When Disney's main street is the last man standing (without support).

I was hoping at this point to begin a new article on the effect the climate has on the soil here in Afghanistan. Mid-March being the peak of the rainy season here, I figured I’d come up with some demonstrative photos and explore the ramifications that rain has on human habitations here. But so far, Mother Nature has thwarted my efforts: we’ve had nothing but unexpectedly warm, sunny, and dry weather this entire March so far, so I have no photos to offer as proof. I’m not yet concerned. We’re bound to encounter a thunderstorm eventually, here at the northern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The rainy season doesn’t usually end until mid-April. And when we do get that rain, I promise I’ll deliver an article analyzing impacts of precipitation on Afghan soil. Try to contain your excitement.



In the meantime, I return to the States to visit a familiar topic: the “artificial” removal of the vast majority of a structure while preserving the façade. I use the word “artificial” with some hesitation—thus the quotes—because this act, usually (clumsily) called façadectomy, has become so commonplace that it’s almost a natural part of many re-emerging historic urban environments. In most instances, the façade is propped up while the developer builds something else behind it—usually an entirely different building with a floor plan that meets modern demands. Thus, the process is predicated upon the notion that everything about the structure is obsolete except the way the front of it engaged with its surroundings (i.e., the street and adjacent buildings). And in many cases, it is. The entire building would have met the wrecking ball otherwise; keeping the façade allows building and its immediate surroundings to retain a simulacrum of salvaged history. Preservationists usually frown at the façadectomy practice, no doubt because it taints the integrity of this discipline by implying that the veneer is what really matters. A façadectomy implies that the essence of the building—its ability to enclose specific human activities—is expendable, tossing most of the refinement of true preservation out the window and reducing it to a cosmetic exercise. Conversely, anyone preparing a rebuttal to a criticism of façadectomies would argue that the façade really is the most important aspect, while building interiors often undergo far more frequent surgeries over the life cycle of a building. Rare is the National Historic Landmark that enjoys preservation inside and out, so salvaging the just the façade—the one part that the vast majority of people will actually see—frequently succeeds as a cause célèbre in populist preservation. Thus, the “ectomies” continue.

But what happens when the developers salvage the façade, only to replace it with nothing? I first noted this occurrence early on in the life of this blog, when it took me by surprise on Memphis’ Beale Street. For several of the structures along this popular, touristy entertainment hub, the façades are all that survive. If a visitor passes through what used to be an entrance, he or she encounters a courtyard featuring a restaurant and bar.

But from the outside, it doesn't look remotely like a building: the girders supporting the structure make no attempt at subtlety; the masonry where the rest of the building was demolished is still jagged and irregular; the windows are just gaping apertures without glass. It looks like exactly what it is: a brick sheath suspended in an upright position. From a greater distance it's a bit more convincing, and it retains the essence of a contiguous street wall—the classic old-fashioned main street with a storefront at the ground level and apartments or offices on the floors above. As much as I hate sneering Disney analogies, the illusion Beale Street hopes to create is not unlike Disneyland's Main Street, which in itself is a specious paradigm since Disney's corridor owes its vibrancy to a captive audience and its imperviousness to conventional urban blight. Beale Street is vibrant too, no doubt due more to its loose alcohol than because it still harbors a genuine blues community, or many of the Street's actual buildings for that matter. From a distance, Beale Street looks like the real deal. But up close, it's like Pinocchio hoping to become a real boy (alas, another Disney analogy)—the semblance of a building that depends on a human presence to animate and legitimize it.

Keeping this in mind, I was less surprised when I encountered a similar practice in Mobile. Alabama’s southernmost big city, and probably the one with the most distinctive vernacular architecture, has an emergent entertainment corridor in the form of Dauphin Street, a remarkably long main street (over ten blocks) for a not-so-large city.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine whether the corridor is enjoying a rebirth or a decline. Vacancy was pretty high on a summer 2010 visit, with some surprising shuttered storefronts:

I know we’re long past the microbrew craze, but at least one should survive on the primary entertainment spine of a metro of over one quarter million. Mobile didn’t appear to have one in business. And the surest sign that Dauphin Street isn’t hot property is the presence of a storefront church:

I've blogged about this a ton in the past. If you see one of these, you can rest assured that the landlord is hard-up for any tenant and rents are low—especially in an area that most likely is trying to attract high-energy, revenue generating debauchery more than piety.


But I don’t want to knock the town when it’s down. Like much of the Gulf Coast, the Mobile area suffered significant losses from Hurricane Katrina, and some of the vacancies might be residual consequences. The fact remains that Dauphin Street almost exclusively features locally owned businesses, and the eyesores alternate in equal measure with streetscapes like this:

Or this:

Or this one:

The establishment in that last photo (probably a restaurant) may be out of business, but the building itself appears well-maintained. None of the grillwork on the balconies is rusted, so it probably hasn’t been shuttered for long. But a trick camera angle is the only thing retaining the duplicity here.
The surgery is much more obvious.

Like the building in Memphis’ Beale Street, it’s an old façade with girders holding it up. But it does show some critical differences. On Beale Street, the girders stood front and center, occupying part of the sidewalk. Here in Mobile, the supports are a bit more subtle because they sit in the back. But this façade also has something else supporting it; unlike Memphis, it’s more than a partition between the street and an open-air courtyard.
The lower level hosts genuine retail space. Whatever the tenant used to be, it was protected from the elements. The alleyway opening to the left of the facade shows how far back the structure extends, seen in the photo angling to the right of the alley:


The scarring of the masonry in both photos suggests that this alleyway underwent some heavy surgery as well in order to achieve its current condition. No doubt at some point in the distant past, this area had a roof. Another significant alteration is right there at the entrance.


