Girlhood Gone: Notes from the New Nashville

September 20, 2016 8:56 AM

After returning home to Nashville following many years away, Susannah Felts assesses the city’s changing face through the eyes of a native, and as a woman raised in the South. (slLongReads)
posted by Kitteh (21 comments total)

Great article. I'll add that that after only five years away, as opposed to eighteen, the change feels basically as extreme. The condos, the traffic, the restaurants. The fact that nobody you meet is from here anymore. The fact that when you tell people you're from Nashville they now say, "Oh, I really want to visit there," or "All my musician friends from Brooklyn just moved there." All new. And the abundance of bachelorette parties cannot be overstated.
posted by little onion at 9:44 AM on September 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

I had the same experience with Portland.
posted by iamck at 10:33 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

"And if anything is just as it should be, this is it. The nature of places is to change; it is our nature to both mourn and celebrate that change."

Except in most of the previous paragraphs she spends most of the time mourning it. I live in Nashville, have for the past eight years, almost. It's a great city, as far as cities go. It's got a lot to offer. But it has some glaring flaws that are being brought out in high relief by the explosion in growth over the last ten years. To me, the most glaring flaws are: (1) lack of decent public transit (most metro areas would look at our transit system as a pathetic joke) and a lack of interest in getting folks out of their cars; (2) crumbling and aging infrastructure, especially the roads; (3) way too many special treats and kickbacks given to wealthy developers who keep throwing up huge-assed highrises that nobody who makes any kind of normal salary can afford (and those highrises, from what I can gather, are sitting there half or more empty); and (4) a downtown that caters to nobody but tourists (it's certainly not a downtown for people who live and work here) but that tourists laugh uproariously at -- it has nothing but five blocks of tightly-spaced rickety honky-tonks and kitsch stores, and after that five blocks ends, there's the Bridgestone Arena, the Schermerhorn, the Frist, and boom -- literally nothing after that but churches, auto dealerships, fast-food joints, and I-40 and I-65.
posted by blucevalo at 10:39 AM on September 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

But, hey. 5 points is still there. With 3 Crow and Lipstick (even tho Lipstick doesn't do poker Wednesdays anymore, booooo!). Also, Bookman/Bookwoman, plus Percy Warner and Radnor Lake! I miss you Nashville :(
posted by triage_lazarus at 10:52 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

I mean... this describes pretty much all mid-size cities that have been taken over by luxury-condo developers, by crusading "disruption-first" politicians who think the Creative Class is better than blue collar workers. They throw up one bike lane (not a bike infrastructure across the city, that would require real thought and investment in public transit) and a coffee shop with the day's specials in chalk and consider it an up-and-coming city. Sad, really.
posted by yonation at 10:57 AM on September 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

You could write a similar piece about Fort Worth, though we were never as big a deal.

One thing she doesn't really touch on is race, and in an article about a Southern city that seems pretty glaring. She tiptoes around with "gentrification" but no mention of who is doing it and who they are doing it to.

(Fort Worth has the same problem; for years the east side of the freeway was where people of color mostly lived, but I've seen some white people "discovering" it and stirrings of gentrification, and I wonder what will happen to all the families already there now).

Nashville, and Fort Worth, and most cities, are still terribly segregated places. I don't think any discussion about cities should omit that fact, because it affects absolutely everything. Because all that happens is now is that white people take over more spaces, and people who were pushed there but made it home get pushed, once again, somewhere less desirable. Further out, with fewer amenities.
posted by emjaybee at 11:07 AM on September 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

I have a lot of conflicting feels about my own Southern upbringing and how the once-small, now mid-size city I grew up in (Greenville, SC) has also changed radically in 20+ plus years since I lived there. I liked this article because it felt familiar in so many ways for me. Of course, I have no desire to live where I grew up--I often say that if my family didn't live there, I'd never go back at all--and any sentimentality I have about it often gets caught up in the cycle of how hard it was to grow up there as a weird kid. I mean, it's great that Greenville has changed enough where it's appealing to stay--and I have a lot of high school friends who never left, or left and boomeranged back within a decade--but for me, it remains the place I was desperate to get out of since middle school.

Sometimes it's a lot for me to unpack since I live very faraway from the South now. I mean, I'm a Southerner, but it feels more like a remote identity now than one that has much meaning to my current life.
posted by Kitteh at 11:07 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

this describes pretty much all mid-size cities that have been taken over by luxury-condo developers, by crusading "disruption-first" politicians who think the Creative Class is better than blue collar workers.

And it all seems completely exaggerated in Nashville, as do most things.

I've never lived there, but have spent a fair amount of time in Nashville over the last 10-20 years. There is something odd to me about Nashville that I can't quite put my finger on, not that it's a terrible place, I enjoy some time there. It's like a TV version of itself, most people are from somewhere else, most of them came to get in show business, and they came to live the myth. If you take what's weird about Los Angeles and distill it down to make it small and set in the South then you have Nashville.

It's also interesting how completely different it is from Atlanta, seeing how it's only a 3 hour drive.

Of course, I have no desire to live where I grew up--I often say that if my family didn't live there, I'd never go back at all

It is odd how that turns out for some of us. I never thought I'd want to go back to where I grew up, the only thing I thought about when I was there was leaving. But, surprise!
posted by bongo_x at 11:31 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ha! The furthest I ever got away was New Orleans for the briefest of times and then I ended up in Atlanta for a decade before leaving the South altogether. I miss Atlanta more than I ever do Greenville.
posted by Kitteh at 11:38 AM on September 20, 2016

And if you want more in-depth about Nashville historically and now, you could do a lot worse than to read Betsy Phillips (previously), who writes about things like the Napiers, a black family that shaped much of Nashville's history but is largely ignored.

