Nashville’s mayor says the city needs more time to decide whether to purchase a 100-year-old downtown building with strong ties to local black history.
Mayor David Briley said Wednesday that Metro believes the Morris Memorial Building is worth preserving. But the city will ask its current owners, the National Baptist Convention, for an extended purchase deadline.
“Morris Memorial Building is too special a place to leave its fate to the private market to decide,” Briley said in a statement.
Metro’s ideas for what the building could become are also shifting.
Initially, Metro said the building could be partially converted into affordable housing units. But a committee created by the mayor says that “does not make sense,” because of the cost of retrofitting such units.
Instead, the committee suggests other ideas, such as:
- a workforce development center or business incubator;
- a civic center for black history and culture;
- an artist-in-residency program with a gallery space; or
- office space for some city departments like Metro Arts or the Community Oversight Board.
The three-page committee letter is available online here (PDF).
The Morris Memorial Building has long served as the headquarters for the largest African-American Christian denomination in the country. The study committee calls the building a “vital remnant” of black business and was effusive about its architecture, calling it a “Rembrandt of construction.”
The mayor also wants a public conversation, so he’s asking to push a decision back to the fall.
In the meantime, he says affordable housing funds will be shifted to a different project in the urban core — although the details have not been shared.
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