Still meeting after a year and a half, the Fort Sanders Forum struggles with itself over how to preserve Knoxville's oldest neighborhood.
by Joe Tarr
Chris Tucker was driving around Fort Sanders looking for a place to live last spring when he stumbled across his dream house. Located on the corner of Laurel Avenue and 14th Street, the ramshackle wooden house had been vacant since 1994 and seemed destined for the bulldozers. The windows were smashed out, part of it was charred from a fire, and across the front door was spray painted the graffito: "Rebuild This House Punk."
That's exactly what Tucker had in mind.
"If I was to sit down and design my dream house, I couldn't draw it any better than this. I love Victorian houses and this one had all the elements to make it stand out," says Tucker, a third-year UT law student. "I was surprised how good of shape it's in, considering what it'd been through."
Since May, Tucker's been plugging along at the house—restoring the original staircase and window frames, and adding new flourishes such as the second-floor deck with little orange Ts painted on the banister finials.
Unfortunately for Knoxville's oldest neighborhood, Tucker's home improvement efforts are an anomaly. Last year, dozers toppled more than 50 homes—almost all of them in better condition than Tucker's dream house.
Many hoped the Fort Sanders Forum, formed in 1998 on the brink of the demolition wave, would figure out a way to protect more of these homes in the neighborhood, and make sure new construction wasn't a blight. But the forum seems from the outside—and even to some on the inside—to have been a dismal failure.
However, with the forum's recommendations now being finalized, some are holding out hope the tide can be turned. What exactly went wrong with the forum? And more importantly, is there still time for something to go right?
in 1998, a Texas development company named JPI began acquiring options on property throughout the neighborhood as it prepared a major student housing complex. Residents and historic preservationists—sick of watching historic homes being razed to make way for bland apartment buildings—took a stand. Opposition at City Council meetings was abundant and fierce.
Mayor Victor Ashe hoped to resolve the issue by getting the various players to sit down together. He formed the Fort Sanders Forum, including developers, landlords, home owners, city officials, neighborhood and historic preservationists, and administrators from the University of Tennessee, Children's and Fort Sanders hospitals (though hailed by the mayor as an extremely diverse group, others criticized it for the absence of women, minorities, and renters).
The forum agreed on a core area that it wanted to save, and outside which the high-density developments would go. At first, many people thought the agreement (which was not formal or binding) was a good compromise. But when JPI razed more than 30 houses for its buildings along Grand, 11th and 12th streets last summer and other property owners demolished buildings, optimism turned to despair.
Nic Arning, president of Knox Heritage (a non-profit pro-preservation group) and a forum member, says he's been aggravated by the lack of any concrete actions. "To a large degree, this forum makes everybody look like we're working in the right direction, so we can pat ourselves on the back, adjourn, and go home—and conceivably nothing is ever accomplished," Arning says.
Although he's glad the forum has brought the various interests together, Arning says that City Council should be more involved in the process. He also complains that the forum's three facilitators—UT architecture professor Jon Coddington, John Leith-Tetrault of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and John Doggett of the Community Design Center—"are not allowed to voice an opinion," despite their expertise.
Ellen Adcock, Mayor Ashe's director of administration, admits that so far the forum has accomplished very little. "What we're doing is trying to reverse the trends that started 50 years ago. What we tried to do was jump through any window of opportunity we could find," Adcock says. "Don't fault us for trying."
Simply getting all the various interests to sit down together and work on a plan could pay off major dividends in years to come, Adcock says. However, that depends on how good the plan is and whether it can be implemented.
After meeting for a year and a half, the forum has yet to finalize any recommendations. Working with the Metropolitan Planning Commission it has drafted several ideas, many of which have been no-brainers, such as enhancing sidewalks and lighting, and creating new parks. Also being supported are innovative ideas like narrowing Cumberland Avenue to three lanes and widening the sidewalks to make the strip more pedestrian friendly; and examining a residential parking permit program to ease parking congestion in the neighborhood. Another idea is to construct an underground parking garage at Rose Hole, the deep gully behind the Scottish Rite Temple on 16th Street, and putting shops and apartments above the garage at street level.
But the group has yet to formulate a plan for its most important charge—finding a way to preserve historic homes and ensure new construction enhances the neighborhood.
The initial idea was to establish a conservation overlay on the core of the Fort. A new type of district in Knoxville, conservation overlays are not as strict as historic overlays. They would establish certain guidelines for new construction, which would mainly have to do with lot setbacks and general structure dimensions. Existing buildings could be renovated as the owner pleased. However, any major additions or demolition would be subject to review by the Historic Zoning Commission.
Both those who favor and those who oppose regulations have problems with this proposal.
