Places matter, and that sense is less common that you might think. For the past 60 years this city, like our nation at large, has willfully ignored the effects that quality of place have on us. Beauty and its absence have powerful effects on people, yet we have placed so little value on beauty that we have built whole neighborhoods, cities and a nation that dehumanize and demoralize us. The public realm and its attitude towards people not only express our values as a society, they in turn influence those values. As we have allowed ourselves to build isolated, detached buildings that do not respect or engage people, the social contract has dissolved. We have begun to accept lack of respect for the public realm and the loss of social decorum as inevitable.
In my neighborhood, East Nashville, nowhere is this effect more striking than on Gallatin Road, a main street so thoroughly depressing none of us has the heart to call it Main Street any longer. East Nashville is by all accounts a progressive neighborhood, full of passionate individuals and leaders, striving to lead the best type of urban life where community and shared responsibility come before personal motives. Quite recently we all witnessed the incredible kindness and generosity East Nashvillians are capable of when citizens of all stripes and means dropped everything to help our neighbors recover from devastating flooding. Yet each day as I depart my house in Eastwood for a job that takes me to Germantown I cross a physical manifestation of the divisions that remain in our community.
Like a scar bisecting our community lies a road which shows so little respect for any human who might use it that we only dare travel it armored in our cars. If you have not tried walking down Gallatin Road, try it sometime. It is an experience not unlike walking down the side of an interstate highway, and about as rewarding. As vehicles speed by you may find yourself sandwiched between them and a chain link fence. The psychological effect of this experience is one of utter fear and desperation. As neighborhoods we have been forced to turn our backs to this expressway, looking inward. Goodbye Main Street, hello Woodland Street. Goodbye Gallatin, hello McFerrin.
This has left us with a glaring gap in the social fabric of our neighborhoods. As you enter East Nashville you don’t see the progressive, socially aware neighborhood you were promised. You have to make a left or a right turn to find that place. Instead you see the least among us, forced to travel this no man’s land on foot day in and day out to access public services like the bus. Remember that experience of walking down Gallatin Road? Imagine doing it day in and day out for years, and what sort of effect that might have on your psyche. This is what we ask our poor to endure, and we expect them to find hope and aspirations among it. Try lifting yourself out of poverty when the message of the physical world is that we don’t even respect you enough to build buildings that acknowledge your existence. Instead we’ve placed them 50 feet from the road, to make sure the rich are able to drive a safe distance away from you before entering the building.
How many neighbors and friends do you know on your side of Gallatin Road? And how many do you know on the other side? Anything disturbing to you about those numbers? Gallatin Road is, at present, perhaps the single greatest lost opportunity in our neighborhood. Gallatin Road should be Main Street, a street that embodies the very best our community has to offer. It should tie together our neighborhoods, and bring us closer as neighbors. It should treat our citizens rich and poor alike humanely. Above all, it should lift our spirits to set foot on it, rather than crush them.
There was a time in our history when we did not need legislation to achieve such goals, because building places that mattered was a part of the social contract. It was understood that buildings express our aspirations as a people and that it is necessary to build buildings, blocks and places that lift us up. From that era we get streets like 2nd Avenue and Lower Broadway, plazas like War Memorial and the Public Square (just now reactivated from an earlier era), all places we as citizens unquestioningly defend the integrity of. Threaten to build a building with 2 acres of parking in front of it on one of those streets today and even the libertarians among us would be lying in front of bulldozers. It is part of our human character to value places of great beauty and harmony. And when we are given places of value, we come out to walk among them, bump into one another, and our civic life is richer.
Nashville has been blessed in recent years to have a growing number of leaders looking out for opportunities to build better places and create a richer civic life, and bit by bit, piece by piece, legislation has passed that sets the framework for how we return to building places of value. Chief among these achievements are the Downtown Code and Gallatin Pike Improvement District Special Plan. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Councilman Mike Jameson, who has quietly and persistently worked to fix our city’s zoning requirements to effect these changes. I am deeply concerned now that some of those achievements are about to be undone.
