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Preserving Nashville's History & Culture in the Face of Gentrification & Demolition

Welcome to Nashville

Music City. Athens of the South. NashVegas.

The #1 City with the Most Economic Growth

Est. Population: 1.99M

Famous Nashville Sites

Nashville's Growth

Nashville's Economic Growth, Population Boom, and Construction Increase (2021)

1.99M (2021)

Stories of Nashville Podcast

S1E1 - Historic Preservation in the Face of Gentrification

Host Sofia Pfaffl and guest Dr. Learotha Williams discuss Nashville's daily battle to balance the city's positive growth along with correctly preserving its history and culture. Pfaffl and Williams dive into the issues of gentrification and demolition along with ways the community can get involved in preserving Nashville. Williams shares many Stories of Nashville: Fort Negley, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, The Civil Rights Movement (The Nashville Sit-Ins), The Woolworth, and The Nashville Slave Market.

Nashville's History

The Civil Rights Movement

The 1960 Nashville Sit-Ins

Under the Nashville Student Movement and the Nashville Chrisitan Leadership Council (NCLC), 124 college students from historically Black universities orchestrated the lunch counter sit-ins, non-violent protests from the violent responses of racial segregation. Civil Rights Activist and long-time Senator John Lewis, along with many other students, peacefully fought for their right to be served at the lunch counters alongside the white customers. After months of protesting to no avail, the devastating bombing of defense attorney Z. Alexander Lobby’s home and the perseverance of the protestors lead them to victory with stores opening their counters to Black customers.

The sit-ins in Nashville became the catalyst for other Civil Rights protests throughout the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Woolworth

With the recent news of Nashville’s historic Woolworth building being renovated into a theater, one serious question arises: Will the building's history and culture be accurately preserved with respect and empathy or will “another one bite the dust?”

All eyes fall upon the renovations of the Woolworth as its history not only impacted Nashville but the entire nation. One of the original “five and dime” stores, the Woolworth became one of the first sites to ignite a fire under the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

With such an impactful history, turning the historical site into a theater, yet another place for tourists’ entertainment in Music City, turns some heads. How the building’s new owner, podcast host and country artist Chuck Wicks, goes about handling the renovations can make or break the history, culture, and community of Nashville.

“AS A PRESERVATIONIST, I'M ALL FOR ADAPTIVE USE. HAVING SAID THAT, I’M NOT FOR THE EXPLOITATION OF PEOPLE’S MEMORIES, PAIN, AND SUFFERING. BECAUSE EVEN THOUGH IT’S A PLACE THAT WE CELEBRATE, IT’S STILL A SIGHT OF VIOLENCE, A SITE THAT WAS REPRESENTED BY FEAR AND UNCERTAINTY. SO I WOULD BE AGAINST SOMEBODY TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF THAT.” - DR. WILLIAMS
A place of pain, suffering, violence, fear & uncertainty
WE HAD TO MAKE THE POINT THAT SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PUT YOURSELF IN HARM'S WAY AND IN THE PROCESS YOU MAY STIR UP SOME VIOLENCE BUT YOU WOULD NOT ENGAGE IN VIOLENCE. WE WERE ATTACKED, PEOPLE BEATEN, LIGHT A CIGARETTE, POURED KETCHUP AND HOT SAUCE ON PEOPLE." - JOHN LEWIS
WE KNEW THAT WE WERE STICKING OUr NECKS OUT. IT REALIZES YOU COULD GET BLIND OR YOUR TEETH KNOCKED OUT." - BERNARD LAFAYETTE

More on the Nashville Sit-Ins & The Woolworth:

It only takes one to start a movement." - Ernest Patton, Sit-ins Participant
We saw a wrong and with our bodies we went into the situation to correct it." - Rev. James Lawson

Nashville's Problem

A Loss of History from Demolition, Renovation, and Gentrification

“SO YOU HAVE A BIG BANQUET, YOU HAVE A BIG FEAST SET OUT AMONG PEOPLE THAT ARE STARVING." - Dr. WILLIAMS

Hermitage Cafe

In the most wonderful time of the year, the season of Christmas brings expectations of joy, love and gifts, yet Sherri Taylor Callahan, received coal in her stocking: a phone call with shocking news just days before Christmas in 2020. Callahan was informed that the Hermitage Cafe, her family’s restaurant for nearly 32 years, was sold from underneath her without the option to buy the property.

please go out and support your local mom and pop’s. They are unfortunately dying, they are being pushed out. If Covid is not closing these places down, gentrification is. Right now mom and pop’s need the community's support more than ever." - Callahan

Hermitage Cafe closed on October 31, 2021.

Hermitage Cafe is not the only one...

“This is not just about my diner at all. Other restaurants have been shut down after 50-60 years of service in the community because gentrification is really prominent right now. Where do we put a cap on our growth and where do we limit how we do this? I think kicking people out who have lived here for decades to make room for condos is just ludicrous.” - Sherri Callahan

The Nashville Nine

The Nashville Nine represents the city's historic properties endangered by demolition, neglect, or development. Every year Historic Nashville publishes the Nashville Nine, a list of the city's historic properties that matter to the people of Nashville. The list is compiled through a public nomination process. Throughout the year, Historic Nashville focuses its advocacy and education efforts on these locations.

