The leading influencers for the Rolling Mill Hill development were city officials - first Mayor Phil Bredesen followed by Mayor Bill Purcell.

Mayor Bredesen was instrumental in the General Hospital merger with Meharry Medical College, and Mayor Purcell urged the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) to pursue redevelopment studies of the city-owned land. 

 

An important catalyst for change was the Metro Council, which lifted a 20-year ban to build residential development in the downtown core in 1994. With that law change, Nashville entered the era of new urbanism.

 

Rolling Mill Hill became the first neighborhood that attracted new urbanism efforts in the immediate vicinity of downtown.

 

As soon as it became clear that the Metro General Hospital would move from the site, the Downtown Nashville Partnership developed redevelopment plans for the site, which called for a mixed-use, dense urban development (Lawson, 1997).

 

MDHA, under the leadership of executive director Gerald Nicely, called for an RFP to develop the 35-acre site. The two local names that keep appearing in development and site planning proposals - yet on different teams - are the Mathews Company and Tuck-Hinton Architects.

 

Eventually, MDHA accepted a proposal by Post Properties from Atlanta, which included the Mathews Company. However, Post/Mathews bowed out because they could not get the financing to work to their satisfaction. The property sat in limbo because Metro could not figure out where to house the city departments, which at that point occupied the trolley barns.(Kreyling, 2000)

 

In April of 2000, Mayor Bill Purcell took the Rolling Mill Hill dilemma with him to Charlottesville, VA, where he attended a Mayor’s Institute on City Design and upon his return requested that MDHA conduct a feasibility study for the site

 

“The mayor says that while many people have wrapped their minds around Rolling Mill Hill, the planning processes ‘reflected a time when we did not coordinate our planning very well, when we did not engage the larger community as much as we could. That’s the record for many instances of development and planning in this city’” (Kreyling, 2000).

 

Activity truly began rolling in 2002 with a planning study conducted by the Nashville Civic Design Center in partnership with Metro planners, and in 2003, the city held a series of public hearings, which resulted with the presentation of a 15-year redevelopment plan from RTKL (see MDHA page).In 2004, MDHA received a $900,000-grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moved forward with preparing the site by cleaning up the brownfields and starting infrastructure improvements.

 

MDHA awarded the overall project development to Direct Development out of Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the end of the same year. Direct Development planned a $55 million project with four condominium buildings on the site of the old Nashville General Hospital (see Nashville Business Journal, 2009).