Some opposed to parking lot at Cheeburger Cheeburger site
A surface parking lot is proposed on the site of the 141-year-old brick building that held the Cheeburger Cheeburger restaurant until the building collapsed unexpectedly in late March.
Opposition has formed to the idea, since some say surface parking isn’t the best use for the now-empty lot at 138 Market St. which is in a prime location across from the Tennessee Aquarium in the heart of Chattanooga’s downtown.
“That’s not the highest and best use for an important corner in our city,” said Kim White, the president and CEO of the River City Co., the nonprofit organization that works to improve downtown.
Many urban planners argue that surface parking lots have hollowed out America’s once-densely developed downtowns and made them pedestrian-unfriendly. Surface parking lots have been called everything from “the scourge of American downtowns” to “parking craters.”
“I’m sure he’s going to have a lot of opposition,” White said of the property’s owner, George W. Walls Jr., who’s being represented by Kevin Boehm, a Chattanooga real estate broker who focuses on downtown properties.
Civic activist Helen Burns Sharp, who lives nearby, said, “Sad to see the historic Shelton Flour Mill building (“Cheeburger Cheeburger”) replaced by a surface parking lot where the goal seems to be to cram as many cars in as possible with the minimal amount of landscaping. There are five surface lots already in the immediate vicinity.”
The city’s form-based code committee will meet at 2 p.m. next Thursday
the Development Resource Center at 1250 Market St. to decide whether to allow variances that would maximize the parking lot’s size.
Walls’ proposal asks for a reduction in parking setbacks. For example, instead of a 30-foot parking setback on Market Street, the proposal calls for a 2-foot to 6-foot setback in various areas.
The proposal also asks for a reduction in the number of required trees from 12 to six and no landscape islands.
Walls also wants to be exempted from a requirement for a sidewalk on Cherry Street, and he’d like to keep the sidewalk its existing size on Aquarium Way, instead of meeting the city’s requirement for a 10-foot-wide sidewalk there.
Walls couldn’t be reached for comment, and Boehm and Republic Parking officials didn’t return calls Wednesday.
White said there already are enough parking structures nearby, and she offered to meet with Walls to help him find another tenant.
“I think it’s a valuable piece of property,” she said. “We would love to work with him.”
At best, White said, surface parking lots should be thought as “placeholders for development.”
As for the other, existing surface parking lots near the aquarium?
“We think those need to be developed, too,” White said.