The 2021 Nashville Nine

#1-4. Second Avenue North

170, 172, 174, and 176 Second Avenue North

  • Issue: Nashville Christmas Day 2020 Bombing
  • 172 Second Avenue North is damaged beyond repair
  • Proposed plans for the other 3 buildings appear to comply with the Metro Historic zoning overlay, but proposals & finished development are entirely different things.
  • Historic Nashville urges those implementing the rebuilding to make sure the buildings retain as much of their historic & architectural integrity as possible.

#5. Elks Lodge #1102

2614 Jefferson Street

  • Issue: Nashville's March 2020 Tornado
  • Since 1968, the concrete block building has housed Elks Lodge #1102, an important part of the neighborhood community.
  • Before that, though, it was an integral part of Jefferson Street’s live-music scene as Club Baron. From the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, Club Baron booked the likes of B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Etta James.
  • The mural on the side of the building commemorates a legendary 1963 guitar duel between Jimi Hendrix and local blues guitarist Johnny Jones. Jones is said to have won that showdown, partly because Hendrix was still developing his genre-shaking sound and partly because Jones had the more powerful amplifier.

#6. Patton Brothers Funeral Home

1306 South Street

  • Issue: New owner - possibility of demolition
  • The Victorian-style structure is one of the most historically significant Black funeral buildings still standing in Nashville, a reminder of the city’s segregated past.
  • Patton Brothers Funeral Home operated for nearly 70 years at the location, though the site’s mortuary history goes back nearly a century.
  • From the 1920s, it was the Zema W. Hill Funeral Home, run by a charismatic Primitive Baptist evangelist whose marketing efforts included the placement of two snowball-toting concrete polar bears in front of the parlor — and two others in front of his home on Edgehill Avenue.
  • Patton Brothers, which began in Franklin, TN, in 1882, bought out Hill in 1952 when he decided to retire and continued there for many years.

#7. Southern Ground

114 17th Avenue South

  • Issue: On the market
  • The recording studio owned by musician Zac Brown for the past decade began as a Sunday school building for the Addison Avenue Cumberland Presbyterian church 120 years ago.
  • The congregation worshipped there from 1901 until 1950.
  • The building subsequently housed the Nashville School of Fine Art, the Nashville Royal Order of Moose lodge and a Veterans of Foreign Wars clubhouse before Monument Records head Fred Foster purchased it in 1968 and transformed it into a recording studio.
  • Monument artists like Kris Kristofferson and Larry Gatlin recorded their early albums at the studio, Sammi Smith cut her hit version of Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” there, and Tom T. Hall recorded “Homecoming.”
  • During part of the 1970s and 1980s, it operated as Young ‘Un Studios. Brown bought the building in 2012 and renovated the studio.
  • In the past decade, Zac Brown Band and acts ranging from Kacey Musgraves and Dwight Yoakam to Megadeth and Foo Fighters have recorded there.

#8. Woolworth Building

221 Fifth Avenue North

  • Issue: The interior is currently undergoing extensive renovations as it prepares to re-open in 2022 as the Woolworth Theatre
  • Built in the 1890s, this building was occupied for 80 years, from 1913-1993, by retailer F.W. Woolworth Co. In 1960, it became the focal point of efforts to desegregate the city’s lunch counters.
  • Because of those events, the Woolworth Building is now a national historic site. The previous tenant, the Woolworth on 5th restaurant, sought to preserve as much of the original interior architecture as possible and emphasized this history before closing last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Recommendation: Bring in a historian with a specialization in the Civil Rights Movement or Black Freedom Struggle, a trained historic preservationist, and a conservator who can assist with the identification and care of the building’s remaining historic elements.

#9. Coca-Cola Bottling Plant

1525 Church Street

  • Issue: Possibility of demolition for new development (increasing likelihood due to downtown high-rise development extending along the West End-Church Street corridor)
  • Known to many as the Old Jim Reed Showroom, this 1920s brick warehouse building was originally part of the Coca Cola Bottling Works.
  • In the 1970s, the soft drink bottling plant was converted for use as Jim Reed’s automobile dealership.
  • Located in Midtown, the building is an excellent example of ornate industrial architecture from the early 20th century and perhaps Nashville’s last remaining historic soft drink bottling plant.
  • In the 1990s, part of the building was converted into a nightclub.
  • The plant building previously appeared on the 2014 Nashville Nine.

WAYS TO HELP

Visit Nashville's Historic Sites

  • Historic Sites and Museums
  • Historic Tours
  • Historic Accommodations
  • Parks and Cemeteries

Go on Nashville Tours

#17 on the map is the Woolworth (221 Fifth Ave. N)

Attend Meetings & Events

  • December 11 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm - Battle of Nashville 157th Anniversary Living History Event
  • December 11 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm - Fossil Finders
  • December 20 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm - Metropolitan Historical Commission Meeting
  • December 21 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm - Nashville Civil War Roundtable
  • February 11, 2022 - 2022 Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture

Donate

  • Make a donation to the Nashville Nine Fund
  • Make a donation to the Historic Nashville, Inc. General Fund
  • Make a donation to the Music Row Preservation Fund
  • Upgrade or amend my Historic Nashville, Inc. membership (please specify in comments section)
  • Other

Growth and preservation are not incompatible. One must find the balance between the two, a struggle that Nashville must face as the new threatens to replace the old.