Thanks so much for the kindness and detail of that reply. Even though I've been gone for decades (or perhaps because of that fact), I still have a soft spot for Nashville but it's likely to be the place that I recall from the 50s and 60s and not the current one you so vividly describe. Back then, shopping meant hopping on the NTC bus (before it became the MTA), heading down Gallatin Pike and dropping off at Church Street to head to Harvey's, Castner-Knott or Cain-Sloan ("the greatest store of the Central South" as the slogan went). Going to a movie meant Lowe's, the palatial Tennessean or the Paramount. This was all in the pre-mall days with Hundred Oaks and Harding Mall just in the planning stages at the time. I even remember reading the afternoon paper, the Banner, which was a Conservative Republican broadsheet unlike the leftist morning rag. We didn't even have much in the way of interstates back then -- heading north was either via Dickerson Road or Gallatin Pike and points south were reached on Nolensville Road (out in your neck of the woods) and Franklin Pike went though the then-tiny hamlet of Brentwood.
It was a kinder, gentler place back then. And it was still very Southern and charming. I've never hidden the fact that fate had me born up north although I was conceived right here in Texas. I never felt at home up in Yankeeland and always had a desire to move back to the region where my life began. My first stop when I headed South for good was Nashville and perhaps that's what still makes it special in my mind. What's not surprising is that friends I made there over half a century ago still remain close after all those years. They're all good Christians and of the Tea Party type and most all have moved out of Davidson County and rarely go into Nashville itself. And more than a few of my fellow greyheads have settled here in Texas.
Once again, I really appreciate the response and I hope the ramblings of an old man going down memory lane didn't bore you...too much! :)
I would say I was on the cusp between the Nashville of old and that of the new. I had the misfortune to watch as the grand old department stores closed by the time I was a teenager (Harvey’s in 1984, Cain-Sloan in 1987, Castner-Knott around 1989/91). I had fond memories of the former two (I wasn’t a Castner’s fan, it was more for older ladies, it seemed). Took the last photos of Cain-Sloan the sunset before it was imploded in 1994 for a parking lot that still stands there 21 years later (it was planned for a 1,000+ foot apartment tower a decade ago but fell through, now they’re building a parking garage with the hopes of a high rise above it before long). The middle section of Harvey’s was needlessly leveled for parking, leaving an ugly gap in the block that you can see straight through towards the Hermitage Hotel (the latter of which used to have Minnesota Fats, the grand pool champion played by Jackie Gleason in “The Hustler” residing there for years — I fiddled around with his personal pool table he kept on the mezzanine, though never got to meet him. They upgraded the hotel to a 5-star property and tossed out Fats’s pool table as being too gauche for the property).
They did keep the Cain-Sloan building and stripped off the ugly, modernist veneer they put over it in the 1950s or so, so it’s now back to its classical configuration (though now converted to offices, I believe). I also remember some of the grand old movie palaces (saw a few films in there in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s), but as downtown grew seedier and more vacant, they closed one by one and demolished every last old theater (Nashville has the unfortunate reputation of having preserved not a single old theater downtown, whereas you can go to almost any small county seat or town and see one, even if they don’t function as theaters, but the buildings are still there). They even demolished the Sudukum Building and Tennessee Theater for an ugly apartment tower in the ‘90s. At one point by the early ‘90s, so much had been demolished on Church Street that it really ceased to be “urban” with huge, gaping maws on the south side of the street between 4th/5th to 8th (the demos started in the late 1950s when the Tulane Hotel was brought down for a parking lot, and would you believe it, it is STILL a parking lot some 55-56+ years later, nothing was ever built on it). Can you imagine Church Street from your era CEASING to be an urban street ? The very heart of the downtown shopping district ?!
