BusinessTN

Imagine a 4,500-acre urban park within the Memphis city limits that could one day rival or even exceed in quality some of the world's premier public parks--Central Park in New York City among them. Burch, Porter & Johnson attorney Charlie Newman has been a key player in the four-decade effort to bring such a park to fruition.

Located just a handful of miles from the heart of downtown Memphis, Shelby Farms Park was once a penal farm, and in fact, a prison still stands on the grounds. When it ceased operations decades ago, developers eyed the site, a notion fought against by several prominent businesspeople at the time, including Memphis icon Lucius E. Burch Jr. (then Newman's friend and boss), who saw the site as a unique asset that shouldn't ever be developed.

A prominent landscape architect, Garrett Eckbo of California, was hired to devise an elaborate plan for preserving the area. Completed in 1975, Eckbo's vision never took root. Luckily, however, the land remained owned by Shelby County (though the land is located within Memphis) and remained undeveloped. Attempts were made through the years to apply a conservation easement to the site, putting restrictions on future development, but to no avail.

More recently, with the help of current Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton Jr., the Hyde Family Foundations and the Plough Foundation (as well as the hard work of other interested people), the commission was persuaded to grant an easement over the land and to enter into a management agreement with a newly created nonprofit called Shelby Farms Park Conservancy. Newman and his office drafted the easement, set up the new nonprofit and drafted the management agreement, which protects the entire area from commercial or residential development for at least 50 years.

A New York-based company led by Harvard instructor Alex Garvin was hired to do a master plan for the park. The result was a 223-page document envisioning 12 distinctive "landscape rooms" and other developments, including an expanded Patriot Lake and large-scale tree plantings. This past August, the Hyde Family Foundations announced a $20 million challenge grant to launch the plan to transform Shelby Farms Park into America's great 21st-Century park. Phase one (three phases are envisioned) is anticipated to cost $80 million to $100 million and take five years to implement. The outcome of that challenge grant was unknown at press time.

Separately, Newman is also employed by the Memphis Community Connector, a nonprofit group that is working to gain control of an unused, but not officially abandoned, CSX railroad that goes from virtually the center of Memphis to Shelby Farms and beyond (a total of 13 miles). The group recently reached an agreement with CSX on the purchase of half of those 13 miles and an extension of the deadline to buy the rest. Completion of the deal would allow Memphians to bike, walk or run from the center of Memphis to Shelby Farms and would also tie in trails being developed and restored by yet another local conservation group, the Wolf River Conservancy.