Since 1991, the Nashville Zoo has delighted residents and out-of-town guests of all ages with exotic animal exhibits, family-friendly events, and one of the city’s best outdoor playgrounds. Like many of Nashville’s top attractions, the zoo has experienced record attendance year after year—from just over 73,000 guests in its first year of operation to 1.4 million in 2023.
As a result of its boom in popularity, parking became a regular challenge for the zoo’s staff and its visitors, particularly during weekends and holidays. Existing lots would often fill up before lunchtime, resulting in long lines of awaiting motorists and traffic jams on Nolensville Pike, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
In 2022, the Nashville Zoo announced that it planned to build a new two-story parking structure on the property to facilitate its growing crowds of visitors. The zoo selected its long-time partners at Solomon Builders to head up the project, which put its trust in Charter Construction to serve as its concrete contractor.
Jonathan Rizkallah, a senior project manager at Charter Construction, had helped manage several major projects for the company before he was tapped to lead the zoo project, including The Crestmoor at Green Hills, BNA Hilton Hotel, and state-of-the-art radiation treatment facility at Tennessee Oncology.
In October, he began assembling a sequence plan and day-to-day schedule in collaboration with the pre-construction planning and estimating team.
By January 2023, Jonathan and his team were working on-site. As soon as they began digging to pour footing columns to a maximum depth of eight feet, they discovered that as they moved further to the western edge of the structure’s footprint, there was no bedrock to be found until they dug up to 40 feet underground.
“I divided up our foundation crew into different teams to investigate each footing location and find out where we could move forward as planned and where we’d need a redesign,” explained Jonathan. It was more than a bump in the road that could have resulted in significant delays for the crew had it not been for the team’s proactive management and resourcefulness.
Superintendent Barry Molteni echoed this sentiment when discussing the challenges faced. He also highlighted the significant impact the field team had on the project. He noted that while there were discrepancies in the civil engineering drawings and grading issues, the field team addressed these challenges with remarkable efficiency and their dedication was instrumental in keeping the project on track.
Despite the challenges, the team would ultimately finish the structure within nine months—two months earlier than their required timeframe to complete the job. Their final pour took place in September 2023.
Over nine months, the project team put more than 66,600 hours of dedicated labor into the job, pouring 21,000 cubic yards of concrete to produce 584,000 square feet of finished surface as well as over 1,000 tons of rebar, 190 tons of post-tension cables, and 3.5 tons of barrier cabling.
“It was one of the smoothest jobs I’ve been a part of due to the nature of it,” Jonathan reflected. “It was a wide-open job site, unlike some others where there are a lot of different trades working simultaneously on a single site. And we had control of the entire footprint for the duration of our work, which is one of the reasons we were able to move pretty quickly.”
Their efforts helped create 1,851 additional parking spots at the zoo, which represents a 62 percent increase in parking capacity. From the two-story garage, guests are led down a beautifully landscaped walkway directly to the zoo’s front entrance.
“Experiencing the zoo is always an adventure, but finding a good parking spot shouldn’t be,” said Jonathan, who looks forward to taking his own two kids to the zoo for a visit in the near future.