it's still a healthy, home-growing model to consider as we search for solutions to vitality.

Low density, pedestrian discontinuity (e.g., Union Ave), and single use zoning and mentalities are obstacles for a vital street and public life in Memphis. Overton Square needs residential and residents to seed the street life.

The biggest missed opportunity in Overton Square's history was the design of the now-defunct French Quarter Inn.

Taking the spot of Solomon Alfred's nightclub, which was firmly and directly planted on the corner of Madison and Cooper, the owners pushed the hotel back from the corner (and the street), separated it with a parking lot, then walled it up. While the wall made the parking lot more palatable to the neighborhood, the lack of entrances and the parking lot barrier made the French Quarter Inn a non-presence in Overton Square.

Had the owners placed it directly on and opening to the corner, the hovering hotel and Overton Square would have fed each other's energy and business, just as the district began competing with Beale Street and fake neighborhood bars in the 1980s. Disconnected, they both began a long decline.

Playhouse on the Square, now building a cool new theater complex above the corner of Union and Cooper,

has the most to lose from antisocial, butt-ugly neighboring development. But it also presents Overton Square development a new opportunity: the people pouring in from all over the city, region and country for plays, camps and events.

This major cultural investment should not only be enough to stop a bad development, it should be more than enough to entice a great development to build next to, on to.

Public Meeting About the Cobblestones

2009-08-10T07:15:00.004-05:00

This coming Tuesday, TDOT and the Corps of Engineers will host an important public information meeting regarding Memphis' plans for Cobblestones improvement. Details:

Tues., Aug. 11 -- 5:30 - 7:30 pm
The Balinese Ballroom
330 N. Main Street, Downtown

The Riverfront Development Corporation states

The purpose of the Historic Cobblestone Landing Restoration and Walkway Project is to stabilize and restore the Memphis Cobblestone Landing and provide limited usability, connectivity and accessibility improvements.

The Friends for Our Riverfront* and the blog Memphis Cobblestones both have many questions, real problems and tons of cool side information about the Cobblestones plan.

My questions:

will the improvements intentionally or effectively decommission the cobblestones as a boat landing?
will they harm the Cobblestone's status as a National Historic Landmark?

the RDC answers my first question, listing

Continuation of and improvements to the docking of boats

as an objective.

No muddiness there, except that it's listed as objective 5 in a prioritized list. So my filtrated question for the RDC is,

"Forget prioritized objectives -- I want to land my boat on the Cobblestones. Will I be able to do this after the improvements?"

* despite its reputation as an opponent of the RDC, the FfOR and its skirmishes with the RDC have sharpened the spotlight on Memphis riverfront. In this case, the FfOR have really publicized a public meeting that will give the RDC a chance to pitch their cobblestone ideas.

Smarter Code Update

2009-07-14T07:30:00.002-05:00

Eric had asked whether the UDC had passed. The Land Use Control Board passed it unanimously but it doesn't have a date set for a vote with the Memphis City Council or with the Shelby County Commission. It needs approval from both bodies to become official.

The final votes are waiting on negotiations between the UDC drafters and MLG&W (perhaps other agencies) to get beyond differences like this.

By the way, I understand the huge cost of retrofitting all of Memphis for underground electric cabling -- all at once. However, unless we know that the underground water systems will last forever, why not use their repairs as opportunity for burying cables?

For instance, here's work being done in the last few weeks along the public median of Sycamore View by MLG&W.

Why not bury the electric lines (see background) that run up and down the street at the same? A twofer.

It may take a hundred years but a long-term beautification is preferable to a forever ugly.

The Very Visible

2009-07-09T23:02:00.006-05:00

You might have seen the good news that the Visible School is purchasing Frances Gassner's endangered masterpiece, the C&I Bank Building:

Beside the saving of an icon, the Visible School's purchase and move adds to the further redevelopment and reVITALization of central downtown Memphis. Within 4 blocks we'll have 2 colleges adding their students to the same street and into the urban mix. An unprecedented number of young adults on the streets of downtown Memphis during business hours.

Public Input about Dis/Connections

2009-07-06T07:15:00.001-05:00

From Shelby Farms Park Conservancy and the Greatest Memphis Greenline:

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, Shelby County Government and Greater Memphis Greenline have announced two public input meetings for discussion of the design and management of the new urban greenway connecting Midtown Memphis to Shelby Farms Park.
July 6 from 7pm-9pm at the Benjamin Hooks Central Library, 3030 Poplar Avenue.

July 7 from 6pm-8pm at Agricenter International, 7777 Walnut Grove Road.
The meetings will be an opportunity for citizens to talk about the opportunities and challenges that come with greenways and will feature national trails expert Robert Searns. Representatives from Ritchie Smith Associates, the trail designer, will also be present.

The greenway—a former rail corridor being converted into a multi-use path—will stretch from Tillman Street at Walnut Grove Road to Shelby Farms Park, connecting neighborhoods and providing a safe opportunity for people to recreate, commute and exercise.

Shelby Farms Park Conservancy will manage and operate the greenway, with support from Greater Memphis Greenline—a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collaborate in a public-private partnership with local government in the development of unused railway right-of ways and easements in Memphis and Shelby County, and to create a world-class recreational park/hiking-biking trail system.

And from the Memphis Regional Design Center:

Are you concerned about the designs of our highway interchanges?

Then plan to attend the

TDOT Public Hearing to review proposals for the I-55/Crump Blvd. interchange Tuesday, July 7th, 6 to 8 pm Central Station Corner of S. Main & G.E. Patterson

The redesign of the I-55/Crump interchange will have a major impact on the future of the Historic Marine Hospital, the National Ornamental Metal Museum and surrounding developments. Please plan to attend this important meeting that will clearly impact this important Downtown Memphis neighborhood.

There's a FAQ from TDOT on their proposed changes.

Beauty == Utility

2009-06-19T07:30:00.002-05:00

The only voice of opposition at the Land Use Control Board's affirmative vote on the Unified Development Code a few weeks ago came from Memphis Light Gas & Water.The utility had a problem with several sections of the code, especially

A. New electric utility services shall be placed underground where functionally feasible...

(section 5.3.4)

I seem to remember the MLG&W rep stating that the aesthetics of the code would be a drag on functionality for utilities. A utility's utilitarian argument.

Yet the mass disruptions whipped up by last weekend's storms (mostly by trees and branches falling on above-grade power lines) and the historic storm data exposed by this NOAA map (hat tip Naomi)

show the impracticality of this opposition. Storms will cross the Mississippi, branches will fall from the sky, above-ground electric lines will get knocked out. But happily, safely, beautifully, increasingly buried electric lines will keep on humming.

Good aesthetics in tree-rich, storm-happy Memphis is good utility.

Begin Again with Trees

2009-06-09T07:30:00.004-05:00

If you were alive in the Paris of Louis XIV, the impression of these new boulevards and avenues would be of a tremendous formalizing of nature, rather than of urbanization. The chief device, the parallel rows of trees was a fairly easy way to achieve stunning monumental effects and perspectives with little actual material and labor. These abstract diagrammatic schemes signified little beside the kings' ability to make a rural landscape orderly --something he clearly relished. However, when they finally were developed with buildings decades later, the boulevards and avenues of Louis XIV would become templates for the best of the Second Empire's new street typologies, and they remain models for excellent street sections into our time.

The City in Mind,

James Howard Kunstler
(emphasis mine)

Making ordered rows of great Memphis native trees could be the first, relatively easy step toward retrobeautifying our problematic ugly avenues and boulevards. Even -- especially -- in commercial districts.

