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So yesterday I had to go take my Honda for service at Crest Honda in Metrocenter.
Instead of sitting around for a couple of hours at the dealership, I decided to explore the area.
Walking across the road, I came to the Fountain Square complex. It's kind of a neat area - pond with geese and ducks, benches, promenade - but obviously run-down with many of the offices abandoned or used by government / quasi-government organizations.
I guess from other threads that this was once a mall and movie-theater (where Watkins College of Art and Design is now)?
It looks like Watkins has built a couple of brand new dorms out there, so I presume they have aspirations to expand.
Seeing a sign for Peter Chinn's BBQ Tacos at Clarksville Pike, I walked down Rosa L. Parks blvd. There's a sidewalk for a little ways and then a relatively easy grassy area in which to walk.
Traffic on Rosa L. Parks was relatively light and flowed incredibly smoothly compared to many of the other major arteries around town. The surrounding area seemed mostly undeveloped - one or two apartment complexes, a big golf course, etc.
The bike lanes (nicely marked in green now) are hardly used at all on Rosa L. Parks. I think I saw two bikes the entire time (~60 minutes) I walked to Clarksville Pike and back.
On the walk, I got to thinking that this is a relatively underutilized area. It's super close to downtown. Maybe some rezoning or a redevelopment push would help bring in more residents, restaurants, etc?
More generally, what do y'all thinking about extending sidewalks and just letting bikes use sidewalks in areas without heavy pedestrian traffic? I've been in foreign cities where bikes and pedestrians manage to share sidewalks without too much trouble even in densely populated-areas. I just think it would solve two problems at once - the lack of sidewalks and the lack of space to add bike lanes on most roads.
Perhaps the rise of Germantown will have a positive impact on Metrocenter - or am I just dreaming? (I read that Germantown will get 200+ new apartments....)
Anyway, pardon my ramblings. I'm sure lots of other folks with good intentions have tried to do good things in Metrocenter and largely failed in their development goals. Just wondering what y'all think might work best there?
And are the car dealerships really the best use of that real estate?
Well, the car dealerships are just about the only things that have ever made money out there so I guess there's a market for it.
That area is so weird...it was "the" place to be back in the mid-late 80s. I remember when Fountain Square opened, there was a big celebration and ribbon cutting and everyone thought this area would be the next big thing. The theater out there was the largest of its kind...14 screens I think. And it was the largest in Nashville for a number of years and had the best sound system. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction out there at least twice during its run (this was after the area started going downhill).
I don't know what happened and why it didn't take off. Kinda sad, really. But I assume the basic reason was that no one wanted to travel so far to shop when there were comparable shopping closer to home. Plus the area never really gentrified like East Nashville did...although it's starting to some closer to town in Germantown.
Neely's BBQ is over there in that area...same Neely's BBQ chain from Memphis, owned by the Neely's of Down Home with the Neely's on Food Network. It's pretty good. And of course the Titans training facility is still over there too.
Aaron, I normally agree with your posts but I'm not sure I can get on board with what you're saying about MetroCenter.
You walked around for "60 minutes" & made the assessment that the area is underutilized?
This reminds me of the time someone on city-data couldn't understand why Metro bothers to have city busses because he rode the bus one time & there were only a few people riding. Just because there were only a few people riding the bus at the time that he rode it & the route that he was on doesn't mean that bus isn't packed to the brim at other times & on other routes.
You said that you saw maybe 2 people on bikes. I know a lot of people bike in MetroCenter & use the greenway. I used to work in MetroCenter & would see cyclists & rollerbladers regularly. Just because you didn't see them, doesn't mean they aren't there. Maybe the time of day you were getting your car serviced was when most people are at work?
I think MetroCenter is a good mix of residential & commercial & have recommended the area to people on this board that want to be near downtown.
I use the Looby Library ocasionally & the Post Office as well. I work downtown & go to MetroCenter for Starbucks & like to eat lunch at Neely's BBQ, the pizza place beside it & Jersey Mikes.
Just because you don't regularly go to MetroCenter, doesn't mean that other people don't. Could there be more restaurants? Sure. Are the car lots the "best" use of that land? Who knows. But they've been there a long time & are doing good business so they don't bother me. There are plenty of places right nearby to get your fill of whatever it is you think the area is lacking.
I've tried Neely's and have to disagree with you - thought it was pretty dreadful actually.
You can see that Fountain Square has good bones and the lake is really pretty. I just think it would be great if it could be redeveloped somehow.
There were some earth movers engaged in heavy construction / land-grading over near the Titans training facility. I could see them raising clouds of dust across the lake. Wonder if there are any major building projects going on over there? I would think someone would want to have a lake view apartment just 3 miles from downtown...
I'm just an amateur wannabe urban planner I guess, but if you look at a map, Nashville is expanding dramatically toward the South, Southeast, North, East and Southwest. The Northwest seems totally neglected (Metrocenter and Whites Creek beyond that). Could be an opportunity for planners and zoning boards to promote dense upscale development with perhaps a trolley line or express bus service to downtown. There's already a greenway that goes along the Cumberland River levee out toward Metrocenter so that's a nice touch.
I recognize that I'm being a bit arrogant and presumptuous by assuming I know the 'best' use Metrocenter land.