Or about Nashville's "forgotten supervillain" Isaac Franklin:

Some things in Nashville get saved. Nashville cherishes the stories of complicated men like Judge John Overton and Andrew Jackson, and protects them the same as it does the Victorian Ryman Auditorium or the mid-century modern Cordell Hull Building — now, anyway. By contrast, Isaac Franklin’s story, inconvenient for boosters and thus better forgotten, is buried. The richest man in the South, if not the whole United States, was born here, grew up here, lived here, married a local girl, and was laid to rest in one of the city’s finest cemeteries.

Yet it would be hard to find a less-discussed historical figure.
posted by emjaybee at 11:42 AM on September 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

I moved to Nashville on Sept 30, 2006, so after it was mostly done being gritty but before it was fully booming. My (now)wife and I moved here mostly because it was pretty cheap and pretty interesting. It's certainly no longer cheap but really I guess most of the things that have gone away since I got here were not that important to me and some of the new stuff is pretty cool. Plus, stuff changes everywhere.

We did have to kind of face up to the reality of new Nashville this year though, when our landlord told us she couldn't keep giving us such a sweet deal on our rent (she raised it by $650 a month when we moved out!) and we had to decide if Nashville was still somewhere we wanted to live. We decided to stay because we have people and jobs and habits here but it wasn't a sure thing for me. Also, home prices are crazy anywhere close in.

there's the Bridgestone Arena, the Schermerhorn, the Frist, and boom -- literally nothing after that but churches, auto dealerships, fast-food joints, and I-40 and I-65.

I mean, there's some cool stuff in the areas around downtown but yeah, not much for locals in downtown proper, aside from those that work there I guess. I took the long way home on my bike commute Friday and went downtown to see some of that parklet stuff they were doing on Broadway but I regretted it as soon as I got to the aforementioned Deja Vu strip club on Demonbreun and got stuck behind a John Deere tractor towing a load of boozed-up bachelorettes.
posted by ghharr at 12:53 PM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

I moved to Nashville from Knoxville in the mid-90's. Lived there for about seven years and fell in love with the city. Work took me to the Midwest but I always hoped to live there again. Unfortunately, life took over and my plans to return never came to fruition. This essay makes me ache for Gerst Haus, Rotiers, Jimmy Kelly's, The Villager, Green Hills Grill, Bar-B-Cutie, Sportsman's Grill and on and on and on.
posted by bwvol at 12:55 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

..and the BR-549 era of Roberts Western World too.
posted by bwvol at 12:58 PM on September 20, 2016

One thing she doesn't really touch on is race, and in an article about a Southern city that seems pretty glaring. She tiptoes around with "gentrification" but no mention of who is doing it and who they are doing it to.

Yeah, I would completely agree. Nashville does a great job of masking it and inventing ways of diverting attention from it, but it is still one of most segregated cities in the South, if not the country.
posted by blucevalo at 1:08 PM on September 20, 2016

For maximum old-new Nashville juxtaposition look at the Station Inn on Google street view.
posted by ghharr at 1:10 PM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

For maximum old-new Nashville juxtaposition look at the Station Inn on Google street view.

Wasn't so long ago that area was a railroad gulch and the Station Inn was a sort of oasis in the middle of nothing.
posted by bwvol at 1:36 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not to sidetrack horribly, but that Isaac Franklin article, while fascinating, does a horrible inflation conversion on his estate value (claimed at $24B, only inflates to $15M). This somewhat makes me wonder about some of the other fact finding.

They throw up one bike lane...

As someone from metro Boston, this makes me laugh and weep too.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 1:49 PM on September 20, 2016

Accurate numbers or not, that Isaac Franklin history is why all the Adelicia Acklen attention in Nashville bugs me. I mean, she may have been an impressive lady but all of her money and power and land was built on the backs of slaves and it bugs me that so many things around here still bear her name.
posted by ghharr at 2:19 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll see your Nashville, and raise you an Austin willing to pave over Hippy Hollow to better suck the corporate cocks that brought you SoCo and SxSW. In other news, Thomas Wolfe would like to say something about home and the returning thereof. Also kids, grass, etc.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 2:32 PM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Bill Boner was my Y-league assistant baseball coach. I spent my school years taking the opposite route as the author (who I'm guessing went to University School) on my way to school in East Nashville, then later in downtown, right past that Deja Vu she describes so well.

My friends who are still there all echo this piece in many ways... largely that the rent is too damn high and the character is gone. They're less focused on the strip clubs, and we had a different experience with Lower Broad, which for a time was actually a place high school kids liked to go to.

Most of the character had disappeared from my childhood neighborhood by around the time I was leaving. Rapid expansion of VUMC brought in a lot of money, I guess.

I see the same happening in Portland now, at an alarming rate. And Portland shares many other issues as well... crumbling infrastructure, lack of any coherent planning (yes, it's true), huge favoritism to developers and the wealthy, and, despite claims otherwise, a transit system that is only marginally better than Nashville's.

Quite a stroll down memory lane, or, every place I've ever loved is going to hell. Not sure.
posted by dsword at 7:42 PM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'll see your Nashville, and raise you an Austin

I'll see your Austin and raise you a San Francisco that's been unlivable for anybody without rent control and an income below the stratosphere for pretty much the entire 2000s.
posted by blucevalo at 9:06 AM on September 21, 2016