The old Carnegie Library was also demo’d in the mid ‘60s for the (new) Ben West Library, and it in turn was replaced by the current library a decade ago (placed on Church where the old Watkins Institute and some other formerly demolished theaters stood, although for a very brief time in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, they built a mall, Church Street Centre, hoping to attract shoppers downtown, but it failed and was demolished soon after for the library, an awful waste of money - but it turned out they couldn’t convert the relatively new building because it couldn’t hold the weight of the books according to the experts). They also demolished everything on the long square block between Union and Charlotte where the original radio WSM Grand Ole Opry broadcasts came from, a huge block of beautiful early 20th century buildings across the street from the War Memorial Plaza. In 1969, they built the striking National Life & Accident Tower (now the Snodgrass Building, acquired by the state and named after the 4-decade long occupant of the State Treasurer’s office, Bill Snodgrass) on that block and by the ‘80s, got rid of all those nice buildings surrounding it.
All the buildings that surrounded the courthouse near the river, many stunning mid 19th century businesses, were demolished en masse by the mid 1970s. They’ve since converted it all to a grassy park, but I’d rather wish they kept the old buildings instead. We’ve lost way too many buildings downtown. Came very close to losing Union Station, which was almost going to be demolished in the 1980s, but it was bought and converted to a hotel. Sadly, they demolished the huge train shed adjacent to it, letting it go to rot under the weight of pigeon excrement. A parking lot now.
All the homes you remembered from downtown lining the streets in the ‘50s ? All gone. Only 1 or 2 original houses down there were kept (a townhouse on 8th and an old house next to the Arena on Broadway, built in the 1990s), both restaurants. You have to go to Germantown or see some homes down at Lindley and around there to see what used to be. Sadly, in a lot of the areas, the only thing “historic” is the dirt. Some brick sidewalks here or there with steps leading up to what used to be homes, but little else.
Of course, Nashville isn’t the only city guilty of wanton demolition in the name of urban renewal or progress. It’s curious that I share this stuff with a lot of the younger hipsters on my urban development forum, and they lament the loss of all this old urban architecture, too, and practically cry when they see the photos. It’s heartbreaking.
They did preserve the stretch of 2nd Avenue warehouses from Broadway up to Union, though things looked dicey for a time. There was a plan to demolish them in the 1960s during “urban renewal” and put ugly, brutalist structures in their place. Even the Ryman Auditorium almost was demolished in the mid 1970s (with Roy Acuff leading the charge to use some bricks to build a “little chapel” at Opryland — thank heavens that was stopped !). They restored the venue to its early glory and is now back as a premier entertainment destination downtown. Lower Broad was cleaned up as well (it had become seedy and dangerous when I was a little kid in the ‘70s, porno parlors and peep shows, real nasty), now has restaurants, honky tonks and the like: vacationers and their families strolling past places that was unimaginable in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (some of the improvements).
The warehouse down at the end of Broad at the river was demolished in the ‘80s and they built a bonafide Riverfront Park, which now has hundreds of thousands (no joke) each year show up for a fireworks display to equal that put on in New York City’s harbor on July 4th. I’ve not been down there in a long time when you could sit with your lawn chair. Now it’s standing room only with folks packed in like sardines for blocks up Broad, up 2nd and along 1st. Crazy.
By the 1970s, almost nobody lived downtown, emptied out by urban renewal and the mass demolitions of homes within the CBD where the interstates were built. Today with apartment blocks and towers going up so fast that it’s hard to keep up, tens of thousands live down there again (probably as many as at Nashville’s zenith from 60-150 years ago).
Oh, regarding the Banner, it ceased to be a Republican Conservative publication in the ‘70s, was bought out by John Jay Hooker, Jr. (who was a JFK Democrat, ran for Governor and other offices countless times but never won). It was slightly to the right of the leftist Tennessean (run by John Seigenthaler, a big-time JFK brown-noser). It stayed somewhat centrist for the remainder of its existence and folded around 1997. It freed the Tennessean to move even further to the far left, though it remains stranded politically as the state moved hard to the Republicans and they have very little pull with a legislature that considers their opposition to be a badge of honor. Even the lefties in town complain about them, but more because they’re very sloppy journalists and you don’t learn much in it. The old hard news reporters of yore have gone or died off. “Breaking news” is covered by the tv stations, but that for those of short attention spans (and usually just to announce what shootings/rapes/robberies, et al have occurred in my section of SE Nashville, Antioch - that guy invading the movie theater several days ago and shot dead by the cops, which went national).
Anyway, that’s a bit of a rundown on it.