It’s back to the drawing board
Stakeholders to develop new plan for Pinch
Back in 1991, when the city put up The Pyramid, the idea was simple.
Visitors to the new Downtown arena would avidly spend. New shops, restaurants, bars, maybe a brew pub would refresh rundown North Main and the adjacent Pinch District. That was the idea. In a city that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stabilizing its Downtown in the last quarter century, the idea clearly misfired.
Beale Street blossomed into a tourist destination.
South Main transformed into an urban village.
Yet the Pinch deteriorated.
Much of it at night resembles the barren parking lot in the crime thriller where the homicide detectives find the body.
What if there were a nice grocer serving the 24,000plus residents in the new lofts, apartments and zero
lot lines that define South Main, Mud Island and Uptown?
Or what about apartments and shops for St. Jude workers, or entertainment arcades and bars for tourists, or a good shopping place whose architecture matches the Pinch’s 19th Century red brick?
And in a city where tax breaks for profitable enterprises have become a way of life, how about if new Pinch developments paid property taxes?
Suddenly, these and other ideas appear possible.
That’s because Bass Pro Shops is repurposing The Pyramid into an entertainment and retail center expected to draw more than 1 million visitors per year.
So now it’s back to the drawing board in the Pinch.
Robert Lipscomb , director of the city’s housing and community development department, said the city soon will bring together what he calls the Pinch stakeholders.
They’ll air ideas and settle on a redevelopment plan. The city has earmarked sales taxes collected Downtown to repay any loans taken out for future Pinch work.
Lipscomb said he has no way of knowing yet if the 1-acre project proposed in the district at Main and Jackson will conflict with the stakeholders’ final plan.
Although the proposal for the 1-acre project surprised him when it surfaced in the news Thursday, Lipscomb said, the stakeholders still will stay focused on mulling the broader redevelopment of the entire Pinch District.
The proposal came from Memphis real estate developer Henry Turley’s Pinch Partners Investment Co. No details about the project are available.
Turley couldn’t be reached for comment. He earlier had expressed doubts about the city masterminding the Pinch’s revival.
He favored private developers.
Despite Turley’s view, it’s probable that whatever he and the other stakeholders devise would mesh. Turley’s firm is a Pinch stakeholder.
So are leaders at the Downtown Memphis Commission and the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, as well as Bass Pro and owners of the three dozen or so Pinch parcels, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
The powerful research center reportedly has obtained about a third of the parcels in the Pinch, which is close to St. Jude’s rapidly expanded Uptown campus.
Once the stakeholders settle on an idea for the Pinch, Lipscomb said, the city will bring in a professional analyst such as Urban Land Institute officials to make sure the idea is sustainable and can attract a capable and willing private developer.
Lipscomb, regarded widely in Memphis as one of the most influential officials in City Hall, said he favors that bars, restaurants and retailers move into the Pinch, although he pointed out his opinion will not be the deciding factor.
“I’m just doing what the stakeholders want,” Lipscomb said. “That’s how we got Bass Pro. That was a group of stakeholders that got together. They vetted ideas and said, ‘This is what we should do: Attract Bass Pro.’ ”