Most likely the first floor hosted some large storefront windows flush with the façade, but now they are gated, and the physical entrance to the shelter is offset, allowing a sort of loggia for potential open-air seating—one more reason I think it was intended as a restaurant.

But the most invasive aspect of this façadectomy manifests itself when you crane your neck.

If it weren't for the installation of a new first floor, this building would look just as goofy as the one in Memphis: a decorative brick wall suspended high into the air. But thanks to the restaurant installation at the ground level and the concealment of the girders, it genuinely takes a keen eye to notice the illusion—quite a contrast from the far more obvious, contrived effort in Memphis. Preservationists may groan at the shallowness of either of these initiatives, but they still demonstrate a conscious attempt to retain at least part of the historic commercial character of their respective streets. In both cases, the owner of the property may be waiting until the market is right for a higher and better use. At that point, he or she could fill in the remaining void with a structure that matches the façade.

Filling in the void and completing the façadectomy would be much easier with Memphis. The Mobile example hints at something a bit more problematic and pervasive: many once-struggling commercial corridors are enjoying a revival through renewed populist appreciation in older architecture. But does this revival penetrate the entirety of the building? All to often, the first floor is the only thing capable of landing a tenant: the upper levels remain empty and sometimes quite decrepit. New Orleans' Royal Street in the French Quarter offers a great example, where the first floor is replete with active storefronts hosting often high-end art, antiques, and collectables. Yet even there, where retail space rents at high prices (for New Orleans' standards), the upper levels are frequently shuttered—a problem throughout much of the Quarter. The quaint ideal of retail on bottom and housing above is a concept we idealize but rarely embrace in actuality. Mixed-use seems great when someone else is creating the mixture. But the market demand for it—the best way to find an occupant for those other levels—is often miniscule.

This storefront on Mobile's Dauphin Street looked good enough for a restaurant, and in a better economic climate, it will probably find a new tenant. But the likelihood of demand escalating enough to justify building a structure for those other two floors is slim. In fact, a restaurant on the first floor may actually be a deterrent to transforming those upper levels into residential or office. Food handling is an extremely tough use to mix. Not too many people want the same smells wafting into their home or workspace every day from the restaurant below, no matter how good it may be. And even the best maintained of restaurants have a greater propensity for attracting vermin such as mice or roaches. Ask anyone who's lived next to a grocery store. Ask me.

In light of these undertakings in Memphis and now Mobile, it's hard to take a firm stand on façadectomies. Like it or not, they're part of a sub-practice within historic preservation, and they speak volumes about when the effort to salvage a structure aligns with demand—and when they clearly only generate dischord. We've already lost hundreds of buildings that intended to mix retail and residential throughout this country, and we'll lose many more in the future. Even if Dauphine and Beale Street become trendy entertainment destinations (the latter one already is), nothing suggests that main street architecture has more than a niche appeal—a antique collector's nostalgia. If anything else were the case, the majority of intact American main streets would be flourishing by now, but clearly they aren't. I still hold hope that we will witness the restoration of numerous other aging, pedestrian-scaled buildings in the decades to come, but not all will enjoy preservation from top to bottom, back to front. A flimsy brick wall surviving by braces may look ridiculous, but the care involved in trying to save it earns a distinctiveness all its own. And maybe these shells will find a new hermit crab to re-inhabit them, filling out the remaining three walls, then finding a tenant on those upper-level apartments who never grows tired of the southern barbecue smells simmering below.

Hurdles on the runway.

For the most part, the scale of a city’s major institutions correlates directly to the metropolitan area’s size and economic power. Metros like New York and Chicago win the flagship luxury department stores, they have the highest number of super-tall skyscrapers, the biggest libraries, movie theaters, power plants, and so forth. Obviously Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field prove an exception to this trend, since the humble sizes of these stadia belie the heft of their respective cities. However, both cities claim many more alternate sports venues than much smaller communities such as New Orleans, Indianapolis, or Salt Lake City, so the total square footage of athletic facilities in the major metros roughly parallels the number of people.

One of the few major industries, however, where the importance within a locale routinely defies the city’s relative size is in commercial airports. For example, Ohio’s Port Columbus International (CMH) sits squarely in the center of the country’s seventh most populous state and is within ninety minutes’ flying distance of over half of the nation’s population. It is by far the fastest growing and most economically healthy city in Ohio. Yet the passenger traffic (measured by the FAA) at the airports of Cleveland (CLE) and Cincinnati (CVG) eclipse Port Columbus by far; despite being a relatively slow-growth metro of similar size, Cincinnati’s passenger traffic nearly doubles that of Columbus. Future forecasts suggest this is unlikely to change. Conversely, Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area is only a little over half that of metro Columbus; its vigorous economy suggests that it will grow increasingly prominent over time, but at this point it has a long way to go to equal Columbus’ size. Yet its airport (SLC) receives triple the passenger traffic of its Midwestern counterpart.