Startups, Bikes, Hikes and Unity

2009-05-29T00:30:00.002-05:00

Events this weekend:

The Bicycle Film Festival is a celebration of bicycles through film, art and music. We have a great line up of films and events this year. We're hoping to bring together cyclists from all over the South for this weekend of amazing bike-related events.

There will be free bike valet at all events.

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions. Hope to see you in a couple of weeks!

May 29
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Film Screenings at the Brooks Museum (1934 Poplar Ave)

9 p.m. until late
After Party with Gold Sprints, a DJ and a one hour open bar!
at Nocturnal (1588 Madison Ave)

May 30
12 - 4 p.m.
Block Party at Overton Park with food, vendors, bike games / tricks, games for kids -- fun for everyone!

3 p.m.
Film Screening at the Brooks Museum, Road to Roubaix

9 p.m.
Bikes Rock with River City Tanlines, Magic Kids, The Warble, and Girls of the Gravitron
Murphys (1589 Madison Ave)

Three Days & Great Minds -- All That's Missing is You.

Startup Weekend will be returning to Memphis May 29 - 31, one year after the highly successful inaugural weekend. If you missed the event last year, or are unsure about what it entails -- Startup Weekend is a three-day event that brings great minds together to form viable businesses. Click here for tickets.

Have you already signed up? Make sure you join the Private Facebook group to get a sneak peak at the pitches in advance of the weekend.

Join us to support even more entrepreneurial activity in Memphis. This year, multiple businesses will simultaneously be moving forward in parallel, which promises to make the weekend even more action packed than last year.

Tickets are $40 per person for the entire weekend and includes meals, drinks and supplies. Be sure to get your ticket early because this event sells out and is limited to the first 100 people that sign up. Click here for tickets.

Startup Weekend is a national program that has selected Memphis once again as one of the cities it will visit. For more information, click here. Hope to see you there.

Nature Walk with Citizens to Preserve Overton Park

Sunday May 31, 2009 10:00 am - 11:30 am This event repeats every month on the last Sunday. Overton Park

Meet at the end of Old Forest Lane, next to the Rainbow Lake parking lot, for a free guided 1.5-mile walk through the Old Forest at Overton Park. Kids are welcome!

Questions? Email Naomi (naomi@spiny.com) or call 901-278-2396 if you need more info.

Unity Rally

Support Non Discrimination Ordinance

Sunday, May 31, 2009 1:00pm - 2:00pm First Congregational Church (front steps) 1000 South Cooper St

info@mglcc.org

This is our Harvey Milk moment. We're asking that ALL supporters attend a rally on Sunday to show your solidarity.

Support the right for people to work without fear.
Support tolerance in Shelby County Governemnt.
Support equality for all Mid-South citizens

The time is now. Please attend this Sunday!

It Matters

2009-05-27T23:35:00.006-05:00

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.

A Vote on Unified Development Code This Thursday

2009-05-24T21:47:00.012-05:00

In what could be the most important civic breakthrough for Memphis' built environment in 100 years, the Land Use Control Board will vote on the revised and long-awaited Unified Development Code this Thursday, May 28th, at 5 p.m., in the Memphis City Council chambers at 125 N Main – City Hall.

If you, as a citizen, neighborhood, developer and/or leader, want better tools to rebuild a greater Memphis, or just want a better built Memphis, please show up to show your support.

If you're not up to inspecting the toolkit, 424 pages of development code, the Office of Planning and Development has created a short document which lists the organizing principles of the UDC. Given the importance of citizens and neighborhood groups to its real success, how-to's, case studies, mailing lists, websites, etc. would also be very useful auxiliary tools moving forward.

Inside the Overton Square

2009-05-19T07:15:00.004-05:00

Memphis Heritage is hosting a meeting about Overton Square from 4-6 p.m. this Wednesday, May 20th, at their headquarters, 2282 Madison (at Edgewood).

Like the last public Overton Square meeting, this one also and unfortunately takes place during business hours. Memphis Heritage has told me that this was designed several weeks ago as a educational/informational meeting and has morphed into an advocacy meeting because of the recent contract on Overton Square. From here out, advocacy meetings will take place after normal business hours so members and concerned citizens can participate.

Wall of Trees

2009-05-18T07:55:00.001-05:00

On my way to the Barbecue Fest last Friday I noticed this growing wall of trees on Main between Beale and Peabody Place. Eventually they should be as tall as, if not taller than, the buildings behind them.

The trees are inexpensively creating architectural space where demolition and a surface parking lot removed it 40 years ago. The feeling of enclosure helps bridge the walking gap between the Orpheum and the buildings and businesses north of Peabody Place.

Unfortunately, this is the only side of the block square parking lot that has trees, as you can see looking down the Beale side towards the River.

Maybe planting trees in an urban pattern is not as good as building, but it is something we can do now all over the city to begin filling chronic gaps.

Rebuilding Greensburg and Drinking Green Tonight

2009-05-14T01:02:00.006-05:00

Architect Josh Somes will present a review of the 5.4.7 Arts Center at the Memphis Regional Chapter of the US Green Building Council (USGBC-MEM) May meeting. The 5.4.7 Arts Center was the first structure to the LEED Platinum rating in the state of Kansas and also marked the first structure to achieve the LEED designation in the rebuilding of Greensburg, Kansas. Greensburg Kansas was destroyed by tornados on May 4, 2007 and was the subject of a Discovery Channel Documentary, detailing the town’s rebirth. LEED, is a certification program of the US Green Building Council and stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The lecture is part of USGBC-MEM regular series to promote environmental friendly buildings and facility operations. The presentation will take place at the Memphis College of Art’s Callicot Auditorium on May 14th at 6pm. It is open to all interested parties, free for chapter members, and $5 for guests. The lecture will be followed by a question and answer period with Mr. Somes.

SK8Mud

2009-05-11T08:45:00.001-05:00

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

2009-05-08T06:55:00.001-05:00

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

It's Both, Alcaeus

2009-05-07T07:15:00.002-05:00

Carved into marble and just a few feet from being a literal cornerstone of Memphis City Hall.

Forgotten No. 5

2009-05-06T07:55:00.006-05:00

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

Public safety
Education
Efficiency
Economic Development

I got one more:

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.

More on Demolition Without Design

2009-05-01T07:30:00.004-05:00

The most frustrating thing for urbanists is that there is so little rhyme or reason to how the city disposes of these buildings. With no plan for replacement, the creeping creation of vacant lots in the name of “much needed” parking or blight removal is insidious.

Detroitist Francis Grunow has written a very interesting plea for a comprehensive redevelopment strategy -- what I think you would call urban planning -- in the midst of Detroit's demolition free-for-all. Without at all denying the need for urban triage in a shrinking city like Detroit, he argues for "the repositioning of the city’s core assets, its undervalued anchors, as the urban basis for revival and long-term regeneration".

One of the bases, the anchors, is the incredibly beautiful and incredibly threatened Michigan Central Station,

designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. Detroit plans to "use economic stimulus money to demolish Michigan Central and stick the gratuitously negligent billionaire owner, Matty Moroun, with the bill"

Random questions that aren't completely rhetorical:

why is demolition of neglected private property considered an acceptable governmental responsibility but moth-balled maintenance is never, even when the plan is to force a billionaire to pay up?
what's wrong with treating urban anchors as visual and monumental rather than economic anchors, especially if we're talking about low demand real-estate? Monumental anchors give a city body and presence.

