chelovek

Fixed

Here's a September 2013 master plan of the church expansion that shows which lots are in play: http://www.firstbaptistnashville.org/images/wygwam/FBC%20MPIC%20Master%20Plan%20Presentation.pdf

Can we start taking bets? I have no knowledge of what might be on the radar, but my wild guesses are: 1) a prominent east nashville/main street mixed use building near 5th and main 2) a similar mixed use project in the nations on 51st ave north 3) and the big one- now that Bud Adams has passed, the titans will consolidate a considerable portion of their parking lots into structured garages with ground floor retail/bars and open up the rest of the footprint for a new mixed use neighborhood within the downtown interstate loop. Strings will be the anchor.

It looks like they've replaced the farmers market with a satellite meharry campus with a clinic, academic buildings, student housing, etc... and then moved the farmers market closer to the river. I think the market is number 3 on that rendering. I like the harvard one best because it is intentional not only about mixing uses (institutional, recreational, commercial, residential, public space, etc...) but also users (students, workforce, market, luxury). Nashville's best neighborhoods are the ones where there is a mixture of different housing types and rent levels. It creates a vibrancy that just doesn't happen when everybody is at basically the same stage of life. The only thing I see lacking is the omission of a neighborhood elementary or middle school. It would also be nice if the proposed "community wellness center" was explicit about having services and programs for seniors, and if at least some of the housing was intentional about meeting the specific needs of older adults. The one thing that seems to be consistent across the submissions is an emphasis on sustainable design elements that embrace the river and the historic spring and also a lack of surface parking, which I like quite a bit. Metro planning should consider picking out the best elements of these submissions and working with community members to create an urban design overlay for sulphur dell. There is going to be a bonanza of growth here over the next decade. It would be a shame for these well made plans to go to waste.

UP folks might be interested in this event on wednesday night at Neuhoff: http://www.pechakucha.org/cities/nashville/events/52f2ab114f5c298b54000001

This project will do much to increase walkability in Green Hills. it will bring new modern sidewalks, better crosswalks, and new possibilities. Residents will not have to drive into green hills and park two or three times to stop at the grocery store, the book store, pull into the gas station, etc... they will be able to just cross the street. Likewise, the office workers of this building will be able to commute in the morning, park once, and then accomplish most daily errands - grabbing lunch or whatever- on foot. I fail to see how a gas station and a drive through coffee shop with cracked or nonexistent sidewalks ever encouraged pedestrian culture. Can you give me an example of what you mean by that?

This one will happen. Crews were taking down one of the billboards a few days ago. I feel sorry for all the NIMBYs who will have to eat crow when this attractive project is done. Whosoever stands in the way of progress to save a gas station, old burger king, and a bunch of crappy billboards- shame on you.

On the section between 8th Ave S and the new bridge, I count 11 curb cuts. 5 of those 11 could be eliminated while preserving access to the existing structures. Eliminating the extraneous curb cuts would open up additional parking spaces on the existing properties. It would also reduce points of conflict between drivers and users of the Multi-Use Path. It would probably be better for traffic flow as well. I don't understand why MPW isn't reconsidering the curb cuts along this stretch given how much of the roadway is being reconfigured. You can't really tell in this map, but the area between lafayette and 2nd ave S is encapsulated in a big orange bubble with the label "Connection to 2nd Ave Still Under Review." However, when I spoke to the project engineers at the public meeting for this project they weren't very optimistic about being able to acquire enough right of way to connect to 2nd. They did talk about potentially extending the multi-use path along Ash, snaking it through Metro's Fulton Complex, and then connecting it to the rolling mill hill greenway. more details here: http://www.nashville.gov/Public-Works/Capital-Projects/Division-Street-Extension.aspx

Any chance we can get the architect behind this project the contract for the old convention center rehab? It is heartening to see somebody building something that will add to the vibrancy of downtown rather than turn away from it.