These disparities make fundamental sense, and it doesn’t require much scrutiny to see why. The biggest factors influencing the prominence of a city’s airport are 1) its historical size in relation to neighboring cities; and 2) its geographic proximity to other centers of commerce. In terms of both of these factors, the deck is stacked against Columbus. It was historically nowhere near as large of a city as Cincinnati just 110 miles away; the latter community achieved prominence at a much earlier date and therefore justified the aviation infrastructure worthy of its size. Columbus has only risen to the higher echelon of Midwestern cities in recent years. Meanwhile, Cleveland surged in the early 20th century to become Ohio’s largest metro, which it remains to this day (though if growth patterns in Columbus and shrinkage patterns in Cleveland continue, Columbus may eventually dethrone the Forest City). And Salt Lake City’s prevalence has less to do with its current impressive growth—it certainly didn’t demand a major airport forty years ago—than its relative isolation, with no other major city of any reasonable size within a 350 mile radius.



Such aviational curiosities culminate with the unlikely prominence of Memphis International Airport (MEM). The metro area is not growing at anywhere close to the pace of Columbus or Salt Lake City, or, for that matter, the state of Tennessee’s booming capital Nashville, which has surged past metro Memphis in population. But the Memphis airport still averages at least a half million more passengers than Nashville’s in any given year, it remains a hub for Delta (formerly Northwest) and routinely flies to Amsterdam, and, most significantly, its role as the super-hub of FedEx Express has substantiated the airport’s reputation as the number one cargo operator in the world. In spite of these logistical advantages, Memphis was a higher profile city several decades ago, back when the local leadership assembled parcels for this moderately busy airport. Since the mid 19th century, several other urban centers (Nashville and Charlotte in particular come to mind) have shimmied up the ladder at a faster rate, but Memphis Airport still retains its extensive infrastructure—with room to grow—and its unsullied title as the capital of the Mid-South. As the map above indicates, no city of comparable size sits within three hours’ drive; even Nashville rests over 200 miles to the east. But its central location within the South in general makes it a remarkably convenient midpoint; most Southerners have undoubtedly experienced a layover in Memphis when flying Delta.

But is the Memphis Airport Authority thinking in terms of future growth? Some urban prairies to the west of the terminal, where eminent domain allowed the purchase and demolition of private residences, suggest that newer or larger runways form a part of the airport’s future. But the airport’s interior features suggest otherwise.

This photo, taken near the end of one of the sections to Concourse A, while looking back toward the central terminal, reveals an unlikely impediment: a short stairwell. About seven gates operate on the side of the stairwell from which I am taking the above two photos, while the vast majority of the concourse’s gates are on the inner portion of the concourse, closer to the vertex of these lengthy halls. Seen from the other direction, the stairwell and its respective change in elevation offer a distinct visual contrast.

Fortunately, the authorities at Memphis International aren’t dodging the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act; an alternative to the stairwell and escalator is nestled in a corner just to the right of the above photo.

The elevator helps to avert a potentially serious problem for disabled persons with a reasonable solution. But this reasonable solution isn’t exactly modern. The elevator is only conspicuous from the lower level—the most likely destination for those using the stairs—and most people, unaware of its existence, struggle to negotiate their wheeled luggage down the stairs or escalator.

Now I’ll be bold and draw a broad conclusion from this minor obstruction. The leadership at Memphis airport, aware that their city handed the flag to Nashville long ago, has stopped thinking of itself as a critical airport for a prominent city. Its role as a cargo hub remains auspicious, but other cities with lesser airports may soon surpass Memphis’ infrastructure to support commercial flights. The airport’s tidy but faded interior—and its casual negligence of inconveniences such as the one captured in this photo series—collectively diminish the sense that this airport is scrutinizing a future in which it remains a major player in the field of commercial aviation.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs by pointing this out. But a stairwell in the middle of a concourse is downright weird. I can’t think of where I might have seen it before. While persons in wheelchairs will always have the elevator, what will they do if a sudden evacuation precludes them from using electrically operated conveyances? Why didn’t the authorities at Memphis International install ramps? Ramps would benefit customers with suitcases, strollers, and Segways just as much. The absence of another, better way of managing the grade change here suggests that airport leadership made an effort to fix its problem by installing an elevator with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and then hasn’t thought about this part of Concourse A ever since. And the ADA passed during the George H. W. Bush administration. As is often the case, this nonchalance toward humdrum spaces dampens the overall appeal of this otherwise perfectly decent airport, while capital improvements apply disproportionately to the showy centerpiece of Concourse B. Memphis may not be an Atlanta, but it also pulls a lot more weight within the south than Little Rock these days. One can only hope that the leadership of this Super-Hub for the Mid-South will prioritize universal design as an aesthetic the next time the place is due for a renovation.

Rethinking the Behemoth; Preserving the Banal, Part II: Why downtowns cannot feast on behemoths alone.

In the Part I of this post, I looked at a troubling example of the intersection of economic development, site selection, and historic preservation. The Mayor and City Council of Evansville, Indiana, have decided to demolish a block of century-old commercial buildings to make way from a new sports arena, after negotiations for the previous site, a car dealership, fell through. The Mayor announced that the site where the historic buildings stand (or stood) is ultimately better because the arena will now front Evansville’s Main Street, allowing the activity generated from major sporting events to spill onto the neighboring blocks, thereby helping to revive the long-slumping retail activity on this commercial corridor.