Even as monuments, you can't let the street front die, but can you mothball the tops without having to mothball the bottom?
Is there such a thing as phased renovations of major buildings like you see with the Phase I, Phase II of suburban developments? Could you "subdivide" major buildings?
Why can't a municipality pay for modern infrastructural improvements like electricity and plumbing in a dense urban renovation like they do for new roads, sewers, electricity and water in suburban developments. The former might make greater economic sense.
Will a full-blown urbanist movement emerge, in the mode and possibly from the ranks of the preservationist and environmental movements, with the same willingness to fight for its principles? Or has it already emerged?

Urban Redo

2009-04-29T07:30:00.006-05:00

Let's take a mulligan on the last 50 years of Memphis city planning.

That's what we had to do with this massive Jackson Avenue urban renewal tract from 1961, immediately north of St. Jude (from the Commercial Appeal's Memphis Memories).

Memphis renewed the area cleared as suburbish strip malls. 40 years later, it had to renew the renewal.

Absence of decay is not presence of vitality. Demolition is not design.

$5 Dollar Cover, No Cover and No UDC (Yet)

2009-04-21T22:30:00.004-05:00

Here are 2 great events and 1 contest deadline coming up in the next couple of days. Hurry!

A rapidly approaching (maybe Wednesday, April 22) deadline for the the Commercial Appeal's Your $5 Cover Night Out contest.

Upload pictures and videos of your $5 Cover-style night out in Memphis. We want to see what you did on the weekend - did you check out a band at the HiTone, go to a roller derby bout or record swap, or head to Beale Street for a big night out? Whatever you did, we want to see it.

the prizes are sweet - two tickets to the local $5 Cover premiere and two VIP passes to the Indie Memphis film fest later this year

For more info, go to http://focus.commercialappeal.com/ContestGallery.aspx?e=41.

Thursday night, there's the biggest TechFuel yet:

What happens when you

fly in two top thinkers in innovation, culture, technology, and media for a panel discussion,
retain the services of an international renown DJ,
serve up good food and drink,
and invite entrepreneurs, technologists, and new media mavens to chill for two hours?

You get the extravaganza LaunchMemphis calls TechFuel.

I hope you will take the time to join us, Adrian Ho, C.C. Chapman, and DJ Mr. White for an evening unlike any other served up in Memphis. The event will be held Thursday, April 23rd from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at EmergeMemphis (516 Tennessee Street, Memphis, TN). It will be a great time for you to meet with your fellow technology, social media, and startup enthusiasts. There is no cost to attend, but we ask that you RSVP on Facebook here http://www.facebook.com/events.php#/event.php?eid=74847833872 or to techfuel@launchmemphis.com.

Also Thursday night, Livable Memphis is having another Pizza with Planners session, this time about the very important, long-anticipated Unified Development Code, aka the UDC.

Pizza With Planners: A Citizen's Guide to How Your City Works.

This next session is on the Unified Development Code and how it will provide tools for neighborhoods to become more livable.

Please note that this (and future sessions) will be held at the Hooks Public Library.

RSVP to Sarah via email or phone 901-725-8370. See you there!

NoMore EyeSore

2009-04-15T07:55:00.001-05:00

Decaying buildings don't threaten Memphis; devitalizing suburbanism threatens Memphis.

Not discrete aging structures ill-defined as eyesores, but an entrenched system of speculative emptiness, willfull destruction, oblivious discontinuity and bland development.

Time to give up boring, neosuburbanist visions of an always tidy city, and focus on the rebuilding blocks of a sometimes messy, increasingly beautiful and necessarily vital city.

Greenlined!

2009-04-02T07:30:00.001-05:00

Mark the County Commission's approving the purchase of the Greenline by taking a Google Earth based trip from Midtown to Cordova,

Or if you want to explore it yourself (without getting up), check out the route in Google Maps, or play with it in Google Earth.

3 observations:

the organization called the Greater Memphis Greenline seems marginalized in the recent progress. They have rated nary a mention in the most recent stories. Meanwhile, Shelby Farms is all over the story, as fundraiser and manager, after little mention before (other than as eastern terminus). Something is missing here. Perhaps, as the deal with CSX came closer, the quasinonymous purchase group called Memphis Community Connector gave their funds to Shelby Farms who in turn donated them to Shelby County. But why is Greater Memphis Greenline, after being the apparent public face for so long, now barely mentioned? Doesn't matter as far as Greenlining goes, of course, but the true story would help the next citizen activist push the boulder up and over the hill.

Fewer and fewer articles refer to it as "the Greenline". Recent stories have called it a walking trail or the CSX trail. On top of that, I've heard rumors that Shelby Farms will rename it. While I'm neutral about the last issue (if it is an issue), I'm not neutral about this (if it is an issue). Greenline is a great simple name. Greenline.

Shelby Farms' stewardessship could mean the Wolf River Bridge is repaired much more quickly, which would be a very good thing.

Crossing the Wolf is the Greenline's premier "wow!" moment.

In Place Pillowfights and Putridity

2009-03-25T12:15:00.001-05:00

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.

Return of Main @ Jefferson

2009-03-20T07:50:00.000-05:00

I went to the Lowenstein Building opening on Wednesday and was happy to see this great project completed.

Also cool to see its across the street neighbor, the Courtyard Marriott ascending at Main @ Jefferson. This is the visualization.

And this is the actualization, still in progress.

Hugely exciting to see the rebuilding of that corner.

I hope the local buildings can collaboratively use the new space and energy on the street.

By the way and along the way, this is what happens when you treat the street as incidental:

Don't waste the opportunity!

Our Future's Got a Hole In It

2009-03-17T07:30:00.002-05:00

I heard Chicago's Conservation Design Forum speak at the Brooks Museum in December 2007. They had come to Memphis at the invitation of the Mississippi River Corridor - Tennessee to speak about sustainable development. Until that talk, I had never really thought much (ever?) about stormwater runoff as an environmental problem.

And it's only with the recently publicized threat to the Greensward that I began to think about the talk's hyperlocal importance -- the importance lying just 100 yards away.

The core of CDF's message for me was this (and I paraphrase from memory):

we must use natural techniques to decrease environmentally destructive stormwater runoff, rather than engineer increasingly invasive stormwater runoff mechanisms.

While there isn't a recording of their talk in Memphis, they have amply outlined their strategies, including plans for the city of Chicago and for the Nature Conservancy. The techniques they recommend include:

Green Roofs
Bioswales and Rain Gardens
Native Landscaping
Permeable Paving
Filter Strips and Level Spreaders
Naturalized Detention Basins

These techniques seem to be of the 21st century kind that VECA resident Mary Wilder and Sierra Club representative James Baker called for in the VECA neighborhood meeting last week.

But they're also the kind of ideas that City Engineer Wain Gaskins politely dismissed as "long-term."

I think Memphians are increasingly sick of having the future deferred by a long term that is never begun. They're sick of regressive anti-imagination disguised as short term prudence. They're sick of a mediocre present digging a bigass mudpit that a good future has to climb out of.

And even if they're not, I am. The future is here.

Master Plans and Public Participation

2009-03-11T07:30:00.003-05:00

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.

10 Things I Love About Memphis

2009-03-05T07:30:00.002-06:00

To add to the meme over at Smart City,

Mouse over if you'd like to know what I'm visioning.

Great Skatepark of the World

2009-03-02T07:30:00.001-06:00

The Web Urbanist has a nice photographic compilation of great skateparks around the world.

All cool but I think a skatepark designed and built for the tip of Mud Island, jutting into and surrounded on 3 sides by the great Mississippi River, would hold its own, and probably more with any of them.

Skatelife Memphis has proposed just such an incredible public use for a piece of land that has been unused since it formed over 100 years ago.

