The Knight Program at The University of Miami

Memphis Winchester Park/Intown Charrette Blog
by Mary Newsom

Mary Newsom is a Knight Program Fellow and associate editor of the Charlotte Observer

Monday, July 17, 2006

Day 1

Clean up the neighborhood. Get property owners, especially absentee landlords, to fix their buildings. Make the area safer for those who live and work there.

Those were some of the key themes emerging Monday night at the community meeting and public kickoff of the Winchester Park/Intown charrette.

An estimated 80 people spent a couple of hours talking about what they’d like to see the area become. Charles “Chuck” Bohl of the University of Miami, director of the Knight Program in Community Building – which is sponsoring the charrette – posed this question: If you won the lottery and spent 20 years away from the neighborhood and came back, having spent your winnings, what would you hope to find?

Participants at each of 12 tables came up with ideas, and drew them on maps. Then a spokesman for each table presented to the whole gathering. Among the suggestions:

Narrow Poplar Avenue so it isn’t six lanes wide. Provide activities for neighborhood kids, especially after school, weekends and summers. Provide services, including stores within walking distance, for seniors. Don’t forget bicycle riders. What about community gardens?

The charrette team took the ideas and drawings and will compile the suggestions, along with their own observations, research and expertise. They’ll talk with smaller groups of people – for example, hospital officials, representatives of nonprofit groups and neighborhood residents – to sketch plans and proposals. Throughout the week those working plans will be refined.

The public is invited to stop by the design studios – in the basement of St. Mary’s Cathedral – any time. To hear a summary of the ideas so far, come to the public “pin-up” meetings at noon Wednesday and at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

The final presentation and public meeting will be 5 p.m. Saturday.

Tuesday, July 18

Day 2

Today was jammed with stakeholder meetings – seven in all. Two others were held Monday, and four are planned for Wednesday. Some of the meetings were: “Developers, Land Owners and Home Builders,” “Business Owners and Nonprofits,” “Memphis Medical Center,” “Churches,” and “Neighborhood Residents.”

Dozens of concerns, and opportunities, came out. Some examples:

--Crime makes working in the neighborhood uncomfortable. It hurts employers’ ability to hire and retain workers.

--Walking in the neighborhood isn’t pleasant, because of panhandlers and crime worries. Also, the sidewalks aren’t very inviting, traffic on Poplar is too fast, and the area isn’t attractive.

--Code enforcement isn’t effective. Too many properties are deteriorating, possibly abandoned. City officials say they need a bigger “stick” to get property owners’ attention – the maximum fine now is $50, which is set in the state constitution. There’s political sensitivity to using existing techniques for taking over abandoned/neglected property.

--Most of the services that homeless people use are in this area. But Memphis lacks any overall coordination of homeless services, such as an Urban Ministries Center or homeless services coalition.

Tuesday night the charrette team – all 11 University of Miami students, the 12 Knight Fellows who represent a variety of professions, plus university professors and consultants – shared their summaries and ideas.

For example, architecture Professor Joanna Lombard proposed thinking of the large collection of medical facilities as three nodes, each large enough for a 5-minute walk: the Ronald McDonald House node, the LeBonheur-Med node, and a Methodist Hospital node.

Wednesday, July 19

Day 3

The plans – or at least several different versions of plans – are starting to take shape. For instance, why not a series of towers in the medical district? Should the natural bayou that runs through the area be freed from its concrete prison to become a pedestrian-bicycle greenway? Does Morris Park need to be so big? The charrette team is split over that one.

The team spent the day listening to the last of the stakeholder groups – education, housing, public safety and parks/open space – and pulling together common themes. Then we came up with some early versions of recommendations, presented at a public “pin-up” meeting at noon. Among the people who came to the pin-up, reaction seemed generally positive.

Following are some of the proposals as of Wednesday night. Remember, these are just ideas; nothing is final:

Let each of the dozen or so medical institutions build a small tower, like a bell tower, to give the area a sense of identity and to help orient people. Each tower would look different, so you’d know which of the institutions you were near. For an idea of how it might look, said University of Miami architecture Professor Joanna Lombard, consider the Italian hill town of San Gimignano.

One proposal was to develop multistory housing, with space on the ground floor for cafes, coffeehouses or shops, on one or two sides of Morris Park. The idea is to have more people living, working or visiting around the park, so more people are watching. That’s a big help in deterring criminals.

But some of the charrette team think that idea might be a mistake. Is it politically feasible to get rid of public green space? And if the area develops as we envision – with a lot more people living and working here – it might need a park as big as Morris Park, although we agree that right now, the park is bigger than it needs to be.

The area should be thought of as a series of neighborhood nodes, or centers, each of them centered on a key intersection or institution. Each node is roughly a circle – the distance it takes people to walk about 5 minutes, which is generally about as far as people are willing to walk for a cup of coffee, or lunch, or to catch a bus or trolley, for instance.

Some cities use their creeks – which is what the rest of the country calls a bayou – as amenities and linear parks. Is that a possibility for the bayou that runs north through the area, along the edge of what’s now Dixie Homes and under I-40? Currently it’s mostly underground in a big concrete culvert, although it runs in the open – though still in a concrete chasm – for about a block near I-40. Again, opinions are split. Would it be worth the trouble to rip out the concrete? Can an area large enough to serve as a floodplain be created? Etc. Jon Ford, the Knight Fellow from Boston who’s a civil and stormwater engineer, is on the case.

