Harbor Town development offers old-fashioned values

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Nov 22, 1996 by Philip Langdon N.Y. Times News Service

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- This city's top tourist draw may always be Elvis, but people more fascinated by houses and community design have been coming to see a different kind of attraction: Harbor Town, a 130-acre development that seeks to re-create some of the sociable traits of places built 70 to 100 years ago.

Architects, developers and home builders are among those who cross the nine-year-old A.W. Willis Jr. Bridge from the northern end of downtown and arrive on narrow, green Mud Island intent on discovering how a new community sets out to achieve old-time gregariousness.

Since the 1980s, when a pedestrian-oriented resort called Seaside began to be developed on 80 acres of the Florida panhandle, there has been a surge of interest in designing communities that offer housing of many kinds, mixed within walking distance of stores, parks and other gathering places. This approach, variously called the new urbanism, neotraditional development or traditional neighborhood development, can be found in 102 developments in construction or planning around the country, according to the newsletter New Urban News. Harbor Town, which broke ground in 1989, has earned a reputation as one of the most successful. "We call Harbor Town a traditional neighborhood on the river, where everyone knows your name," said Jim Shankle, marketing director for Henry Turley Realtors, which sells houses and building lots in the project, situated between the diminutive Wolf River and the broad Mississippi. The community design, produced by RTKL Associates of Baltimore and revised by the local architectural firm of Looney Ricks Kiss, places some freestanding houses so close that their roofs could practically share the same gutter. Front yards are only 10 feet deep, and nearly all the homes feature porches overlooking the sidewalks and narrow streets. And true to the designers' hopes, sociability abounds. "One of my neighbors says only friendly people move to Harbor Town," said Nancy Caldwell, who arrived with her husband from Chicago in 1992. "Everybody is out walking, riding bikes or Rollerblading. You know your neighbors, you know their schedules." Jim Howell, the father of a newborn, said: "Your neighbors are more like second parents to the kids. It's a more protective environment than suburban areas." Howell estimates that he knows 50 of his neighbors at Harbor Town, in contrast to the handful he knew in each of the neighborhoods where he previously lived on Memphis' eastern periphery. The driving force behind Harbor Town is Henry M. Turley Jr., a 55- year-old downtown developer who grew up in an old Memphis neighborhood that contained a mix of the rich, the poor and those in between, along with a few drugstores, a bakery, a coffee shop and other businesses where people met and sometimes began lifelong friendships. Turley said he envisioned Harbor Town as a community with "shared ground" where residents could "have a political rally, trade knives, spit, idle away an hour or so -- just have a spontaneous, unexpected conversation with a neighbor." His development company, Island Property Associates, a partnership including Jack Belz and Belz Enterprises, acquired the land -- about a quarter of the mostly raw island -- in 1987 after the Jake Butcher banking empire in Tennessee collapsed, leaving the undeveloped property in the hands of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. During a recent visit, the atmosphere looked auspicious for idling and there seemed little doubt that Harbor Town was as outgoing as Turley had hoped. "You get more of a sense of community than in the typical suburban development," said Craig Beard, a lawyer who with his wife, Dee, bought a town house at Harbor Town in 1991. So far, 280 attached and detached houses and a 345-unit apartment complex have been completed. An additional 175 houses are yet to be built. A 50-slip marina has opened on the Wolf River, eventually to be expanded to 200 slips. A Montessori school has been constructed and twice enlarged as the number of children, about 100, has surpassed expectations. Recently Turley has been searching for an operator for a 7,000- square-foot grocery he intends to build in Harbor Town Square near the school. Also expected in the town square area are small shops, an office building, two restaurants and a 162-room inn and yacht club. Harbor Town's biggest triumph has been in getting builders to erect houses in a broad range of sizes and prices, within steps of one another and in a huge assortment of generally compatible designs. "There's a half-million-dollar house next to a $220,000 house next to a $170,000 house," said Antonio R. Bologna, director of development. J. Carson Looney, an architect who oversees building design, said families built the big houses after smaller, less-expensive ones had already been started nearby -- a sign, in his view, that people were not troubled by the mixing of economic classes and found the diversity refreshing. Many of the house designs update traditional Southern types, including Charleston, S.C., "sideyard houses," which have their main yard to one side, and "shotgun houses," narrow dwellings supposedly given their name because a shot fired from the front door could go straight through to the back. Front porches and second-floor balconies give the occupants elevated perches from which to watch the parade of passers-by. High foundations like those found on turn-of-the-century houses elevate the living quarters and help to shield them from inquisitive eyes. Looney, whose firm has designed about a third of Harbor Town's houses, said the high foundations, the raising of door and window heads to 8 feet from the conventional 6 feet 8 inches and an emphasis on classically correct placement and detailing of porch columns distinguished Harbor Town dwellings from typical Memphis tract houses. Looney's firm interlaced Harbor Town with alleys so that cars would be out of the way and the streets would be primarily given over to people. With time, the alleys have become increasingly refined, their utility meters and trash containers hidden behind screened enclosures. Homeowners have been encouraged to plant trees in the backyards to shade the alleys and to light the vehicular passages at night. To entice residents outdoors and make their views more pleasant "all of the main streets start at a park and end at a park," Turley said. The tiny Nursery Park -- overlooked by tall, narrow dwellings, some of them on 30-foot-wide lots -- has become a popular meeting place for all ages. Appraisers value Harbor Town houses at $105 or so a square foot, vs. the upper $80s in the Memphis suburbs, Bologna said. Harbor Town's apartment complex commands rents about 5 percent higher than comparable properties downtown, reflecting the added time and effort required to build a mixed-price, mixed-use development like Harbor Town over a conventional project, Turley said. Turley views himself as a pioneer, challenging a collection of powerful influences like the desire for houses on large plots on the countryside and a fear of cities and minorities in general that make it tough to develop tightly woven, sociable, urban communities without extraordinary effort. If the reaction to Harbor Town had been negative or lukewarm, he said, "I would give up." Instead, he is pushing toward completion in 1999.