The red line below shows the approximate location of the skatepark.

Nothing but grass, and rough at that.

Yet the Riverfront Development Corp has put Skatelife off since April 2008 so the RDC can do a master plan on Mud Island.

Another master plan.

Another plan.

Another master plan that will cost approximately $800 thousand dollars*, when the highest end skate park is only $3 million. Another plan that won't even start gathering input from the public until late March because it's already taken a year to plan the plan.

In the meantime, greatness flows past Memphis.

So maybe that's just water under the bridge. Skatelife Memphis asks that you attend the public input sessions and let the RDC know your support for the skatepark on Mud Island. Let the RDC see the dynamism and vitality that they put off for at least two years, but can still have.

There will be 4 sessions.

* figure ciphered from the $400,000 matching grant they received from Corps of Engineers to do the study.

Details from a Deconstruction

2009-02-24T07:30:00.007-06:00

It's not that we've lost a great building with the BellSouth demolition. What bothers me is it's being ripped out without replacement, unless you count a (energy swallowing) surface parking lot as replacement. The built replaced with the empty.

Yes, the office building itself was near suburban in its setback and its surrounding parking, but its height and street-adjacent raised wall gave at least urban presence and definition to that side of Madison. Judging by the picture below, both are coming down.

So on to the future! But a mediocre past should not be a barrier to a better future.

(Photo courtesy of Joe Spake)

Toxic Dumping in the Memphis Viewshed

2009-02-20T07:45:00.004-06:00

Viewshed is a new favorite word of mine.

I hadn't seen or heard it before this article about an Apple store going in Georgetown.

Like watershed, viewshed makes our visual additions and subtractions socially cumulative decisions, not just one-off bad decisions. Don't pour motor oil in the drain, don't demolish beautiful buildings for parking lots. Don't empty chemicals into rivers, don't clearcut trees.

An individual act will aggregate with a million other individual acts and destroy life.

The greatest pollutant in the Memphis viewshed is suburbanality, which is toxic to both natural and built viewsheds.

Polluted viewsheds threaten our creative ecosystem.

Old Forest Jamboree This Wednesday

2009-02-16T07:30:00.002-06:00

On the anniversary of the clearcut, come celebrate the Old Forest at the Hi-Tone.

Green Space

2009-02-10T07:45:00.003-06:00

I received an email recently from the Natural Resources Defense Council announcing their program called Picturing Smart Growth. It's a series of smart growth visualizations in 70 different communities, showing the path from the not so bright present to a much smarter future.

One of their featured scenarios is in Memphis, and specifically, a street around the corner from Stax and Soulsville (College Street? The actual street isn't listed.)

The first transition, from the present

to the first phase,

is what really caught my eye.

The trees not only beautify the street but alter it spatially, becoming architectural.

This spatial effect was confirmed for me by the great Suburban Nation

These trees are not intended merely to be decorative; rather they are included to create spatial definition when the buildings fail to do so. The trees narrow the space and provide a natural vault that contributes to the pedestrian's sense of enclosure and comfort.

So Memphis, space and cash poor but tree and land rich, could move inexpensively toward a smart, built future by planting trees as the official "Phase I" of all our neighborhood rebuilding. Even if they're just regularly spaced seedlings, the young trees will be placeholders for the space that will emerge beneath their vault.

Plus an ordered, ritual planting could provide a very immediate, on-the-ground beginning to charrette implementation. A simple, tangible, visible groundbreaking.

Light Addenda

2009-02-05T07:30:00.002-06:00

Here's an another important question for the Triangle Noir section of my previous post:

How will this increase the prosperity and well-being of the residents of the affected public housing projects?

Also, for a progressive anti-poverty, pro-Hope VI perspective, read this blog post by Ryan Fowler, which I discovered after he left this comment.

Light

2009-02-03T07:30:00.003-06:00

Memphis has recently publicized 2 major initiatives with huge real estate angles, Triangle Noir and the Parks Services Master Plan.

As these move forward, backward, sideways, into the shadows, under the cone of silence and back through the echo chamber, we must ask hard questions of everyone -- the public officials, the businesspeople, the citizens --- not just the politicians! -- involved with them.

For instance, re: the Parks Services Master Plan:

Who's on the committee?
What's the proportion of citizen representation to business representation?
How much of that is developer representation?
Do any of the representatives have contracts with the city?
Do any of the representatives have relatives who work for the city?
Do any of the representatives have private dealings with the Mayor?
Are any possible divestitures in the vicinity of major city led developments, e.g., Uptown, Fairgrounds, etc.

or for Triangle Noir:

Why is it necessary to remove anybody from the Triangle Noir? Isn't there enough space to infill?
Hasnt' the public housing being recently renovated? How is it dilapidated?
How does this improve Memphis outside of Downtown?
How will we pay for the elderly housing required in the rest of the city?
Are there enough Section 8 vouchers available to everyone scattered by Triangle Noir?
Will eminent domain be used?
If so, will takings be given to private developers?
Are any of the possible developers on the Mayor's host committee?
Who owns property in the Triangle now?
What are their connections to city government?
What will Triangle Noir do to the mix of income in downtown Memphis?

I don't believe the questions are cynical. They're just the type of questions that should be asked anywhere the public realm is opened to exclusive private uses. Vigilantly asked by citizens and the press, and reasonably answered by independent means, they're an antidote to cynicism.

Public-private partnerships promise revenue and/or efficiency, but they will eviscerate the public realm, subvert public power to private ends and corrupt our democracy unless we ask and get answers.

With

2009-01-29T07:30:00.003-06:00

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.

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.
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.

High-Speed Awesome

2009-01-23T07:30:00.002-06:00

City Councilman Shea Flinn has a Smart City vision for Memphis 2009 and beyond:

We need to change (that damn word again) how we interact with the rest of the state and region. To this end, I would propose that our federal delegation get in the on the bailout package and try to get some high speed rail for our region. A few billion (remember when that used to be big money, now it seems like small change) would allow us to connect not only our city to Nashville in a greater way, but also with Jackson, MS, and Little Rock, AR, as well as providing the requisite short term jolt to our local economy.

This is a 2005 U.S. Department of Transportation map of possible high speed rail corridors.

See the gray hole in the right middle, between St. Louis, Jackson (MS) and Little Rock? That gray hole is Memphis. Not even a possibility.

Councilman Flinn's idea could change (that beautiful word again) that.

Personality of the City

2009-01-22T07:30:00.002-06:00

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

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.
Presently, Memphis' personality is the sum and greater of the wisdoms, confessions ... insults, abuses, that we share verbally and textually.
We have yet to create Memphis' personality in built form, athough we have so many prototypes on the ground.
Consequently Memphis' personality is lost to casual visitors and new residents. People like keyinfluencer.
A new greatness, a new weirdass Memphis greatness, awaits if we build our city to its personality.

How do we do this?

Architectural Passage

2009-01-15T17:30:00.001-06:00

A recreasingly urban Memphis should retire the cosmetic architectural tailfin for at least a decade, and bring back the beautiful and functional archway.

It's an excellent combo of visual openness and architectural control.

When it's part of a structure built to the perimeter -- the public sidewalk -- an archway is a good urban mix of vigilance and visual and physical passage.

It would be cool to see a growing St. Jude line their new perimeter

with buildings, and make gateway arches the passage points between public and private . Beautiful urban gateways would be a striking solution to St. Jude's twin challenges of security and recruitment.

And they have a prototype, that they don't know is a prototype, already on their campus.

Build more, but this time as large urban gateways.