Its because the Convention Center Authority is a quasigovernmental entity that doesn't have to play by the normal rules. They have quite a bit of power and not a lot of scrutiny.

The ledger has a piece about this project in their current issue. Apparently the winning design had an edge because it included upgrades to the existing ballroom space for the hotel. Says Charlie Starks, CEO of convention center authority: The ledger piece also includes an interior rendering of the retail component, which IMO looks like a crappy 80's mall and makes me puke in my mouth a little bit. WTF convention center authority? I can't believe that in 2014 architects are still turning buildings inward like this. Have these people learned nothing about the importance of a vibrant streetscape? My opinion of this project would instantly become positive if they turned this crappy courtyard inside out and activated the street with it.

Or MarketStreet could decide to create a publicly accessible park on their privately owned land. It would only increase the value of their surrounding investments. Public Space is a quality of life generator that will help guarantee occupancy and high rents for decades to come. If I worked at MarketStreet and was developing a long term strategy- I'd get my butt in gear on an open space plan for the few remaining vacant parcels in the neighborhood. I agree that Metro shouldn't be expected to contribute at this point. Considering all the public investment and now the pedestrian bridge that has been concentrated in this area, MarketStreet should be expected to provide public benefits like open space. In fact, MarketStreet reps seem to agree: http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/blog/2011/10/public-financing-may-help-bring-an.html I personally wish MarketStreet would convert the currently vacant lot bounded by pine street, gleaves, and the railroad yard into an urban park with some character (not just a grassy area for dogs to crap on). They could grant metro an easement for an ada accessible ramp to the new pedestrian bridge at the same time, as the bridge project designers initially pursued. I think this side of the gulch is too often overlooked. In my opinion there is a really good urban fabric and existing building stock there that has allowed for creative locals to come in and do cool stuff that simply isn't cost effective in a brand new mixed use building. The "middle Gulch" is great too, but it is pretty cookie cutter new urbanist. A pine street park would tie together the south and middle gulch and would allow MarketStreet to bring much better rents from their surrounding buildings. It would also be something appreciated by locals and tourists alike. Come on MarketStreet! Bring some park space for the Gulch!

I got in touch with the folks at the Melrose. Maybe we're jumping the gun. Here is their response: Thank you for your concern and please know that construction is not complete at this time and we plan to add sidewalks around the poles to comply with ADA. Regards

I believe ADA requires a minimum of 60" or alternatively 36" with 60" passing zones at regular intervals. Although I haven't measured, driving by it seems like the sidewalks in question don't meet either of those requirements. I'm guessing the problem is that this development is technically in Berry Hill, which only recently adopted codes requiring sidewalks. I doubt they have much experience with enforcing ADA. Compare it with the other new Franklin Pike development, which is technically in Nashville. Their sidewalks are banging. Metro public works isn't a model agency by any means, but I they spend a lot of sidewalk dollars retrofitting noncompliant sidewalks to be ADA compliant ever since a federal court placed an injunction on the city in the early 00's. While this means there is less money for new sidewalk construction, its still important work. We need more sidewalk money generally, or at least a better way to pay for new sidewalks. Unfortunately, Berry Hill might not get their codes act together until they get sued.

There must be something useful that can be done with a giant hole. For many reasons we'll never have a subway system in Nashville.... but if it ever comes to that, palmer & co have already excavated a good central site to drop the tunnel boring machines into!

The area is governed by the downtown code. It is specified as the Gulch North subdistrict, except for the parcels fronting Charlotte Avenue, which are Gulch South. The standard max height for buildings in this subdistrict is 7 stories. Bonus height is available for the standard list of niceties up to 10 stories below 560' elevation. The regulations specify that buildings should be set back no more than 10 feet from the sidewalk. Parking is supposed to be contained behind buildings. The max height for the Gulch south parts of the property are 10 stories, with a required 15' step back after seven stories. A maximum of 16 stories is allowed for the Charlotte Ave Gulch South properties. The post reports that franklin based Kiser + Vogrin is behind the north gulch master plan. http://kiservogrin.com/

Does anybody know what this deal means for the old Ben West Library? Not too long ago the city and the state had proposed swapping Ben West for the Nashville School of the Arts property on Foster, with Ben West slated to become more state surface parking. Now, my understanding is that the city will acquire the NSA property as part of the Ballpark land swap deal. I haven't heard anything about what that means for Ben West, though. Hopefully this means it will be taken off the chopping block and can be put to good use.