I didn't mean to present myself as an expert, but just throw out some thoughts from the viewpoint of an outsider and occasional visitor.
I have been to Metrocenter half a dozen times over the past year and have never seen anyone use the bike lanes. I suspect that many cyclists may choose to use the bikeway along the Cumberland River levee, but that only reinforces my musings about whether it would be better to get rid of the official 'bike lane' and add broad sidewalks that pedestrians and cyclists could share.
I guess I was just indulging in Sim City fantasies. If I was the Robert Moses of Nashville, what would I use Metrocenter for? I look around and see some horribly congested areas far away from town and then some areas like Metrocenter that just seem underdeveloped even though they are 3 miles from downtown.
I wouldn't want Metrocenter to become another stretch of strip malls (Publix, Kroger, Walmart, Target, etc.) but I could see a dense-development pedestrian friendly neighborhood with good public transport links to downtown doing really well. Like I said, the road infrastructure seems great and far, far from overloaded (at least during the middle of the day - not sure about morning and evening rush hours).
It's nice to know that cyclists and rollerbladers use the greenway. Again, I was only on it once, but the one time I was on it I didn't see another soul. That doesn't mean it's not utilized, but I would make the case that it does mean that it's not heavily utilized (and may in fact be underutilized).
As for the buses, I have to say that I see plenty of buses (out in Bellevue) that are practically empty. I wonder whether the MTA could shorter buses (i.e. shuttlebusses) on certain routes thereby saving on equipment costs. If MTA could buy three shuttlebusses for the cost of one regular bus, perhaps the buses could run more frequently? (On a related note, I took the Music City Circuit bus twice last weekend - both times there were a grand total of three people on this giant bus, including me. Surely the MTA should run shuttle buses on these routes most of the time too, at least on weekends.)
The bus I ride is full, but I'm not way out in Bellevue so I'm sure that my proximity to downtown makes a huge difference in ridership. 15 passenger vans sound like they would be a great idea out your way instead of the large busses, depending on the time of day & how many people actually ride.
My thing about Nashville urban planning is that people like to come in & get all excited about their way of life & what they'd like to see for an area & sometimes completely discount what people are already living there & have lived there a very long time or what an area can realistically support.
My church has been on Jefferson Street since 1905. It makes me cringe when I hear people talking about how that corridor could be so nice in the future & be filled with pilates studios, sushi restaurants & blah blah blah because those are things that they would like to use. Just because they don't go to church there or shop at Kim's Hair Plus & eat at Mary's BBQ, doesn't mean those businesses should be pushed out. The way I see it, Nashville has a pocket for everybody of every type to live in. Try to find the one that lines up with your lifestyle best & then travel the short distance it takes to get everything else you could ever need.
My husband and I looked at a house in Germantown when they were starting the push to renew that area. The house was nice and well priced, but the area was not as far along as we would have liked. And now 10-11 years later, it has hardly progressed at all. There are several nice, cute streets, but it definitely has not taken off like East Nashville has.
Germantown may be rising, but it is a very slow rise. And so I don't see an impact to Metro Center in the near future. Also Metrocenter had some major flooding during the May flood, which would scare some developers off. The city struggled to even keep the utilities on to the Maxwell House hotel during the flood recovery week.
Did you visit the Cupcake Collection while you were in that area? Yum!
I live in East Nashville and work in Metrocenter. It takes me 10 minutes to get to work and back...so I'm quite fond of it. I think it's actually full of life (for an office park). It's kind of restricted by the boundries of the interstate, the river and Clarksville Hwy. I'm not sure how much more development could go on there. There's been several new buildings (some of them big) over the last few years in the office park. About the only residential areas that are really close are the houses over behind the Maxwell House and the few apartments around there. The interstate pretty much cuts off Germantown from Metrocenter.
I went to the mall when it first opened and then moved away and didn't come back to Nashville til 94. I thought it was a really cool place. I don't know exactly what caused it to flounder. I know there were some safety issues and things...but I didn't live here at the time it closed. I don't think it would ever be a mall again really, but who knows. Metrocenter is definitely not dead though, drive through during rush hour and you will see
I never lived there during the development of that area. I was at Vanderbilt '69~'72 and remember reading about the planning for Metrocenter, probably about 1971. I read an article from a publication that I saw posted on a bulletin board at the engineering school, it was not a newspaper. I guess they were building levees for the area at that point. It seems that this was the first time in my young life that that I experienced qualms about city planners and city government, that they could just declare a successful urban expansion by fiat. In the same article they were predicting Nashville metro population would be 900,000 by 1980. When the 1981 Information Please Almanac came out I was in Austin, but I remembered to check it for the Nashville metro pop. and it was 850,000. When I was at VU, Nashville was maybe 650,000 metro, so 200,000 in 10 years was pretty impressive, but they were using the quarter million figure to justify the metrocenter expansion.
So here we are 40 years later and people still believe that government can just declare an expansion (of the national economy in this case, or of a healthcare scheme) and we saw monstrous sums spent to try to make it work. I think skepticism in '71 was pretty prescient, and I can't help but wonder what would have happened with this year's flooding if they had left this area as a flood plain. Downtown may have had a few feet less water had the flood plain been left intact.
Last edited by groovamos; 10-22-2010 at 08:27 PM..
Reason: Just rememered bulletin board.
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