Fact: the Return of Li'l Film Fest

2009-01-12T07:30:00.002-06:00

Live from Memphis' Li'l Film Fest is back.

Live From Memphis announces the re-launch of the LI'L FILM FEST with its 9th edition: Memphis - Fact or Fiction? That's right, it's back and it's gonna be better that ever thanks to our new partnership with the Memphis Tourism Foundation and collaboration with Indie Memphis!

Besides the "Memphis - Fact or Fiction?" theme, the films must contain an extra, surprise ingredient.

This "surprise ingredient" will be revealed at our Li'l Film Fest Kick-off Party! Wednesday, January 28, 6-8pm at the LFM Studio - 1 S. Main St. 38103.

Entries are due by February 27, 2009. The Fest takes place at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 21st at the Brooks Museum in Overton Park. All the details can be found at the Li'l Film Fest site.

I will miss the funky First Congo location (what has become of that space?), but the Brooks is a fine replacement. I do hope the august surroundings don't diminish the fun, DIY spirit of the previous incarnations.

Great news for the New Year.

Failure in 2009

2009-01-05T07:30:00.000-06:00

I think Memphis has 2 traditional civic narratives of risk and failure. I would call them cycles but the circle is broken by their forgetfulness.

Try
Fail
Recriminate, or "You Suck! I Suck! We Suck! Memphis Sucks! We should have never tried! We're gonna die! Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!"
Heap derision and shame on the attemptee.
Forget lessons learned from this horrible, horrible event.

A case study.

Or a more corporatist narrative:

Try
Fail
Publicize success
Blame bad press for appearance of failure
Eventually abandon failure.
Cleanse institutional memory.
Repeat, all previous lessons forgotten.

A case study.

The first narrative personifies and demonizes failure; the second denies it.

My wish for Memphis is to shun these narratives of the status-quo, and embrace fast, iterative, educational cycles of risk, failure and success.

Try
Fail
Learn, or "Where did I make mistakes and what can I can do differently next time? Looking for another opportunity."
Try Again
Maybe Fail Again
Definitely Learn Again
Iterate

...
Succeed!
Learn.
Try Something Else.

...

Failure as not only an inevitability but a necessity is very new to me, and mind-blowing. (proof of my old way of thinking.)

The change for me has come from this article about the work of Carol Dweck (who I've written about before), the work and openness of the entrepeneurial evangelists at LaunchMemphis, Mr. Jalopy's quote that "people are not born craftsmen, they just have the courage to screw things up." and this passage from Jeff Haynie's "What's Wrong with the Atlanta startup ecosystem and how to fix it":

Lots of deals for some period - say the next 3-4 years - will fail. Our goal should be to fund smaller amounts faster, build some teams up that can execute on different ideas without much concerns for revenue models and salespeople, and then FAIL FAST. Fail as fast as possible with as little capital invested as practical. Once they fail, they must be encouraged to START AGAIN as soon as possible! Refactor. Get back on the horse. What can we do different next time around? These failures should be not be shamed. Let’s go ahead and get rid of the startup scarlet letter. We need more starts. We need an economy that allows the whole thing to get going and fail and get going again - without having to mortgage houses and without having to present 5-year financials to get $50K. Go go go. Dream big and let’s find you some money to try it out.

Failure, and a creative attitude about it, will build the skill and the ecosystem.

Success in 2008

2008-12-31T16:30:00.001-06:00

I have only one top Memphis event of 2008. Only one because a) I'm lazy, and b) people from the future have assured me it dwarfs everything else. I have this:

Term Limits added to the City Charter.

This change was a systematic and democratic repudiation, approved by a hugely overwhelming majority of voters, of Memphis' historic (and royally fucked-up) paternalism.

The change will create more leaders, and not just political leaders. The more leaders we produce, the more creative, dynamic, honest, responsive, prosperous -- greater -- Memphis will be.

Here's to a civic Memphis that looks more like a Mississippian mound than an Egyptian pyramid.

The 3 Rules of Urban Design

2008-12-28T23:25:00.007-06:00

David Sucher's simple, elegant list to guide us, judge us, as we (re)build Memphis.

Build to the sidewalk (i.e., property line).
Make the building front “permeable” (i.e., no blank walls).
Prohibit parking lots in front of the building.

from his book City Comforts

Merry Christmas from the Backyard Gates of Memphis

2008-12-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

Spreading the Creation: Civic Economy

2008-12-18T08:45:00.000-06:00

...an economic system which is beyond capitalism, that is a system which enhances the participation in the creation of wealth, not only its accumulation.

Civic economy can be defined as the economy resulting from generalized repricocity, from people helping people to succeed, with the understanding that the well-being of each member of the community is to everybody's advantage. Whereas unbridled capitalism destroys diversity, competition, and ultimately the market and has to be controlled with anti-trust laws, civic economy encourages diversity and supports small and medium companies and cooperatives with legislative and fiscal tools.

The result is an entrepeneurial economy where repricocity matters.

Ernesto Sirolli,
from the Epilogue of
Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepeneurship and the Rebirth of Local Economies

Civic economy is a way forward for a healthy, dynamic, prosperous Memphis.

Jefferson @ Main

2008-12-15T07:30:00.003-06:00

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 Easy Way

2008-12-08T07:30:00.001-06:00

I noticed Saturday that someone had ripped the modern covering off an old shop on Union Avenue, revealing this facade underneath.

Very beautiful.

But will the owners appreciate this beauty as they renovate it, or will they unnecessarily cover it with some other inferior facade, as their neighbors recently did?

This is what they shops next door used to look like, with a faux facade similar to that removed from the Easy Way #6 building.

This is what they looked like underneath, after the fake was removed.

Even unrenovated and blocked by a tractor-trailer, you can tell they're classic midtown storefronts. Notice the detailing on the top left.

Unfortunately, the owners didn't stop while they were ahead. They covered it, again:

Yuck!

We've recently seen the same metamorphosis at some shops at Madison and McLean.

Bland 60's era covering removed.
Nice original brickwork exposed.
Bland 00's era covering imposed.

Boring facelifts both, they've turned the banal into the unique into the banal.

Here's hoping that back on Union they'll STOP when they're already so much ahead.

Heed the sign!

Holiday Card from the Church Health Center

2008-12-04T23:22:00.006-06:00

A painting by well-known artist Danny Broadway will be featured on this year’s Church Health Center holiday card, one of the Center’s biggest fundraisers of the year. The card will be the second in a series of five holiday cards to feature local artists.

Church Health Center holiday cards can be sent in honor or memory of loved ones, friends, clients or even co-workers. Those honored will receive a personalized, hand-inscribed holiday card acknowledging the gift. Holiday cards recognizing a memorial gift will be sent to the person specified by the donor. A tax-deductible minimum gift of $10 per honoree is suggested.

Broadway, a graduate of the University of Memphis has had work displayed nationwide in galleries as well as major art shows like the Arts EXPO in New York. He has also been named by PBS Television as the Master Artist for five consecutive years. Many prominent companies, including FedEx, Black Enterprise, Memphis Grizzlies, Memphis Redbirds and Major League Baseball have commissioned Danny Broadway original paintings. In fact, Broadway was commissioned to produce the official logo of Major League Baseball’s Civil Rights Game.

Order this card in support of the mission of this great Memphis organization. They recommend ordering by December 7 to ensure cards get there by Christmas.

The Concept or the Particulars

2008-12-03T00:48:00.005-06:00

"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

2008-11-30T22:11:00.005-06:00

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.

Room With a View

2008-11-26T09:30:00.001-06:00

I recently forewent free wine and networking so I could explore the terraces of Roy Harrover's Memphis College of Art.

