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Imagination
Put the premium on the idea, not the cost
by Robert Loest
When my wife and I moved into The Emporium, I hung a wonderful Brian Andreas “Story People” print beside my bathroom mirror where I see it every day. It says:
“In my dream, the angel shrugged and said if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination, and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”
We all tend sometimes to become so accustomed to our faults that we create excuses for them, or no longer see them as others do, if at all, and any incentive to change ourselves disappears over time. This is as true of cities as it is of individuals.
This morning I jogged down State Street to Hill Avenue from my home on the 100 block of Gay Street, then back along Central. This is an ugly, deserted series of blocks lined with gray concrete parking garages, gray concrete expressway, asphalt parking lots and broken sidewalks. At night it’s dark and threatening. It runs almost the entire length of downtown from Summit Hill to the river, and from Gay Street to the Vols Onramp to Neyland Drive. It’s relieved by only one short block with a few decayed apartments and a church. Incredibly, this area comprises something like a quarter of Knoxville’s entire walkable downtown!
We have what could be an attractive park buffer between all this ugliness and the Vols Onramp, but it’s blocked by an ugly, rusting hurricane fence topped with rusty barbed wire along Central. Why not move the fence over next to the onramp, and make an attractive, usable park for residents and visitors, accessible from Central and the Old City? The city did this on the other side of the onramp, and even put in a playground. Why not here? All they have to do is move a fence!
The last little leg of State Street along the south edge of the Country Music Memorial at Gay and Summit Hill is a fatal accident waiting to happen, because the intersection with Gay Street is so confusing for both pedestrians and drivers. Digging it up and combining those two small park-like areas could create a real park for this end of town. The city already owns the land. Only labor is required. A park there could make downtown far more attractive, and the cost is trivial.
People could then more easily imagine, set between the twin jewels of two small parks, music and laughter, children and the elderly, sidewalk cafes and small businesses. Beauty inspires imagination. Imagination creates wealth. We should listen to Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Sometimes some concrete change or encouragement is required for people to view themselves in a new way, to uncover some major new potential within themselves of which they are unaware. So it is with cities, too. Deserted buildings are being renovated, thanks to the leadership of private developers. Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale and Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam show progressive and creative thinking in discussing a swap of the county-owned parking lot between State and Central for the deserted News Sentinel building site, for the new county library.
Mayor Haslam’s options have been limited by decades of center city neglect and runaway profligacy during Victor Ashe’s administration, but this decay has created greater potential for recovery as well. If we want our city to be attractive to the real creators of wealth—new downtown residents and businesses—Mayor Haslam has no choice but to begin thinking completely, and radically, outside the box, and to not allow fiscal limitations to become constraints on imagination and creativity.
For example, could we somehow make many of our asphalt parking lots available for more valuable use through major development incentives? One solution could be to give parking lot owners an equivalent number of parking spaces in a new city-owned parking garage, in exchange for their lots. Put business space on the street level. The city gets developable lots and new tax revenues, the lot owners get to charge more rent without having to do a thing, and downtown’s attractiveness for new businesses and residents soars.
Surely there are many other innovative options. The appearance to visitors of our endless gray blocks of ugly, dark parking areas, the removal of nearly a third of the city (over half if you count parking lots and non-taxable government properties) from significant economic development, and of downtown’s almost total capitulation to the automobile, has limited Knoxville’s economic and regional leadership potential. We seem to have gotten so used to it that we no longer even see our faults.
I sincerely hope Haslam’s administration proves open to the innovative input of Knoxville’s non-establishment—talented, successful and imaginative residents and business people—drivers and creators who have already proven their worth in the hard world of ideas, business and accomplishments.
If it is not, it will be due to a failure of imagination, not a lack of money.
June 17, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 25
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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