I'm with you! The REI proposal seamlessly continues the streetwall from lower broad and does an excellent job addressing the street from the pedestrian's point of view. I too like the modest frontage height for this location, which is respectful of the historic structures along Broad. Although the REI proposal is not shattering any height records or making a statement (that would probably look dated in 10 years anyway), it is good urbanism and its form provides a basic structure that could be repurposed over and over again for years to come. The beauty of architecture with goods bones is that it can be adapted to meet the needs of its time, unlike the single use megablock widescrapers that become obsolete after 25 years of use.

From this angle it kind of looks like they took the new convention center and ironed it to get rid of the "rolling hills" effect. The cladding material and popout balconies seem to be ripped directly from the music city center design vocabulary. Maybe I'm just thinking this because of the way that it responds to the sloping terrain of 5th Ave like the MCC does with Demonbreun. If I were a retailer looking for some good curb appeal for window shoppers- I don't think I'd find much to covet in this building. Looks pretty opaque. I just don't see much on the street level to engage and delight pedestrians, which is my biggest complaint about the structure currently on this site.

The plans currently call for just stairs and an elevator on the gulch side, which is a huge mess for cyclists and could be a problem for people using mobility devices if this bridge is anything like the Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge, where the elevators stop running after a certain hour. Check out the info online at the link below and be sure to leave a comment either online or at tonight's meeting (tonight, 5-7pm at Music City Center). If we're going to build a 16 million dollar bridge, it should be accessible and functional. Heck, even if it was a 1 million dollar bridge it should be accessible and functional. http://www.nashville.gov/Public-Works/Capital-Projects/Gulch-Pedestrian-Bridge.aspx

I believe that it is actually for Assurion at 1st and KVB. They have a special staircase down to the KVB sidewalk now for Assurion employees