I discovered that, like the studios, the bathrooms on the top floor opened directly to the outside terrace.

See?

Usually a bathroom that opens directly to the elements is a problem, of abuse and neglect.

But on the top floor of the MCA, open to nature but controlled access to the public, it's clean. And it's cool. At least I think it's cool.

Leaving the door open will probably get you expelled, but there is the view.

Magic: the Art Installation

2008-11-23T23:13:00.013-06:00

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

2008-11-21T08:00:00.002-06:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

2008-11-19T01:00:00.001-06:00

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.

Term of the Week: Irrational Paralysis

2008-11-16T23:47:00.001-06:00

Irrational Paralysis: a malady turning the otherwise creative and active of Memphis into the hesitant and passive. Perhaps caused by fear of failure.

Spoken by a stranger (no longer strange) during a conversation at Otherlands a few nights ago.

Density of Creativity in Memphis

2008-11-11T23:11:00.010-06:00

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?

The Exotic in Normal

2008-11-10T07:55:00.002-06:00

Perhaps because I was born in the era when many were being built, I never cared much for Memphis' modernist buildings. They were the normal, while the strange were the older, traditionalist buildings I might see in my rare trips downtown and less rare trips to midtown.

But time has subverted and replaced the norm, and I've come to love what I can see now as the historical exoticism in buildings that looked so boring to me as a kid.

Like the Normal Masonic Lodge.

A simple modernist building overall, it has a nice horizontal tile-inlayed plane on its second floor, horizontal concrete borders around its windows, a concrete Masonic icon and most interestingly, these short and stout columns

which remind me of Botero. It's like the builders were afraid to give up traditionalism and settled on these as a lifeline. A hesitant traditional touch that is weirder than anything modern they could have added.

Unfortunately, while I appreciate how its landscaping evokes the building's era in its rigid untouched normalcy, it also taints the building's exoticism.

While architectural styles have changed much, suburban-style berm and bush landscaping style hasn't. We risk overlooking the special in the building due to the sameness of the lawn.

And it is a risk, because the coming westward expansion of the University of Memphis will threaten even special buildings. A building mistakenly branded as insignificant by a berm doesn't stand a chance.

The Empty: a Theory

2008-11-06T12:55:00.001-06:00

The economic and social expectations (and the wealth that sustains the expectations) of so much Memphis commercial space is too great for a local grassroots entrepeneurial ecosystem to successfully form in that space, given Memphis' present density and available capital.

As a result, buildings remain empty rather than rented or purchased at economically sustainable and viral lower levels.
It's a theory, and subject to proof, if not too badly theorized.

Is it a verbose way of saying we got speculation going on? I think it's more than speculation.

It's that those at the top of the Memphis pyramid are oblivious to the large wealth gaps that separate them not only from the poor but from the middle class. Consequently, they set their expectations to their and their peers' resources, rather than the resources available to Memphis' talent rich, capital poor entrepeneurs.

More Perfect

2008-11-04T00:01:00.000-06:00

Despite blessings of good people and good place, Memphis has been cursed from founding by our nation's greatest imperfection -- racism.

May today be the triumphant beginning to the final end of the curse.

Random Thoughts Relating to the Pyramid

2008-10-31T08:30:00.003-05:00

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.

Creative Cluetrain

2008-10-29T00:36:00.010-05:00

Wow!

Artist Chandler Pritchett's ArtMemphis 2.0 is a digital native's spitball, targeted at Memphis' tired (and expensive -- spend the money on art!) PR and advertising strategies for arts advocacy.

It's a great piece, and any arts leader in Memphis who doesn't read it tomorrow should be fired the day after tomorrow (announced by their successor in a tweet).

Memphis' Creative Conversation

2008-10-26T23:25:00.009-05:00

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.

Quote of the Week: Always

2008-10-24T20:00:00.006-05:00

When introducing new ideas and new creative thoughts, I so often heard the words, "No, we can't do that."

That is the most frustrating thing to creative people.

Because there is always a way to do something, there is always a way to figure it out.

Chris Reyes
Founder, NinjaCat and Live from Memphis
at Memphis' Creative Conversation

Detail from a Sinkhole

2008-10-20T13:09:00.008-05:00

You've probably heard the good news about Amtrak service being restored to Central Station in Memphis after the sinkhole almost swallowed it.

When I saw the repair last Saturday, I noticed a little more good news.

When they rebuilt the retaining wall for the tracks, they detailed it the same way as the existing wall.

This is the wall as it's been for decades.

This is the new part of the wall, on the right, after the repairs.

They've replicated the detail, the planes and bands, of the original. Perhaps it was structurally necessary, but I doubt it. Since Memphis has had little respect for its public works architecture over the last few decades, seeing a detail as simple as this is a pleasure, and maybe a hope.

Thanks to everyone involved for getting rail service going again, and for respecting a simple, subtle detail.

Details texture Memphis.

The Face of Med City

2008-10-16T07:30:00.000-05:00

As Daniel Connolly's Sunday CA piece Building a Medical City concludes, the Medical Center definitely gives "an opportunity here to completely change the face of the city".

Right now the Medical Center's face looks like this:

Will a change look like this?

The Medical Center overlay gives hope that it won't. But is the overlay enough, especially if juiced organizations and individuals cling (and build) to the same 50-year old anti-urban vision of Memphis, i.e., a scatter of disconnected places, the many gaps filled with car trips and desperate PR?

For those clinging, and those who've let go, the article has an illustration that imagines differently, of a new face, of a vibrant street life without the scars of surface parking -- happymedcity.

It's a cartoon, but it can be a guide. Everything we build in the Medical District should be imagined, built and judged to the happymedcity standard.

Sustainability is Fun

2008-10-10T07:55:00.003-05:00

How do you sell sustainability? How can sustainability persuade ?

As a certified product of Catholic schools, I can assure you guilt isn't the answer. Neither is sacrifice.

But fun is. Or can be. Should be.

Fun how? Say, for instance, by

building compact homes and businesses, we'll densely and imaginatively create intimate private and connected public space. We'll fill gas-powered emptiness (aka berms and parking lots) with human creativity and social energy.

making creative challenges out of reuse, we'll make the thrift store a quarry and a game show.

concocting local recipes from local foods, we'll show that barbecue was just an appetizer.

learning and sharing with the rest of the world, we'll help the Live Web finish tearing down the Magnolia Curtain (leaving the magnolias, of course). Memphians will be connected to the good and fun ideas around the world, and across town.

Sustainability requires creativity. Creativity produces fun. Fun brings more people to sustainability.

Public and Private in an Art Town

2008-10-07T12:55:00.002-05:00

I'm nothing if not a delayed reaction, but a week ago Friday a Commercial Appeal editorial, while advocating a worthy alternative for the Promenade, stated that the

idea represents a good compromise between the goals of the Riverfront Development Corporation, which wants to bring more vitality to that part of the waterfront, and the Friends for Our Riverfront, a citizens group that wants to preserve as much open space as possible.

This not only trivializes the difference between these 2 groups, factions, philosophies, it misstates the difference. From what I've seen both factions want vitality and open space.

The difference is how much of the Promenade will be privately developed and controlled, and how much will remain, or restored to, public use.

At core it's neither a technical nor aesthetic difference. It's a struggle between the public and the private, over the public realm. It's a central civic issue.

Not that we can't* or shouldn't compromise, but we can and should understand what we're compromising.

By the way, kudos to the Memphis Art Park for their proposal and for this audacious statement from their website:

We're an art town first and foremost.

Alright!