Mark Schimmenti, a UT architecture professor, says the proposal simply lacks bite.
"The bottom line is you have to produce a clear document that has teeth. Many times it's necessary to work with developers. But when it comes down to the area you're really trying to save you have to have teeth, something that will save the structures you want to save and make sure new construction is sympathetic to what's already there," he says. "Right now, we don't have any of that. What we have now are suggestions.
"I know MPC knows how to do it. The plan they wrote for Mechanicsville is really good," he adds.
While Schimmenti praised parts of the plan (such as narrowing Cumberland), he says what's needed is a detailed building code, outlining what people can and can't build. There also needs to be a formalized process that makes it easy for developers to submit plans—with architectural reviews early in the process to steer them on the right track and prevent them from spending a fortune on designs that will eventually get rejected (or worse yet, lead to poor compromises), Schimmenti says.
"Developers will tell you, 'Oh, no, we don't want to see that... We won't be able to develop.' Well, maybe we've got the wrong developers. Every place that I know of that has good, strict guidelines for how to develop is thriving," Schimmenti says, pointing to Santa Barbara, Calif., and Coral Gables, Fla., as examples.
But some developers and large property owners in Fort Sanders bristle at this line of thinking. To them, MPC's suggestions aren't soft, they're stifling.
"[The neighborhood] has developed, it has come to a certain point, and now people want to stop the wheels and go back," says Brent Howard, who owns six buildings with 48 apartment units in the neighborhood and is a forum member.
"Two of the buildings that are affected by the overlay are two 30-year-old buildings that I own with 18 apartment units in each. The way this zone reads, if I were to put a new roof on it, I may have to put a Victorian roof on it, a turret—I don't know, they may make me put a Tudor roof on it," he says.
"If [property owners] want to paint their building pink or white or whatever or put a pack of dogs in there, or start a bear den, that's their business. If they want to have a bunch of gypsy dancers, that's fine. I just don't think the whole neighborhood ought to be steamrolled because some people want it to go back to some historic aesthetic.
"People bought into this neighborhood for a reason...if their building burns down and they have to rebuild, they don't want to have to be forced into rebuilding it into a Victorian mansion.
"This will not happen. If we have to take it to the courts, we will," he adds.
The conservation district wouldn't require such draconian measures as Howard fears. But his suspicions show how tough it will be to get property owners to buy into the measure.
City officials say a conservation overlay—or any other type of building regulation—wouldn't be established unless a majority of property owners support it. (However, the Council does have the power to impose an overlay.)
Although he didn't name anyone, Arning says many large property owners are stymieing the forum's efforts by being closed-minded. "They won't listen to reason. That group is driven more by individual avarice or greed than anything," he says.
Schimmenti says the city has a right and duty to regulate development. "As soon as Knoxville realizes that private interests are secondary to the public good, then we're going to have a good city. Sometimes you have to say, 'No.'"
Unable to agree on the right approach, the forum has formed a sub-committee to look at tweaking or re-writing the neighborhood's R-3 zone, which has been blamed for much of the Fort's current problems. By requiring large setbacks from the property lines, high density developments require the accumulation of large tracts of property. The large setbacks run counter to the way the neighborhood traditionally developed, with homes generally built on narrow, deep lots with front porches close to the sidewalks. The taller a developer wants to build, the more land he must accumulate, forcing the obliteration of more and more homes.
Mike Carberry of the MPC says the sub-committee should have recommendations back to the forum by the end of the month.
In the meantime, houses keep falling and the city seems to have little power to stop it or control what is built in their place. Landlord Robert Shagan recently evicted residents from at least four homes along Clinch Avenue so that he can demolish them. What he has planned for the property is unknown. In the past, he's demolished homes and used the land for gravel parking lots. In a letter to tenants, Shagan blamed the evictions on the city's attempts to protect Fort Sanders' historic structures.
If the bulldozers stay as busy in the Fort this year as they did last, there won't be much left of the historic neighborhood to save.
Arning fears that there won't be the money or political will to accomplish much. "What worries me is...it'll get stuck on the bottom of the list of the things that need to be done, which means it's five to 10 years down the road. Which means, so what. We could have put them on the list without having a forum."
Despite all the frustration the forum has caused, the preservationists are still holding out hope.
Adcock says that City Council will be more likely to enact some kind of standards once the forum has completed its work. "What we will have is more accurate information that can be put in front of council members," she says.
Schimmenti says there's no reason the neighborhood can't be rebuilt.
"We could rebuild all of Fort Sanders and it would be as beautiful as it ever was and probably have twice as many people. There's no reason building new can't be good. Everyone's given up on it because they've seen how cheesy it's being done in the Fort," he says. "But that's not the only way to build."
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