The first rumblings of this began recently with the temporary relocation of the Greyhound Bus Station to the old Hansen Chrysler dealership on Charlotte Avenue. The North End leadership is understandably upset. That bus station has been an eyesore for as long as I’ve lived in Nashville. In handling the relocation Metro departments and councilwoman Erica Gilmore appear to have conspired to keep the location a secret until the last possible moment. While their behavior is deplorable and in violation of the spirit of our open meetings policy, it has absolute nothing to do with the downtown code and it is equally deplorable that they used the DTC to justify their actions. Before the DTC was passed, the Hansen Chrysler property was already zoned to house a commercial business like Greyhound. Don’t blame the DTC for Greyhound.
The downtown code, admittedly a dense read, is designed to protect neighborhoods from exactly the kind of eyesore that the old bus station presented. The repeal of the DTC leaves inner city neighborhoods open to more business like Greyhound, not fewer. Under the DTC if a business pulls permits to improve the property and they demolish 5% or more of the existing square footage or add 25% more or at least 1000 square feet to the existing structure, they are required to build/fix sidewalks, plant street trees, landscape existing parking, and all of their new construction must meet the standards of the DTC, leading to better buildings and better places than previously existed. The Hansen Chrysler dealership is ugly, and in an area of the North End desperately in need of new life. The Greyhound station, for better or worse, is a vital part of Nashville’s transportation infrastructure. Because we decided to build the MCC, we have to move it somewhere. By placing it inside the DTC, we’re making sure that it cannot again become the eyesore it once was. If this is indeed a temporary move, I hope their permanent location is also inside the DTC.
Even more pressing though is District 5 Councilman Jamie Hollin’s proposal to exempt his district and the north side of Gallatin Road from the SP zoning plan it now enjoys. I have a great deal of respect for Jamie and think he’s the best kind of councilman a neighborhood could hope for, one who listens, but on this I think he’s just plain wrong and in danger of undoing years of work to improve our neighborhood. While some of the details differ, the SP zoning for Gallatin Road is of the same spirit as the DTC and is designed to repair the rift in our community. It’s not perfect, and I could rattle off a list of things I would improve, but it’s the best tool we’ve got to improve the public realm in our neighborhood. I’m disheartened that Councilman Hollin jumped directly to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If there are improvements to be made, let’s improve the thing, but we need these tools if we are to build places of greater substance and value than those we inherited.
The best example we have of urban design on Gallatin Road at the moment, the 5th and Main building, broke ground 2 years before the SP plan was approved. While in general this is a good building, walk by it sometime. None of the entrances are at grade with the sidewalk, instead presenting a low concrete wall to the street and pedestrians. Another barrier between the sidewalk users, mostly the poor in our community, and the building above. Without the SP, even the most well intentioned developers will get these things wrong, and assuming developers are well intentioned is a fool’s wager.
The idea that the costs associated with SP compliance are somehow prohibitive strikes me as a straw man. The greatest cost of building a new building or an addition to an existing building has little to do with whether it’s on the front or back of the lot or how many windows it has. It has a lot more to do with the raw cost of labor and materials. Compliance with the SP over time is going to make it easier to build in our neighborhoods, not more difficult. As the existing building stock is renewed and becomes of greater quality, property owners will find banks more willing to make loans to improve existing properties. Rising property values have a compounding effect. This is what we should be aiming for, not the status quo.
The only part of the SP which seems controversial to me is the part that restricts what types of business may locate in the area. I believe a healthy neighborhood needs all types of businesses within it, including auto repair shops, pawn shops, appliance repair, etc. People need places to work and those uses should not be segregated to areas outside of our neighborhoods. I just want those businesses, when they locate here, to be made to build buildings of substance that engage the street and respect passers by. Eventually a street full of such buildings will begin to price less desirable businesses out and they will spill over into side streets where they’re less visible. But if those businesses have the capital to build the sorts of buildings we aspire to, I don’t see why we should prevent that.
If property owners resist the SP, I am looking to our leaders in Councilmen Jameson, Cole and Hollin to explain to them the benefits the SP bring to the neighborhood and to their property values. And it is my sincere hope that Councilman Hollin will reconsider his proposal to exempt District 5 from SP zoning.
Yours in Eastwood,
Brandon Valentine