* maybe. There is also the legal issue, which is the public position written into an easement. It may not allow for compromise, but IANAL.

The Turnaround

2008-10-03T00:25:00.012-05:00

Here's a couple checking out South Main last weekend.

A few feet later, the couple stopped, and turned around. They began walking back the way they came, towards Main and Calhoun.

My theory: they hit a walkability barrier. They came to the place where a street's enticements, human, visual, aural, etc., weren't strong enough for casual amblers to continue ambling. On a Saturday morning, there aren't many people on South Main above Butler, unless a special event is going on. So they turned around, right about here.

I'd think tracking, timing and interviewing turnarounds like this would be invaluable if you want to improve the street life of a neighborhood. And while looking for turnarounds, you can walk it yourself, opening yourself to the experience as a newcomer.

If you're wondering why I was stalking a couple with crappy photography, I was trying to get a picture for Sustainable Shelby.

Sculpture Garden on South Main

2008-10-01T13:19:00.007-05:00

I love the sculpture garden that sprouted in the past week at South Main and Talbot.

It's a happy visual surprise.

I love the art and I love its setting, in a corner lot that's neither hyper-manicured nor abandoned. It has a beautiful old Tulip Poplar on the Talbot side, and bushes and small trees on the non-Main sides, to give it definition. The setting feels organically Memphis.

Congratulations to the students who put it together. They have added real economic value to South Main. The value should come back to them.

To Kill a Fairgrounds

2008-09-29T12:15:00.001-05:00

I've shown some role models for Memphis' kind of kid-unfriendly civic leadership before, but I missed one. A big one.

Mr. Radley, Boo Radley's pop.

So mean, he got his own optical zoom.

Here he is closing the knothole to thwart the children.

In dishonor of the closing of the Mid-South Fair in Memphis.

3 Sculptures in Relief

2008-09-26T01:03:00.005-05:00

On St. Luke's United Methodist Church on the Highland Strip.

the Hippo House at the Memphis Zoo,

and the Main Street Fire Station.

Each is a streamlined metal relief representation of the building's function, an alternative to the detailed ornament banished from modernism.

Jane Jacobs' Easter Egg: Nature and the City

2008-09-23T23:35:00.003-05:00

A surprise urban/environmental synthesis from the last pages of Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities:

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this schizophrenic attitude. Instead, it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized suburbanized shadow of nature -- apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in much deeper and more inescapable ways than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift. And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have the killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature's manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the "unnaturalness" of the city.

The semisuburbanized and suburbanized messes we create in this way become despised by their own inhabitants tomorrow. These thin dispersions lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality, staying power, or inherent usefulness as settlements. Few of them, and these only the most expensive as a rule, hold their attraction much longer than a generation; then they begin to decay in the pattern of city gray areas. Indeed, an immense amount of today's city gray belts was yesterday's dispersion closer to "nature."

The Old Forest clearcut and the decline of Parkway Village are displays in the same fictionalized nature exhibit.

One Web Day 2008

2008-09-22T12:55:00.004-05:00

Happy One Web Day 2008, Memphis!

If there's one thing that excites me about the Web and its potential power in Memphis is Thesis 7 of the Cluetrain Manifesto's 95 Theses:

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Subvert, say, Memphis' particularly steep hierarchies of power and wealth, or better, the hierarchy upon which those hordings are built -- the hierarchy of communication.

What are hierarchies of communication good for? Bullshit.

So One Web Day, imho, is about Freedom from Bullshit. And that makes me happy.

Belvedere Block Party 2008

2008-09-19T07:30:00.002-05:00

A new festival in the cool unique location of the pocket park on the corner of Belvedere and Madison.

Building Up

2008-09-18T12:55:00.002-05:00

There's a matte shot in Scorcese's "The Age of Innocence" that has always blown me away. It's a sudden, unexpected shot of a single mansion, standing alone on a corner in the undeveloped grid of what will be upper Manhattan, waiting for the rest of urban New York to catch up. It's a vanguard for the built changes coming to New York. It's a stunning, exciting image.

I was similarly stunned by 2 new buildings in Memphis when I first saw them:

The Rivercrest

and the Stratum on Highland.

Suddenly appearing on corners where parking lots and underurban developments had been for years, they're exciting vanguards for Memphis' under-developed grid. They've done it by:

building over 2 stories

AND

building to the sidewalk, that is, Hell no! to parking lots and mega-berms.

AND

building residences on a mostly commercial street, that is, mixed-use.

AND

building on the corner, that is, magnifying their power.

AND
building on a spot that was either under- or unused before, that is, infill.

The Rivercrest is not so radical for a building in the South Main district, but it immediately changed the way I experienced the corner of Front and Pontotoc. Probably because it filled a corner which was long a surface parking lot. Plus it has a great staggered roof texturing its skyline.

So filling the space next to Gus' Fried Chicken on Front Street is all gravy.

Mixed-use combo.

The Stratum on Highland (which I've posted about before) not only transformed the corner it's on, it's close to physically transforming the street. It's made Highland Strip a more urban space as well as a mix-used environment by adding residences to the street.

And they've done it in an area where they could have easily gotten by with the same old berm/parking lot style development. Far as I'm concerned, the Stratum is THE model for healthy physical changes in the University district. Good design, good use of space.

Will development catch up with them? In a hundred years we won't be as dense as New York, but a Memphis-scaled* density could be so much greater than what we have now. But the Stratum and Rivercrest are very much the exception now.

*by building not much higher than Memphis' great oaks, we could still have 5 to 6 stories of new development that wouldn't dwarf neighborhoods.

Sustaining Sustainable Shelby

2008-09-16T12:45:00.003-05:00

With these 2 upcoming efforts.

Sustainable Tennessee Regional Opportunity Forum

If you want to have a voice in promoting environmental and green issues affecting the future of Greater Memphis and West Tennessee, this is your chance. This event will kick off an ongoing process of building sustainability networks covering multiple issues through the upcoming year. If you are a invested change agent or wish to connect with some, this is the one event for the foreseeable future that you can't afford to miss!

Download a registration form or call 901-569-4423

For more details visit www.sustainablewesttn.org.

The Saturday session is the more interactive and more environmental in tone, however if you are also interested in sustainable development, check out the Friday session as well.

IF YOU HAVE THE TIME, PLEASE ATTEND:
Friday, September 19 – Sustainable Urbanism: Metrics & Techniques with Doug Farr ($95)

An interactive seminar on the emerging pattern of development called Sustainable Urbanism. Primary sub-topics will include an overview of sustainable urbanism, the tools and techniques necessary to implement it, the thresholds and metrics that define it, and the global case studies that exemplify it. Participants will evaluate regional projects including Hernando West, Legends Park, Downtown Bolivar and the Midsouth Fairgrounds. Approved for 7.5 hours AICP-CM and AIA CEU.

PRIMARY EVENT:
Saturday, September 20 – Sustainability: Exploring Initiatives and Regional Issues ($45)

Learn about current regional, state and national initiatives from Sustainable Shelby, the Mississippi River Corridor, Sustainable Tennessee and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Explore the process of developing sustainability initiatives focused on conservation and preservation of natural resources, healthy communities, clean and renewable energy and sustainable development. Participate in roundtable discussions to identify those sustainability issues unique to West Tennessee and the Midsouth region. Approved for 5.5 hours ISA CEU and 0.75 hours General CEU.

Local Co-Hosts: ULI Memphis, University of Memphis Ecological Research Center and Sierra Club.