Poplar Avenue doesn’t need to be six lanes wide through this area. Narrow it to four lanes, add a median and on-street parking. And for goodness sakes, put in some street trees for shade. On 90-degree days, being in the shade can make a 5- to 10-degree difference.

Thursday, July 20

Day 4

Refine, research, refine again, sketch, confer and sketch again. The charrette team by Thursday was deep into its work. With a 5:30 p.m. public “pin-up” session scheduled, the whole day took on an “on deadline” feel for many.

A noontime lecture on “Walkable Communities” drew a full parish hall at St. Mary’s Cathedral to hear Knight Fellow Jon Ford discuss how cities can create new neighborhoods, or retrofit old ones, so they encourage people to walk, not drive.

Ford, a civil and stormwater engineer from Boston, explained that slowing traffic – through the design of the streets and the sidewalks – can pay off in dramatically fewer pedestrian deaths and injuries. According to Federal Highway Administration statistics, if a pedestrian is hit by a car going 40 miles an hour, there’s an 85 percent chance the pedestrian will be killed, and the remaining 15 percent of pedestrians will be injured.

At 30 mph, the death rate drops to 45 percent, with 50 percent chance of injury, and a 5 percent chance of no injury.

But at 20 mph, 30 percent of pedestrians hit wouldn’t even be injured. Though 65 percent would be injured, there’s only a 5 percent chance of death.

Ford also praised the multiple benefits of street trees, not the least of which are economic. Properties with street trees have higher real estate values – that translates into higher property tax collections for cities and counties. Street trees can reduce the temperature on the streets by 4 to 7 degrees – important in a place where, as we’ve learned this week, summer temperatures can hit the high 90s or above.

And the presence of street trees can have a safety benefit. One study found that having trees along a street could reduce vehicle speeds by 10 or 15 mph.

At the 5:30 p.m. public meeting, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture and one of the country’s most well-known architects and town planners, asked the audience for reactions to some of the proposals.

One question the charrette team has: Should the bayou through the neighborhood, now an unkempt area of trash and poison ivy, be transformed into a natural wetlands and public greenway area? Neighborhood resident Celestine Hill preferred the option of covering it up. The charrette team doesn’t know yet whether federal water- and wetlands-protection laws would allow the bayou to be completely covered. Stay tuned.

Jaime Correa, a professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, showed his sketch of the area around Morris Park, which stakeholders complained wasn’t safe due to crime. The charrette team also had noticed most of the park was trashy and poorly maintained and, except for the basketball court, used primarily by people sleeping on benches. Correa’s drawing proposed lining the park’s west and southern edges with mixed-use buildings, one of them featuring a loggia – a covered walkway framed by columns.

Again, that was just one person’s idea. The charrette team’s urban design experts believe that in terms of designing a great-looking urban park in a lively neighborhood, Morris Park probably needs to shrink. But they also think there’s a lot of other property in the area – vacant lots, surface parking, etc. – where development could occur. As of noon Friday they were leaning toward presenting a variety of options for the park area.

Saturday July 22

Day 6

Showtime.

I counted almost 100 people in the audience Saturday to hear the final presentation of the plans the charrette team has been working on since Monday, July 17. The PowerPoint show and the drawings and photos on display portrayed a Winchester Park neighborhood much different from what's there now.

Drawings envisioned a tree-lined Poplar Avenue with a median and on-street parking. Plenty of new buildings were drawn, almost all facing directly onto sidewalks, not pushed behind large surface parking lots.

The list of recommendations is too long to repeat here in its entirety. You can see the Powerpoint presentation, complete with drawings, on this website (click here).

Major themes:
-Create grand avenues along Poplar and Dunlap, with pedestrian amenities, improved sidewalks, street trees, etc.
-For the huge Medical Center area, begin to think of it as three walkable neighborhoods centered on LeBonheur, Methodist and St. Jude. Develop each with a Main Street and a street grid, which will provide district-wide connectivity. Within the district, use ornamental fences or gateways to help create a more attractive pedestrian edge, and use improved signage as well as the streetscape designs, to give the different institutions more individual identity.
-Build a “towerscape” of campaniles (bell towers) to guide visitors and give a memorable character to the district.
-Create a public shuttle, probably using Dunlap as the key connector, to link the medical facilities, including St. Jude, with each other and the Madison Avenue trolley.
-Begin a Healthy Neighborhood Initiative, a public-private partnership dedicated to community building and strategic investment to serve the current residents of Winchester Park/Intown. This could include employment training, expanded housing options for families, and better educational opportunities.
-Improve code enforcement, and give the city more tools in its toolbox for dealing with property owners who abandon property or let it sink into blight.
-The final recommendation for the bayou? Cover it over – yes, it was determined that’s legal – and put a park on top of it.

The towerscape idea became the basis for one of the loveliest drawings -- Knight Fellow Geoff Dyer of Calgary, Canada, drew a vision of Poplar Avenue looking east and south, with the tower of St. Mary's Cathedral visible. Rising above were nine or ten other slim towers, each slightly different. It's likely to become the iconic drawing to represent the whole charrette.

Want to know more? Check the other charrette materials on the Knight Program web site, including the PowerPoint of the charrette's final presentation.