John Cooper isn’t being candid about his role in the Fort Negley site | Opinion – The Tennessean
John Cooper isn’t being candid about his role in the Fort Negley site | Opinion The Tennessean
The Cloud Hill project was never going to move forward if slave graves were found likely on the Greer Stadium property.
opinion
T Bone Burnett Guest columnist
Published 7:01 AM EDT Aug 27, 2019
Multimillionaire developer John Cooper is representing himself as the person who saved Fort Negley from developers, when we on the Cloud Hill team said from the very beginning that because the Greer Stadium site was located next to Fort Negley, a site of historical significance, our first step would be to conduct a thorough archeological survey.
We withdrew our offer to the city out of respect for the human remains that were there, not because of the people who mischaracterized our plan.
Buried in the first article The Tennessean ran about our project is this quote. “Burnett said he’s already tapped an archaeologist to review the site, has started to engage with historians, and said that he would use best archaeological practices aimed at preservation.”
No one planned to build over graves, ever
When the preliminary archeological survey was completed, it was determined that there was the possibility of human remains on the Greer Stadium site, and we withdrew our offer to the city, as we said we would from the start.
Cooper had nothing to do with our decision.
To set the record straight, we were never going to do or build anything on a site that was found to have the remains of the African Americans who had been conscripted by the Union Army to build Fort Negley.
Cloud Hill was a creative plan to give to the city of Nashville an important public space including the much needed affordable housing that the city had requested and to reconnect the city, which had been segregated by freeways, with walking paths.
The Cloud Hill plan was to create an urban park in the center of town, a public space where people from every part of town would be welcome.
For the record, the preliminary study that was done found that the most likely site of human remains was near where the ostensible Friends of Fort Negley built their visitor center, which opened in 2007, without doing an archaeology survey before they broke ground there.
Fundraising is falling short
In the last 10 months, preservation groups have run a crowdfunding campaign to belatedly do their own archaeological study. So far, $4,585 have been raised of a $50,000 goal. At this rate, in eight years, they will meet their goal, but not have enough to accomplish a complete study.
To be clear, we never had any plans to build anything on Fort Negley. In fact, we had plans to help restore the disintegrating fort, something neither Cooper nor the Friends of Fort Negley have been able to do. The only buildings we proposed for the site were on either the parking lot or the existing ruin of the abandoned baseball stadium, and they were all in response to four major studies that the city had published.
Cooper’s claiming credit for our decision to withdraw our offer to the city is as the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.
I believe this is obvious now, as during Cooper’s tenure as a council member, the Greer Stadium site has been bulldozed and the 100-year-old community baseball bleachers that were the center of a historic African-American neighborhood have been demolished along with the historic 1930s-era walls and whatever other historic artifacts were on the site.
A political move
This demolition was done without the proposed archaeological study, which, of course, Cooper could easily have paid for himself.
He is, after all, spending $1.4 million of his own money on his mayoral campaign, while raising only a small fraction of that from individuals.
I think it has become clear that Cooper’s posturing over the Fort Negley site is not out of concern for the good of the people of Nashville, but rather for his own political designs on the city.
I find Cooper’s attempt to disparage our team and our motives to serve his own political ambitions disturbing. Even after 50 years of show business in Hollywood, John Cooper is, I believe, the most two-faced person I have ever met.
T Bone Burnett, one of the driving forces behind the Cloud Hill Partnership, is a highly acclaimed, award-winning songwriter, performer and producer who is also a conscience-driven cultural and urban planning advocate.
Published 7:01 AM EDT Aug 27, 2019
