Main Street Journal: Feature Article: Progress and Preservation

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The following article is taken from the July 2009 issue of the Main Street Journal. Click “Subscribe Online” above to start your subscription.

Progress & Preservation: Can Memphis afford to look the same?
By: Michael Roy Hollihan

While the City Council was having titanic discussions about the City’s budget in early June, they also passed a resolution that was little noticed at the time. The resolution was simple and specific: No permit would be issued for demolition work on Overton Square without the prior approval of the City Council. The resolution still hasn’t attracted much discussion, however could have some very far-reaching consequences for the City of Memphis.

The resolution proposed by Councilman Shea Flinn was intended to be a stop sign for development in Overton Square, a guarantee that the developer and “the community [are] going to be involved in a dialog” before building. Why such a drastic step to get people to talk?

Memphis Heritage — whose mission is to be “the voice for the preservation of the Memphis area’s architectural heritage” — has been working for eight months to find out who is trying to buy the property and what they plan to do with it. It hasn’t been easy. “That was part of the issue here. There was no real plan discussed,” says June West, executive director of Memphis Heritage.

Even the identity of the potential buyers is obscured. They might give their names, but won’t discuss which company they represent, nor what relationship they might have to other companies believed to be involved. Some of the people West and other Overton Square stakeholders have met won’t even leave business cards.

It does appear that the two companies tentatively identified, Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc. and Sooner Investments & Development of Oklahoma are known for budget priced, no frills, big box chain grocery stores. There is a high possibility that the old buildings along the southwest corner of Overton Square might be bulldozed. But since no one with knowledge is talking, it’s all guess work. That has those who care about Memphis’ history concerned. Memphis Heritage. The people they represent want to preserve as much as they can of the building environments in historic Memphis.

But is the resolution overkill? Whatever the motive or plan for Overton Square, the fact is that it has been moldering by slow degrees for many years. The last substantial tenant of the building spent six months and over one million dollars hoping to turn the space into a disco club, only to see the entire operation go belly up. The once vibrant intersection now sits stagnant, less useful, less attractive and less recoverable as the people who own it decide what to do and try to pull together their own plans and elements to make their dream come to life.

It’s a pattern that’s all to common for Memphis. The largest example is the Fairgrounds, which has been strangled by the slow squeeze of tight money for maintenance and upkeep. Fire sweeps the old Fairgrounds building and the embers are quickly cleaned way but the bones are left to bleach in the sun. The Coliseum could be a perfect mid-sized auditorium and a key element to building the Memphis music scene, but no one is seeing to its refurbishing or its use, much less its success.

People have been asking for years for a grocery store downtown. And yet the old Chism Trail grocer’s building sits at the corner of Auction and Thomas, all but abandoned. They Pyramid is kept on the barest of life support purely on the whispers of a promise. The old skyscrapers downtown? Held up by the hopes of adaptive reuse one day by someone, somehow. Justine’s? Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, quietly falling apart, forgotten and left behind.

And how many literal shells of buildings are there around town? The Tennessee Brewery is nothing but walls teetering on the edge of collapse, guarded by preservations but starved for money and a purpose. Anderton’s Restaurant on Madison was going to be rehabbed into a Midtown office for Crye-Leike Realtors until disaster struck in the one-two punch of a violent storm and a crushing recession. Now it, too is is just walls, windows like empty eyeglass frames, walls tarted up with graffiti like a passed-out drunk attacked by preteen girls with a makeup kit.

Memphis Heritage proudly points to the under-construction Chick-fil-A restaurant on Union as an example of the victory of heritage preservation in the face of uncaring, out of town developers. But what is the end result of their pressures and demands? The Cumberland Presbyterian Church building is still gone, save for a piece of the southwest corner, which looks like something from WWII Germany after the bombing, or a deconstructionist architectural project that baffles and confuses more than it illuminates or references. The Chick-fil-A itself will still be a standard corporate design, slightly offset by the dead stump of the wall.

The city has, according to Memphis Heritage, 13,000 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. We’re in the top ten of cities in terms of historically designated buildings. There’s talk of getting such a protective shield for Overton Square, too. But at what point does the genuine desire to keep our past alive and relevant outstrip the ability of the community and its economy to support the extra costs and demands?

Look at Victorian Village. Having such a cluster of buildings kept intact is a worthy accomplishment. But the money to keep it open and functioning isn’t there. It can barely stay open; it has no resources to build a new, marketable, active future with. And look at the neighborhood surrounding it. Ratty apartment complexes of recent vintage and half-successful small businesses. How can the Village become an anchor to with no weight of its own; what vibrant community can spring up in this scrubby field? How much longer can Victorian Village hang on before rescue comes?

Is Memphis a quilt of stitched-together bits of fabric from generations of old clothing? Or is it gradually becoming a landscape of old scars and blotches disfiguring the contemporary complexion of Memphis? In the desires of some to create a modern urban landscape that is pedestrian-centric, bike friendly, landscaped and small-scale are the poor realities of many residents nothing more than unpleasantries waiting to be pushed aside, if only the money and the changes of attitudes will come?

In an interview, West was quite clear where she stands. “We don’t speak for ourselves. We speak for the community that comes to us and says this is what we feel. We’re a facilitating organization that lets the community know what’s going on. We’re not obstructionists; we’re fact-givers to the community. That’s one of the things we want to be real clear on. We are the catalyst for the community to get the facts about historic properties in town. Yes, we are an advocacy organization for those properties but we let the community also speak for us as well.”

Councilman Flinn says, more realistically, “We have to be realistic about it. We want to do the best job we can to preserve the historic place but we’re not gonna save all of them. We do want to see progress, but we also want an open dialog.”

And that’s the point. Is the determined drive to keep things looking like they always have creating a glut of buildings that exceed the economic or civic ability of Memphis to properly keep them? Part of the natural life cycle of cities is for older parts of town to be snapped up when the value of the land and buildings falls below their replacement value. When preservations take too many lands and buildings, or put encumbrances on their rehabilitation, it artificially raises their replacement values. Much more money must be spent to incorporate the added expectations of the community, or those within it who want something more.

Can the successes of Memphis Heritage also possibly be seen as warnings of dangers not yet acknowledged? Perhaps the dialog that Councilman Flinn and Heritage Memphis hope to foster is about the wrong topic. Even when this city passes beyond the current recession, do we have the money, the financial abundance, to do what we hope? Evidence point to no.

Is the hope of many Memphians to remake their city, simultaneously preserving the past and bringing to life the future, overrunning the financial economy’s resources?

Can preservation and progress work together? They always should. But each should be heeding the other, too.

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