He could be right; I hope he is. But the car dealership site was only a block further from Main Street, and in choosing this location the City is sacrificing some of its oldest surviving structures. Regardless of whether this block of faded two and three-story buildings was architecturally significant, they had the patina that gives a downtown its perceived “character” and could have proven pivotal for a sustainable revitalization of the downtown’s commercial core. Now they are gone. While the arena may nonetheless help bring pedestrian traffic to a part of downtown that has sorely lacked it, the City’s favoritism toward a historic Main Street site instead of a car dealership seems based on two specious assumptions which I previously mentioned: 1) that big-ticket destinations revitalize downtowns because the foot traffic they induce will “spread” to the struggling surrounding area; and 2) that small historic commercial buildings lack merit without some larger attraction upon which they depend, almost parasitically.



Now let’s dissect the first of these two assumptions a bit more.

The Indianapolis blogger, Dig-B raised terrific initial observations when the new site for the arena was announced on the Skyscraper City forum. What’s the biggest problem with an arena as a catalyst for downtown revitalization? As Dig-B recognizes, its usage is sporadic at best. Though it is likely to pack in the crowds for Evansville Purple Aces basketball or the Evansville IceMen hockey, it will remain unused most other days, with the exception of the occasional music concert. If the arena is bustling with activity for 120 days each year—and that’s an ambitious number—that still leaves two-thirds of the year where it will have no activity whatsoever. All too often, downtown revitalization strategies seem (often unconsciously) to import the suburban mall typology where the existing old vacant commercial buildings are perceived as the homes for the small in-line tenants, and what is missing is the giant anchor or department store. If that paradigm were valid, then how would an arena equate to a department store, when a Macy’s or Nordstrom has just as long (if not longer) hours in a mall as the in-line tenants? Many of the arena’s biggest attractions occur at nights and on weekends, whereas these small commercial buildings often attract small businesses that operate during a standard M-F 9-5.

Memphis offers a good example of where a giant sports venue has failed to engage the neighborhood that surrounds it—actually two venues.

Beale Street—at least four blocks of it—remains mostly intact as a testament to the city's blues heritage. (I say "mostly" because it is dotted with none-too-subtle infill and facadectomies, including some where just the facade is standing through careful bracework, while the rest of the building opens to a courtyard or parking lot, as the photo above reveals. I blogged about this peculiar approach to façade preservation in the past.) The map below outlines the heart of Beale Street in red; it is one of the few consistently successful pedestrianized commercial corridors in the country, even if only for three blocks. However, the area that surrounds it demonstrates the potential damage incurred on an urban landscape when a City introduces mega-destinations.
The aerial above makes it clear: all around this nerve center of classic rock ‘n roll are bulky structures—not a home or apartment building to be seen. Within a few blocks on either side sit FedEx Forum and AutoZone Park, circled in purple. No doubt it appeared a wise decision in terms of helping Beale Street to surge with activity after major events, and the street clearly offers a great number of options for a beer and live music after the game. But did the sports venues really need to be located so close to the commercial district?

Beale Street was extraordinarily depressed in the 1970s, despite being declared a National Historic Landmark. Only in the 1980s did entrepreneurial interest take hold and reinvigorate the corridor. Yet the two sports venues listed above were completed in the early 2000s, long after Beale Street had re-established its foothold. My suspicion is that tourists will continue to patronize Beale Street because it boasts a legendary history, and at least some Memphis Grizzlies fans would have trudged over to Beale Street—those who aren’t turned off by the fact that it’s extremely touristy—even if the Grizzlies arena were quite some distance away, because it remains a hub of activity. I’m not sure if the City of Memphis killed a viable neighborhood to the north and south of Beale Street to make room for these stadia, or if the residential community that helped Beale Street to thrive in its blues heyday was eliminated long ago through urban renewal. Regardless, the areas on either side of Beale are pedestrian dead zones today, offering vistas like this one at Fernando Street, looking southward toward Gayoso.

This is what most of the “neighborhood” that birthed Beale Street Blues looks like, sacrificed to make way for enormous structures such as AutoZone Park, FedEx Forum, and the parking garages to serve these two sports pavilions. Could something more compatible have occupied this land, like (wild idea I know) housing? Meanwhile, AutoZone Park also sits just blocks away from the historic Main Street of downtown Memphis (also pedestrianized like Beale Street and Evansville used to be). Main Street Memphis is filled with beautiful commercial buildings that are struggling to find tenants, if this 2007 photo is any evidence.
Beale Street, just south of downtown, feels more like a linear theme park foisted into a no-man's-land—a classic neighborhood corridor in search of its neighborhood.



Compare this to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, perhaps even tawdrier than Beale Street but generally one of the most vibrant Main Streets in America for its surging nightlife—and it’s still open to cars! (At least during the day.)

Granted, it’s much longer than Beale Street, or at least that part of Beale Street that hasn't been ripped apart for urban redevelopment. No major redevelopment has taken place along Bourbon because it serves as the historic commercial artery of the French Quarter, and the neighborhood around it is almost completely intact. See how the street fits in as the spine of the tightly ordered grid that comprises the French Quarter.

And here are some obliquely angled vistas of the streets surrounding Bourbon, elsewhere in the French Quarter neighborhood. One at Burgundy and Bienville Streets shows a number of tightly grouped residences and commercial buildings within the frame of the picture.

Another at Dauphine and Governor Nichols Streets shows some of the classic double shotguns that comprise a preponderance of the housing in this portion of the Vieux Carre.
I could muse endlessly about notions of authenticity and how Bourbon feels a bit more "real" (however commercialized and utterly touristy) because it's still part of a neighborhood, but that is just my own personal taste. The truth is, people go to Bourbon Street regardless of the distance from major event; they'll walk the 4 blocks from the convention center or the 12 blocks from the Superdome. You can see the distance between the two in the photo below, where the Superdome is circled in purple to the lower left.