Music City Star, small rail networks face funding pinch from lawsuit A lawsuit filed by two of the nation’s largest railroads challenging Tennessee’s tax on diesel fuel for locomotives could lead to a shutdown of the Music City Star commuter train and a network of smaller railroads that feed tons of cargo from Tennessee companies onto the big carriers’ systems daily, say operators of the smaller lines. A federal judge in Nashville this week sided with CSX Corp. in its suit against the state Revenue Department, prompting the state to freeze the assets in its Short Line Equity Fund, which gets its money from the state’s tax on diesel fuel, leaving operators such as the Nashville and Eastern Railroad Authority without money to pay their bills. The Nashville and Eastern Railroad Authority owns the tracks on which the Music City Star operates, and relies on money from the state rail fund to pay off the $2.5 million loan it took out to upgrade its 30 miles of track between Nashville and Lebanon to accommodate the daily passenger trains. “We have a $255,000 payment due to First Tennessee Bank in January, and until now, the money for these payments was coming from the state rail fund,” said Val Kelley, managing director of the Nashville and Eastern Railroad Authority. “We have no other way to pay it.” The authority, which owns and maintains the stretch of the former Tennessee Central Railroad line to Monterey, also has a $405,000 payment due in June on a $7.5 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture used to reopen the track from Cookeville to Monterey to serve a new sand plant for LoJac, a company that provides raw construction materials. CSX and BNSF Railway Corp. filed similar but separate suits in September in U.S. District Court in Nashville, contending that the state’s 7 percent sales and use tax “on diesel fuel purchased and used for rail transportation purposes is discriminatory and unlawful” under the federal Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 because it does not also apply to highway and water shippers. The want the court to permanently enjoin the state from collecting the tax, which amounted to about $14 million last year. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Kevin H. Sharp sided with CSX and issued a preliminary injunction barring the state from continuing to collect the tax, pending final disposition of the lawsuits and an appeal in a separate earlier case brought by the Illinois Central Railroad. The process could take several years, said Nashville attorney Matt Scanlan, lobbyist for the Tennessee Short Line Rail Association. In response, the state Transportation Department, with Gov. Bill Haslam’s approval, immediately froze the $40 million now in the Short Line Equity Fund, and will not release any of that money to the 18 state short lines that depend on the money for maintenance and improvement projects, Kelley said. That might not necessarily be the case for a handful of projects, though, according to a statement from the Transportation Department on Friday. Through a spokeswoman, the department said: “We issued a stop work notice on Sept. 20, and TDOT will reimburse for any authorized and satisfactory expenditures the rail authorities incurred. Rail authorities were given an opportunity to request that projects be continued. Five projects that were well underway have been approved for completion.” No alternative funding But Kelley and other short-line authorities say they were told in a meeting with Transportation Commissioner John Schroer that there is no alternative funding source, and that, with the fund frozen, none of them will get any state aid. “If we don’t get the money to pay on our notes in January and June, we very well may have to file bankruptcy,” he said. Scanlan said that would effectively shut down the Nashville and Eastern rail line, and put both the Music City Star — operated by the Lebanon-based Transit Solutions Group LLC — and the privately held Nashville and Eastern Railroad Corp. out of business. The authority leases trackage rights to both of those companies. The Nashville and Eastern Railroad Corp., based in Manchester, Vt., is a freight hauler that operates along the entire 130 miles of mainline and spur track owned by the rail authority. It also runs freight on a separate line between Nashville and Ashland City as the Nashville and Western Railroad; those tracks are owned by the Ashland City-based Cheatham County Railroad Authority. Ed Cole, a board member for the Cheatham County Rail Authority, attended the meeting of the short line authorities with Schroer, and Cole said it was his understanding that no more money would be available until the railroads’ lawsuit is settled. “One member asked the commissioner if there was a way the department could help the short-line authorities with some funding during this period of determining what was going to happen with these revenues,” Cole said. “The commissioner’s response was that the department did not have an additional source of funds to provide this. In terms of the Cheatham County Rail Authority, we do not have a reserve account to handle this gap in funding.” The Nashville and Eastern line alone serves more than 50 industrial clients, including Coca-Cola, Kenwal Steel, LoJac Materials, Mid-South Wire, Georgia Pacific and Dow Chemical. The rail company moves more than a half-million tons of cargo each year on the line, which connects to the CSX mainline in Nashville. Motives questioned Most of the short lines are owned by rail authorities that took over sections of track that the major railroads were about to abandon, beginning with the federal deregulation of the U.S. railroad industry in the early 1980s. The boards of the rail authorities are mostly made up of county and city mayors in the areas served by the lines. Kelley, head of the Nashville and Eastern authority since 2000, was a key state Department of Transportation official involved in creation of the rail authorities and the Short Line Equity Fund in the mid-’80s. “At TDOT, we worked to set up this network of rail authorities to be able to save all of these rail lines that the Class 1 railroads wanted to abandon, and we came up with the fuel tax as a way to rehabilitate these tracks that the big railroads had been neglecting for decades,” Kelley said. “Over the past 25 years, we’ve spent more than $80 million to rebuild track, bridges and other structures and create nearly 900 miles of short-line railroads to serve industrial customers from Memphis to Mountain City.” The short lines, which touch 36 counties, have helped bring numerous economic development projects and thousands of jobs to those areas, he said. “When an industrial prospect is looking for a place to build a new facility, rail access is usually one of the requirements.” Scanlan, the short lines’ lobbyist, said: “Ironically, the Class 1 railroads helped create this tax and the mechanism by which local governments could create these rail authorities. The Class 1 railroads said, ‘We’re going to help pay for the upgrade and maintenance of this track, but it will be up to you to run the service.’ ” In the mid-’80s, the big railroads “were eager to spin off these smaller lines that were left needing a lot of track upgrades to run the heavier loads of today,” Scanlan said. “Now, they’ve found a clever way to ensure that the funding mechanism for that effort is no longer effective. Why? I can’t speak to their motives.” New tax bill planned To fix the problem, Scanlan said, the Tennessee Short Line Rail Alliance plans to push a bill through the next session of the General Assembly to change the rail diesel tax to the same formula used for over-the-road trucks, which now is assessed at 18 cents per gallon. “Oddly, by our calculations, the railroads actually save money under the current 7 percent tax plan over what they would have to pay if we go to the 18-cents-a-gallon tax,” he said. “Diesel fuel has to get to about $4 a gallon for the two taxes to be equal.” Until the new tax plan can be worked through the legislature and put into place, the short lines should have access to the money already in the rail fund, even if no new tax collections are being made, Scanlan said. “We hope that the problem now is short-term, and we hope we can solve it, but we’re not sure what avenues we can pursue. There is $40 million in the Short Line Equity Fund, but it has been frozen in anticipation that those funds would have to be paid out in refunds to the Class 1 railroads. But that is a somewhat remote possibility that I don’t think will happen, and it will take up to two years for the appeal to be heard. That’s a long time to freeze those funds.” Scanlan also noted that it’s unusual for a state fund to be frozen just because of a lawsuit. “A lot of state programs get sued from time to time, and we typically don’t stop funding them just because we’re having a little trouble with the funding mechanism,” he said. “We believe we can fix the mechanism. And considering how important the short-line program is to the state of Tennessee, we need to find a short-term solution. “We’re certainly not asking the General Assembly to give us an ongoing appropriation. But the Short Line Equity Fund has worked very well for the past 15 years. That rail service it has made possible has attracted business and jobs to Tennessee.” Staff writer Nate Rau contributed. Contact G. Chambers Williams III at [email protected]. http://www.tennessean.com/article/20131102/BUSINESS01/311020042/1972/NEWS02

