Raising Deaderick

As the avenue linking the major monuments of Metro and state governments, it would be hard to equal Deaderick Street for symbolic value or stunning sightlines. At the east end lays the Public Square and Metro Courthouse. The western end terminates in the State Capitol’s front yard, Legislative Plaza, and the classical portico of the War Memorial, backed by the travertine testament to modernism now known as the Tennessee Tower.

What lies between, however, is a monument to mediocrity: a concrete canyon of bland buildings with little visual interest at street level. With the relocation of the transit mall to the new Music City Central bus depot, Deaderick’s human activity is largely restricted to dashing between offices and parking. Why stroll if there are no opportunities for people watching or storefront gazing?

Mayor Karl Dean sees the removal of the bus shelters as an opportunity to reintegrate Deaderick into downtown’s evolution as more than just a place to do business. To that end, he commissioned Hawkins Partners landscape architects, working with the Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) and Public Works, to develop a plan to put some life back into the street. The resulting three-stage scenario will be presented for public comment today at 11:30 a.m. at the Nashville Civic Design Center.

The plan’s designers confronted one of the most pedestrian-hostile environments in downtown Nashville.

“Sixty-five percent of Deaderick is lined by blank street walls; between Fourth and Sixth avenues it’s 80 percent,” says Kim Hawkins. “And that’s not counting the black glass” that’s ubiquitous in building frontages. Such lack of transparency has a disquieting effect on pedestrians. “At the public meeting last spring,” she explains, “people commented that they feel unsafe attending events at TPAC.”

Hawkins notes the unavailability of on-street parking.

“Our survey found 90 percent of the parking on Deaderick occupied by cars with handicapped stickers.”

This all-day encampment by apparently disabled state workers makes short-term parking by casual users of the street close to impossible. Mitigation methods could include barring metered parking before 9 a.m. and enforcement of the two-hour limit on meters.

Hawkins also points out “the sidewalks are in poor condition and 61 percent of the trees are poor to failing, which feels oppressive.”

In considering de-oppression strategies, Dean said his first instinct was to get rid of the cars completely. But Hawkins convinced the mayor that this nation’s successful urban pedestrian-only streets are few and far between. Those that work, such as Denver’s 16th Street Mall, capitalized on pre-existing conditions; a lively retail/restaurant scene and lots of nearby residents, bolstered by tourists and/or a nearby college or university population, as in Charlottesville, Va. Deaderick today meets none of these criteria.

What Deaderick does have are 7,000 state employees as well as the additional workers at Bank of America and Regions Center, 221 residential units and 452 hotel rooms within one block, and ample structured parking — over 2,400 public spaces in garages on or near the street.

The planners also had a big street floor to play with — four 12-foot-wide vehicular lanes as wide as interstate lanes and 32-foot-wide sidewalks. Dean told them to think of this broad swathe as a flexible parcel of land rather than a 112-foot right-of-way.

The plan the designers came up with features three phases to extend the civic and social life of downtown to Deaderick along Fourth and Fifth avenues. These streets are the focus of the Downtown Partnership’s strategy for attracting more retail to the central city.

Phase 1, “immediate improvements,” will cost $4.5 million in Public Works funds and is scheduled for completion in 2009. To make the wide street less intimidating to cross, the plan features specially paved crosswalks, a shrub-filled median and pedestrian bulb-outs at corners flanked by on-street parking. The existing four lanes are reduced to two. Pedestrian-friendly lighting includes strings of lights in newly planted trees and light tubes on sidewalks, as well as the traditional street fixtures. Wayfinding/information kiosks at the intersections with Fourth and Fifth avenues, designed to allude to the cupola of the State Capitol, present maps and historical facts about the area. Semi-permanent vendor kiosks — newsstands and cafés — with fixed seating will draw people to the sidewalks. The plan recommends that the current Lunch Line Trolley be rerouted to include Deaderick to deliver downtowners to the street.

“The idea is that the public makes the first investment” to build a floor on which new development can stand, Dean explains.

Phase 2 sets forth the development potential of the street. Included in the 37,500 square feet total for retail/restaurant space are the current vending machine mall in the base of the Andrew Jackson Building and the void at the corner of TPAC, as well as the attachment of transparent liner buildings to the fronts of existing structures along the street. These liners are in many cases linked to leasable space currently lying behind black glass fronts, thus mitigating the blank wall phenomenon while leaving a more than adequate 14-foot sidewalk with outdoor seating. A second floor restaurant with terrace appears on the corner of Regions Center at Fourth Avenue and Deaderick.

New construction in phase two includes first floor retail on the parking lot next to St. Mary’s Church topped by 11,300 square feet of office. This stage also foresees 94 residential units — the mayor wants an affordable workforce housing component — attached to the east and west ends as well as on top of the Public Square garage at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Deaderick. To stimulate the private investment necessary to make all this development happen, the plan considers strategies to provide tax incentives. The standard vehicle of tax increment financing through MDHA is not available since the agency’s redevelopment district covering the street expired in 1998.

Phase 3, full build-out, assumes that all the development potential has been achieved and the rest of downtown is really hopping. This stage features vendor kiosks replacing the median between Fourth and Fifth avenues. Automotive access to the street is reduced to early morning service vehicles and all-day trolleys.

The plan for Deaderick Street is an ambitious one, carefully crafted to utilize existing buildings and infrastructure and avoid massive public investment. The irony is that the street once was what the mayor hopes it can be again, a place that combined business with pleasure and mixed class with class. Then, in the late-1960s, the so-called “urban renewers” arrived on the scene. They imagined that urbanity is defined by skyscrapers rather than by streets. They failed to grasp that streets are a city’s outdoor rooms, with buildings the walls and sidewalks and streets the living space of public life. These rebuilders made Deaderick into a room with no view, and the street died.

Dean is to be admired for trying to play Lazarus. But he’s got some heavy lifting to do.