To the west of the Superdome, just outside of the aerial photo’s left edge, are more big blocky buildings and parking lots—another no man’s land. So is this stadium stimulating economic development? The fact that these “forgotten corners” of downtown Memphis and New Orleans sit so close to the arenas suggests that their impact may be minimal. The crowds that surge around the Louisiana Superdome during major events aren’t enough to spur demand for the real estate that surrounds it. Nothing is pedestrian-oriented nearby; there’s no housing, but no one cares. The crowds cluster for tailgating before the game, then they finish the night off at bars or restaurants in another part of town. (Meanwhile, the Big Easy’s minor league ballpark, Zephyr Field, sits way out in Metairie, the heart of suburbia, in a completely unwalkable area.) Perhaps a century ago, the land around the Superdome comprised a viable neighborhood. But prior to the dome’s construction, the area was little more than a cluster of warehouses, already largely bereft of its traditional mix of commercial and residential architecture, after the mass demolition that was required for the construction of the adjacent interstate highway. No historic artifacts were harmed in the making of this stadium.

I don’t mean to denigrate stadia through this post. Both professional and amateur sports have the capacity to foster collective support of a community like few other major events. But I question whether the decision makers behind site selection for sports venues need to be so choosy. An art gallery or coffee shop often depends tremendously on the viability of its location; a stadium does not. (Just look at the less-than-convenient homes of the Green Bay Packers or New England Patriots, far from the population center of their fan base.) The new Evansville arena will attract its crowds, even if they plopped it across the Ohio River in Kentucky. One can only hope the city’s leadership doesn’t have such a cavalier attitude toward the rest of Main Street—however few blocks remain.

I will conclude this lengthy post with a final look at those demolished buildings on Evansville’s Main Street. What makes them so much more critical to downtown revitalization than an arena, even if they lack any true architectural merit? City leaders were right in thinking that the goal should be to attract pedestrians to the downtown, but perhaps they need to apply the worm’s-eye-view to what’s already on that urban stage, rather than investing everything into how it might play out with a new unfinished script.

Gowns rewrite the town—twice over.

A casual scan across most urban campuses reveals that they have been building increasingly densely to accommodate new growth, after several decades of building at a lower density than the at their original, historic core. More often than not, they have no other choice. Suffering a scarcity of available land but benefiting from a captive clientele of student pedestrians, the campus planners and leadership must build upward on former parking lots or grassy corners. Otherwise, facilities planners often recommend purchasing homes in the adjacent neighborhood, so that the schools can claim them as administrative offices if they don’t bulldoze them altogether.

Some campuses have been widely constrained by the surrounding city for as long as anyone can remember, such as Harvard University and its heavily built-up surroundings of Cambridge, one of the most densely populated cities in the country (and almost definitely tops for densely populated suburbs). In this example, the venerable old academic buildings rest behind the gate along the right side of the principal artery Massachusetts Avenue while downtown commercial buildings of Cambridge’s Harvard Square sit along the left.

This next photo, taken at the dead center of the urban plaza Harvard Square, demonstrates how the public space has become a vertex of activity generated largely from three powerful forces.

The most obvious indicators are the brick Harvard buildings which comprise the background, but I am also standing at the heart of downtown Cambridge, where the cluster of buildings hosts both university administration and a variety of other prominent companies on their upper levels. Meanwhile, immediately to the right of this photo is the entrance to the Harvard Square T stop, with one of the highest average daily commuter traffic levels in the entire Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s rail network. The photo below more clearly reveals the centrality of the subway stop at this prominent urban node.

Cambridge’s densely commercial downtown has stymied Harvard’s ability to grow to the south of its campus core (the original Harvard Yard), so the majority of the university’s newer buildings trail northward, which is clearly visible to a pedestrian walking across campus from the remarkable shift in architecture. A third “phase” in the university’s development is largely discontiguous from the old and new campus: a few blocks south of Harvard Square sits the Kennedy School of Government and numerous university residential halls. From there, the university’s development pattern played leapfrog again: just south across the Charles River sits the Allston campus, which is currently home to the Business School and the majority of the athletic and sporting facilities. As sizable as this portion of the campus is, the Allston portion of Harvard is only poised to grow over the ensuing decades: the University has long been land banking various parcels in this old Boston neighborhood, and eventually the Allston campus, based on a carefully articulated planning process, will burgeon into the new life sciences hub for the school. (Recent news reveals that, in the face of the financial turmoil, the University has indefinitely suspended its prior plans for the Allston expansion indefinitely.)

Harvard and Cambridge share an antecedent that is quintessentially Northeastern—the majority of their conception predates the radical shifts in urban form precipitated by 20th century innovations. Other parts of the country have adopted a completely different approach, with development patterns that largely reflect their respective population growth trends. The southern boomburg of Nashville and its preeminent Vanderbilt University exemplify this trend, which could hardly be more different from the physical form of Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.

Perhaps the most interesting element of Vanderbilt University’s history is the unusual level of disassociation with the person after whom it was named, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Distant relative and Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire of Nashville stayed with the Commodore while recovering from surgery in New York; he was able to persuade the 79-year-old rail magnate to endow and build a new university in the South that would “contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country.” McTyeire chose the site and supervised the construction of buildings, but Vanderbilt himself never saw it. He never visited Nashville, dying four years after the dedication, without knowing that his only major act of philanthropy would even be named after him.