rumor has it that the new dillards will take that long because they are planning 23 stories (to one-up the richard jones development.)

You have to be creative, but you can walk green hills. The other day a friend and I parked at greenbriar village. We went to Parnassus and Donut Den. Then I had to get cash so we walked over to the US bank across richard jones road. Richard Jones has decent sidewalks. Next we walked down Richard jones to trader joes. The crosswalk there is ugly but it exists and there is a signal phase for pedestrian crossing. This will likely be improved with the new building. After shopping at TJ's we crossed again and walked along the really nice sidewalk in front of greenbriar village, dropped the groceries off in the car. Crossed again at Abbot Martin. Here we cheated- although we weren't going to the mall we did walk through it. Think of it as a climate controlled pedestrian bypass with a lot of teens and expensive retail to ignore. Exiting onto the north side of the mall there is quite a nice sidewalk that you can take to the theatre. You then have to pass by the rather charming outdoor cafe at table 3. Then we walked back to the theater and watched gravity which was INTENSE! After the movie we walked back along the north side of the mall past a lot of al fresco dining that would be more charming if it didn't look out onto a sea of parking. There is a staircase down from the nordstrom parking lot that leads to a fine sidewalk along hillsboro. We took it back to abbot martin, crossed over to greenbriar village, hopped in the car and went on our way, although we could have walked down the pleasant sidewalks on bandywood to the greenhouse bar for a drink. Yes, lots of work remains to make green hills walkable. Changing perceptions of appropriate transportation will be as important as installing the remaining infrastructure, though.

That first one (the fogg-ash connector) was what was proposed in the major and collector streets plan. It is off the table now. The second map shows the division street extension as currently proposed. Metro prefers this plan because it requires fewer property acquisitions and less demolition of existing structures.