Sponsored by: Memphis-Shelby County Office of Planning & Development, Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, University of Memphis, Fisher & Arnold, Shelby Farms Park, Belz Enterprises, Tetra Tech, Southeast Recycling, Inc., Boyle Investment Company, LeMoyne-Owen Community Development Corporation in conjunction with the Tennessee Environmental Council and Tennessee Conservation Voters

Call for Sustainable Photos
For The Best of Memphis
And Shelby County!

Mayor A C Wharton’s Sustainable Shelby is looking for digital photographs to advance the Sustainable Shelby initiative and be used in our upcoming Implementation Plan and website. We need your help to capture images that will help us illustrate the importance of sustainability for the future of our community - the things and places that you love about Memphis and Shelby County. We are especially interested in "active" photographs that include not only local places but local people as well.

If you’re an amateur or professional photographer, this is a great way to get your photography published and contribute to this important initiative at the same time. We will of course credit your photo in the Sustainable Shelby plan and on the website.

We'd prefer higher resolution digital color photos, but we will gladly accept any original digital image that you would like to contribute.

Please send digital photographs to photos@sustainableshelby.com and include a brief written description of the photo and let us know where and when it was taken. Please submit your photos anytime between now and October 8, 2008. There is no limit to the number of photographs that can be submitted per person. Thank you in advance for your help with this exciting project!

Photographs could include:
- Local example of natural features or scenic beauty
- Photographs of parks and recreational activities
- “Old Growth” forest in Overton Park
- Photographs of a great public place or urban environment
- Active downtown streetscape
- Downtown Trolley
- Your favorite place to walk, run, or ride your bike
- Neighborhood park with people
- Beale Street
- Memphis Riverfront and Riverboats
- Mud Island
- Harbor Town
- People using the Wolf River Greenway or VECA Greenline
- Community Gardens or neighborhood association activities
- Neighborhood commercial districts
- Historic districts or significant buildings
- Neighborhood clean up activities
- Examples of Public Art
- Local Farmers Market
- Favorite neighborhoods
- Or anything else that you love about Memphis and Shelby County!

So instead of this, they could use this, which might be good.

Memphis can teach, if we don't ignore.

Sites and Visits

2008-09-11T22:23:00.004-05:00

Bookmark Memphis Heritage's new blog. It contains the latest news and events from the org dedicated to preserving the great buildings and neighborhoods of Memphis. Will the pixel be mightier than the wrecking ball? Certainly mightier than the tired excuses for the swinging of the ball.

Memphis Wrestling History has recently moved to a new location, http://www.memphiswrestlinghistory.com/. Make this your go to reference for the very special showmanship and entrepeneurship of Memphis wrestling. Personal favorite: their review of Downtown Bruno's bio.

Sary Lacy, the Business Week tech journalist who had a near-wrestling experience at this year's South by Southwest, is coming to Memphis. She will be speaking at Emerge Memphis about her book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. The talk is sponsored by the very dynamic entrepeneurs and technovangelists of Launch Memphis.

My Midtown Memphis' Ryan posted about his visit to the renovated Sears tower in Minneapolis. Check out his many photos of the Sears Crosstown's identical twin, located in a section of Minneapolis called...Midtown.

Flood Level at the Foot of Beale

2008-09-07T23:26:00.006-05:00

I noticed the flood gauge at the foot of Beale Street for the first time this summer.

I've been wondering whether the River ever touched it.

And the answer is: only once, in February 1937, when the Mississippi crested at 48.7 ft.

The next closest crest was 45.80 ft on 04/23/1927.

In selecting where the City stopped and the River began, Memphis chose wisely.

Police Officer Attacks Bicyclist on Beale Street

2008-09-05T15:40:00.003-05:00

From Anthony Siracusa of Revolutions Bike Shop:

Friends--

Last night I saw a bicycle rider attacked by a police officer.

Around 11:30 p.m., a group of riders headed south on Second Street to the intersection of Second and Beale. With foot traffic very light and no police prohibition at the edge of Beale, the riders rode down Beale to Third Street. Upon seeing further bike traffic as prohibited, the riders turned to head south to bypass the busy section of Beale St. When the cyclists reached Third and Beale, a police officer turned and began waving his arms. To avoid the policeman, who would have otherwise been struck by the bicycles, riders headed south on Third up the sidewalk.

After six riders passed the officer, he became angry. As the seventh rider passed the officer, the policeman grabbed the cyclist by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. Shocked, I slowed to a stop, worried my friend had broken his arm. When my friend pulled himself from the concrete, the officer stepped as close as he could to my friend, who was now bleeding, and screamed into his face: "Didn't I tell you to stop?"

Officer Woodward, badge number 842, had the number "06" pinned to his lapel. After the officer ceased yelling, I asked the him if we were free to go. "You are!" he screamed. "But not your friend! He's getting a citation!" And after a moment's pause, he screamed "You're all getting citations! For hanging around!" We calmly replied that we were concerned that our friend was injured, to which the officer said nothing. After 30 minutes, my friend who was assaulted by a police officer and the three of us that stayed around to be sure he was alright ended up with tickets.

While we waited, three eyewitnesses offered their phone numbers to us and offered to testify against the police in a court of law. Our court date is set for the 21 of October at 1:30 p.m.

The citation reads that we had been warned many times before, and had been seen on Beale riding bicycles before. I have never once been warned about riding bikes on Beale St., and had never in my life seen any of the police officers on duty that night. The police report was falsified.

This type of un-checked violence from police to citizens is not new. This summer, a transgendered woman was assaulted by local police inside a police precinct, and security forces on Beale have been in the news repeatedly for using excessive force.

In court, we will challenge the charges. We are now investigating a suit against the city for assault and excessive force. Our friend almost broke his arm, and whether it is right or wrong that bicycles are not allowed on Beale St., violation of a pedestrian or bicycle law does not warrant violent force to subdue citizens.

On Saturday, September 27, a ride will leave from Revolutions Community Bicycle Shop at First Congregational Church and proceed to Beale Street. We will dismount from our bicycles and walk the entire length of Beale St.

The ride from Revolutions to Beale St. will leave at 6 p.m. on September 27. Meet at the red doors in the back parking lot of First Congregational Church at 5:45.

Please forward this message along to interested parties. For more information or to share similar stories, please contact Anthony Siracusa: 901.949.1201 or sirac@rhodes.edu

Anthony Siracusa
--
First Congregational Church UCC
Revolutions Community Bicycle Shop
1000 S. Cooper St.
Memphis, TN, 38104
(901) 949-1201
www.revolutionsmemphis.com
Thursday 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Sunday 2-5 p.m.

Chalk Architecture Saturday

2008-09-05T00:01:00.011-05:00

Downtown Chalk Art Festival
all kids, adults & families welcome!

Saturday, September 6, 2008
rain date Saturday, September 20
9:30 am- 12:30 pm

Memphis Farmers Market 545 South Main Street (just west of Central Station)

New award categories! "Most Original", "Best Replica", and the "Professional Artist" and "Architecture Firm" division awards in addition to "Youth", "Team" and "Adult"
All supplies provided AND great prizes from the Art Center and Saint Francis Hospital given!

Register in advance to enter the competition, or just stop by and enjoy the other festival activities and select your "Best of Show". So make your grocery list and visit us at the market!

Several activities are on hand at no cost for kids and adults including a free style chalk area, "Balloon Man Mike", face painting, "Draw Dog" from the Art Center, and live music. Due to the generous support of our returning partners Saint Francis Hospital and the Art Center, this event continues to be free to all those who participate. Chalk provided for all pre-registered participants in the competition. Great prizes awarded in all categories.

To register and get more information go to www.aiamemphis.org or call 901.525.3818.