Looking at the campus today, it takes no stretch of the imagination to surmise that it was largely conceived in a vacuum, judging from the striking contrast in physical form between the campus and the surrounding area—or, for that matter, the contrast between “the Vanderbilt community” and “the Harvard community”. The layout of the buildings themselves fits into the less rigidly formalistic design popular among many universities founded in the 19th century, with an almost consistent tree canopy, the biodiversity of which earned Vanderbilt campus classification as a national arboretum.

(I contrasted Vanderbilt’s campus with the neighboring Peabody campus in greater detail during an earlier blog post.)

What does the area immediately surrounding the campus look like? It’s not the outer suburbs, but it’s also clearly not quite the city center; downtown Nashville is a mile to the northeast. But it’s also not a particularly residential neighborhood, no does it meet conventional standards of older urban development. The streets which comprise the perimeter of the original Vanderbilt campus look much more like the photos below, where I was looking outward onto 21st Avenue South while standing at the campus edge:


The retail mix is largely the restaurant/coffee shop/bar combination one might expect to cater to a heavy concentration of college students. But the majority of it consists of freestanding, one-story buildings with abundant parking in front or at the side. Nearly all of it is automobile-oriented and less than forty years old. The other primary perimeter street to Vanderbilt, West End Avenue, offers a similar landscape:

The development embodies your average planner’s migraine: wide streets meant to convey automobile traffic quickly, with buildings that overwhelmingly fail to stimulate pedestrianism. To add insult to injury, the fact that the buildings are larger and detached gives them a higher gross leasable area and more opportunity for off-street parking, making the structure far more likely to accommodate tenants that are national chains with deep pockets. Even the few structures that are built flush with the sidewalk still seem to repel mom-and-pop stores. Instead of eclectic local enterprise immediately outside one of the nation’s most respected universities, the visitors’ eyes are greeted with this:



The horror! Frankly, I don’t want to devote a post to criticizing this sort of development; it might not be conducive to heavy tree canopy and might seem blandly suburban to some, but it has done nothing to harm the verdant beauty or repute of the University, and it does provide an abundance of convenient shopping opportunities for the students. Instead, I hope to evaluate it on its own terms, based on what it reveals about Nashville’s development in and around Vanderbilt.

Nashville was not a prominent city at the time of Vanderbilt’s establishment. With a population barely over 25,000, it may have been a comparatively large city within the mid-South region, but it was hardly a national center on par with a dozen different cities in the Northeast. (By comparison, Cambridge, Massachusetts had nearly twice as many people at that time, and it was always the adjacent community to the much larger city of Boston.) Even in the 1950s, the city limits of Nashville only contained about 175,000 inhabitants; the city’s emergence as the key city of Tennessee, surpassing Memphis to become a capital of the booming New South, did not really take place until the 1970s. Vanderbilt was founded in an almost rural area at the time; the urbanization of central Nashville clearly didn’t jolt in the direction of the school until well after the automobile. The photos below offers a quick snapshot of the “membrane” that connects Vanderbilt campus to Nashville downtown, where West End Avenue crosses Interstate 65:

The interstate forms a distinct edge between the downtown (on its northeast side) and the strikingly automobile-oriented growth pattern on the opposite, southwest side. My suspicion is that the US Highways 70 and 431, which comprise the general eastern and western boundaries of Vanderbilt, were predominantly quick exits from Nashville until suburban development patterns engulfed them. Interspersed amidst the auto-oriented development are visibly older structures, such as this church next to a contemporary office building:


Another example shows what appears to have been an old automobile service station that has been adaptively reused into conventional retail, all while preserving about two dozen off-street parking spaces:

And the structures below were featured from a distance in one of the earlier photos. They appear to be older private residences that have been adapted to retail uses:

The one on the right appears to have undergone a particularly intensive façade alteration in order to endow it with the first-floor fenestration that makes it a retail-friendly building. The prevailing question remains: how many of these older vestiges faced the bulldozer to make way for the strip mall development that predominates? Was the area immediately surrounding Vanderbilt always so sparsely settled? Not all of the greater Vanderbilt area consists of this fascinating automobile oriented/urban hybrid, but the exceptions are rare. Among the few areas near Vanderbilt with the true feel of an urban neighborhood is Hillsboro Village, a former streetcar suburb that emerges as one continues southwesterly along 21st Avenue South, the old Hillsboro Road. The area was long ago annexed by Nashville, but it retains a short strip of one- and two-story commercial buildings flush with the sidewalk; the only widely visible parking is directly on 21st Avenue. Not surprisingly, the floor plate of these structures, much smaller than your average auto-oriented retail building and typically with a 1-to-3 width-to-depth ratio, more widely supports the local restaurants and vendors typically associated with university communities—the type we often describe as “eclectic”. I unfortunately don’t have photos of Hillsboro Village of my own; this Flickr photo effectively captures the neighborhood’s character: perhaps the closest to Vanderbilt community’s Main Street.

Vanderbilt’s development offers a sort of architectural palimpsest, with one developmental language superimposed on another, based largely on expediency of the time period. From my observations, it appears that, for the first fifty to seventy years of Vanderbilt University’s institutional life, it sat in an almost rural setting on the purlieus of the small city of Nashville—a city which may have been less than 10 square miles in its totality at the time. As the city grew, predominantly after the automobile, the two primary streets (West End Avenue and 21st Avenue South) remained efficient arterials for conveying traffic out to the neighborhoods such as Hillsboro Village and the adjacent countryside, even as the countryside rapidly suburbanized. The built environment between Vanderbilt and Nashville thus overwhelmingly supports cars. Only in recent years have developers adapted to growing consumer preferences for a community with a more urban character, offering infill construction that supports higher residential density and promotes the walkability that seems natural for a large university environment. And the City of Nashville has demonstrated a growing support for higher density in these areas close to the downtown through the relatively recent implementation of Urban Zoning Overlay districts. The Vanderbilt area has undergone a distinctive succession of development styles: initially largely rural, it became stereotypically suburban before its proximity to downtown and the reliable employment base made it a potential location from emergent neighborhoods. The photo below, taken from a mid-rise hotel, effectively captures all three phases:

The turn-of-the-century residential presence largely suffered demolition to accommodate strip malls and car-friendly shopping plazas, but now mid and high-density multifamily developments, hotels, and office buildings are taking advantage of infill opportunities on the remaining tracts of vacant land. Nashville may never be as dense as Cambridge (and most likely the majority of Nashville’s residents prefer it that way), but the lack of density in some regards enhances its versatility, like a painting with a great deal of canvas still exposed. The transitional area around Vanderbilt University is showing a remarkable adaptivity to cultural shifts in preferred lifestyles, fusing urban intensity with the relaxed vibe of a college town through incremental infill developments. In another decade or two, fashionable urban living may demand new architectural incarnations, and I am willing to bet that Nashville will be more receptive to it than many places—it’s clearly less hemmed-in than a city like Cambridge and widely open to reinvention. If the city can retain its high level of housing affordability, I imagine it will enjoy many more years of boomtown status to come.

Campuses have back yards too.

Though I had driven through the mid-southern boomtown of Nashville before in the past, this past weekend was the first time I had left the interstate to tour the city briefly. One of the first stops was the venerable, woodsy campus of Vanderbilt University, just a mile or so away from the city center. Much of the campus offered exactly what one might expect from an older urban academia: uniform, solid brick buildings with limestone Doric columns, well-maintained grassy quadrilaterals crisscrossed with foot paths, a generous tree canopy (at least in the summer), an alarming overpopulation of squirrels. Those more familiar with Vanderbilt can surely describe it better than I; those unfamiliar at least can conjure a facile image.

What took me by surprise was a chance encounter with this beast in the southern half of the campus:

And of course, this pole’s identical siblings stand approximately 250 feet away in either direction. It’s rare to see such a jarringly large utility line in the interior of a campus. In fact, it’s rare to see utilities on a campus at all—nearly all private schools are willing to front the cost to run the lines underground.

In many ways, the presence of overhead wires in urban settings distinguishes the US from most other developed countries. The American landscape is littered with them, even in relatively dense inner city neighborhoods. Only a few settings come to mind in the US where electric wires are not widely visible: downtowns usually employ buried cables, as do newer subdivisions built since the 1970s, and large parcels under single corporate ownership (such as a university). The comparative lower density of US cities no doubt necessitates much higher costs for burying wires than would be the case in, for instance, the Netherlands. Our population is spread over a significantly greater land area, and loosely translates to negative economies of scale in terms of the square footage of cable per person served, equating to higher costs in physical utility installation per person, whether as poles or undergrounded. However, overhead wires elicit other inefficiencies: they are far more likely to suffer power outages from fallen tree limbs or toppled poles after storms or heavy wind. Many urban utilities companies must pay for tree trimming on private lots to protect the cables from snapping, with costs most certainly passed down to the consumer. Utility easements grant them this privilege, resulting in roadside properties with funny-looking, lopsided trees.

Conversely, undergrounding cables never completely eliminates the possibility of power outages, and a severe outage on an underground system may be harder to access or repair. In addition, cities that engage in a fair amount of road alterations such as widening or storm sewer additions may find that underground cables are far easier and cheaper to maneuver around, while underground cables would cost a fortune to relocate. Regions with a high level of seismic activity also need to be conscious of the vulnerability of buried electrical cables. I have also read on occasion that the speed of electrical transmission across great distances is inferior on underground cables, thus explaining—beyond the sheer costs—why sparsely populated rural areas almost always depend on overhead cables. (My source on this last bit of information is questionable; perhaps an electrical engineer can confirm or contradict it.)

Arguments favoring and opposing overhead cables are clearly numerous, often leaving the investment decision at a stalemate, in which each location gets individual consideration. The one determinant in which buried cables always wins is aesthetics. Overhead cables are an unsightly blight on the landscape to most people—no doubt many commercial photographs of great vistas have had the power lines blotted out courtesy of Adobe Photoshop. So why did Vanderbilt choose not bury these lines that rest fully within the campus? My guess is the answer is quite simple—this is not a part of the campus that Vanderbilt leadership wants or expects most of the public to see.

In hindsight, I’m kicking myself for not taking more good photos of the campus, but the combination of what I did take and some campus maps should get the point across. The oldest part of the campus remains sequestered from the majority by busy 21^st Avenue South:

This area (outlined in blue in the campus map below) is known as the Peabody Campus, because it originated as the George Peabody College for Teachers upon splitting from the University of Nashville in 1875. In 1979, it merged with Vanderbilt University and assumed the name Peabody College of Education and Human Development. While the majority of the top-ranked graduate school of education classes take place on the Peabody Campus, its buildings also host classes for undergraduates, administrative offices, as well as some dormitories. Its largest distinction is the strictly geometric layout of its buildings, somewhat visible in the photos as well as the campus map.

The distinctive origin design of the Peabody campus design becomes more evident when contrasted with the historic main campus of Vanderbilt to the northwest. Indicated by the red outline in the campus map, this section of “Old Vanderbilt” adopts a much more organic campus layout—looser and much less emphasis on perpendicularity than the Peabody Campus.

Apparently the biodiversity of this portion of campus has earned it the designation as a national arboretum. This section and the Peabody Campus receive the highest level of utility upgrades; not a single overhead cable is visible here.

The approximate spot where I took the original photo of the utility pole is indicated by the orange circle on the campus map. This area, and virtually everything to both the south and west of it, represents the preponderance of Vanderbilt’s expansions. Most of the university’s expansion began in the 1950s, and it shows. Whereas Peabody and the old Vanderbilt campus are almost completely pedestrianized, with the majority of academic buildings fronting foot trails, the newer portion of the campus reflects the more automobile dominating ethos of the time. Unfortunately the only photo I took that accurately demonstrates this is the first one on this blog post with the utility pole, but it at least hints at the widespread campus design typology of the second half of the twentieth century. The cars, parked perpendicular to the curb, enjoy dedicated parking along a right of way that does not function as a city street, nor is it purely a parking lot. These “campus roads” that weave their way through most universities of a reasonably size usually have two origins: they are formerly city roads that served a residential neighborhood, both of which (homes and road ROW) have been purchased and claimed by the university, giving the school the freedom to design traffic flow and parking to its own standards; they were integrated into the university’s own master plan and never existed as part of the public right of way, again giving the university almost unlimited freedom. In this case, I suspect these campus roads owe their current existence to the first of the two aforementioned scenarios. The brown lines I have traced on the campus map show an inchoate grid pattern that most likely formerly serviced private residences; many of the homes where either purchased or demolished by the university to make way for fraternities and sororities. The roads directly serving the Greek housing still maintain many of the characteristics of conventional rights of way, but one street (indicated by the brown line that terminates in the orange circle) looses its ROW character and becomes more of a logistical service route, with dedicated parking. This is also the point where the conventional urban grid breaks down and, instead of the roads defining the shape of parcels and the buildings that rest upon them, the building alignment seems to have dictated part of the trajectory of the road. I’ve included a few more photos below that show how this phenomenon influences the buildings in the new campus, provided from the Vanderbilt website.

Lupton Hall is one wing within a larger quad structure, but it rests on Vanderbilt Place (no doubt purchased by the university but with public access) and it features a separate vehicular drop-off point.

The Ben Schulman Center for Jewish Life is a particularly new addition at the corner of Vanderbilt Place and 25^th Avenue South. The off-street parking is marginally visible to the far left.

The need for 22,000 square feet of parking would have seemed unconscionable prior to the expansion, but by the time the Kensington Garage was built at the intersection of Kensington Place and 25^th Avenue South, it critically served university staff and faculty as well as guests to a neighboring hotel.

Most likely my original photo featured a different perspective of this 1920s-era power house. The prominent smoke stack is an unlikely feature not commonly seen in most campuses. Interestingly, the campus website claims here that all house-run utilities are underground, which leads one to question why it would make such a claim when above ground facilities are plainly visible. Could it be that the power lines running through campus service other parts of the city and the City of Nashville simply needed to wind across parts of Vanderbilt campus?

Regardless of whether the utility placement is by-right or by easement, it clearly remains the underbelly of the institution—the mess of wires and gears that makes the place tick. Nearly every major campus has a portion like this—the section where aesthetics took a back seat to the convenience of parking, or vehicle unloading, or the necessity of a close electric substation. It would be lunacy for Vanderbilt’s admissions office to coordinate tours in this portion of the campus—the whole area feels like logistical roads for vehicle unloading, while the main entrances to the buildings themselves seems almost hidden. Like most urban development in the 1950s and subsequent decades, both the scale of the structures and the flow created by linear paths disfavor the pedestrian. The buildings might be generally close together and contiguous with the old campus—after all, students aren’t necessarily going to own cars and will still need access to the expansion sections of campus—but the planning seems far less cognizant of foot traffic than 19^th century Vanderbilt, which is human scaled by necessity. The new campus seeks to accommodate both the car and the pedestrian, but it is axiomatic that only the pedestrian will make any sacrifices in this case. The result is sprawl, university style.

This dichotomy between old and may have little bearing on the overall success of the university, but the fact that campus facilities has made no effort to conceal those aggressive electric poles speaks much about the aesthetic stance the university takes to its new development. Most contemporary American cities are devoting an inordinate amount of resources to revitalizing their downtowns, largely because, no matter how much it may decentralize, the downtown remains the foremost location by which an outsider is going to form an impression of a city. Downtown is the city’s front door. Accordingly, old campus and Peabody are the front door of Vanderbilt—the images of walking tours, of postcards, of an officially dedicated arboretum. Some of the suburbs of metro Detroit are lovely—but the first images that come to mind when one thinks of Detroit is a decaying old city center from Robocop. I am not denigrating the development patterns and practices from the age of the automobile, but the positioning of the old historic center of downtowns and campuses demonstrates a perhaps unconscious preference for the way old walkable hubs look and how they accommodate visitors. Contemporary downtowns are increasingly adapting to a growing demand for building and street designs that engages the pedestrian. Most likely, subsequent development at Vanderbilt will follow the same pattern, eventually minimizing the back yard, no-man’s land feel that comprises a significant portion of the campus. And in time it may also impel the university to bury those power lines.