That was some really great information, fieldmarshaldj, and helped me to really catch up on the ol' hometown. As I said most of my friends still up there are now out of the county and therefore don't stay as current on things as you.
Since Antioch made the national news last week, it led me to recall the last occasion I spent any significant amount of time there. It was around this time of year in 1978 when I was visiting friends in the Tusculum area. During those weeks of my summer vacation, we ventured over to the then-new Hickory Hollow Mall and saw a first-run of Animal House at the showroom-fresh movie house there. It was so new that the smell of paint was mixed with the aroma of popcorn. We then headed over to the nearby Bar-B-Cutie afterwards. That snapshot is as vivid as yesterday's memory in my mind but it's been over 37 years ago. And it's why the decline of the Southeast part of Davidson County is particularly dismaying. It really did used to be a nice area.
On our local left-leaning urban forum, just had it out with a snarky and patronizing moonbat telling me how he was “sad” that my neck of the woods wasn’t sharing in the prosperity. I told him we were doing just fine until Metro gubmint decided to engage in social engineering in the name of “die-versity” (read: too many Whities in the suburbs).
They did it with the schools, shipping inner-city Blacks out and then encouraging their movement to this area, and that then caused an exodus from the schools and from housing, which precipitated a spike in crime, lowered property values, et al (Whites just simply moved out of county, many in this area went to Rutherford, which has more of the demographics across the county line that we had in the ‘80s). Also had some Southeast Asians (Laotians), who formed gangs, come in (though not explicitly where I am) and following behind them were Mexicans and Central Americans (of both legal and illegal status). They poured in en masse in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
Hickory Hollow paid the highest price for this. Since many of its “patrons” were more the loitering type than the buying type, stores began to close up. White women, who shopped their during the day (moms/grandmothers), felt uncomfortable and started looking elsewhere to go because crime was hitting the mall and area. My ex-fiancée, hired because she “looked” like the new demographics to work at one of the department stores, recounted daily horror stories of shoplifting and other disgusting habits (changing rooms used as toilets) and harassment by “yoots.”
I remember walking around it at one point when it was reaching its death throes, and you’d have thought the mall was located either in Detroit or East Los Angeles. A handful of specialized stores catering to the specific ethnic groups, which didn’t look to be doing well. Few Whites, the bulk Black & Hispanic (and not shopping). The department stores closed down one by one because they were either making little or no profit (if not losing money outright).
It’s completely repurposed now, added part of a college annex to it, the city pushed to build an ice-skating rink there and so on. It’s not the “mall” anymore. To see close to what Hickory Hollow used to be, you have to go out of county to Cool Springs (near Brentwood/Franklin).
Unfortunately, Antioch has generally had a transient population. People use it as a stepping stone to better neighborhoods and never stay (on average) more than a few years. At 4 decades in the same spot, we are NOT the norm. It’s funny that we stayed long enough to see many inner-city Blacks who moved here decide to give up to move to SAFER areas, leaving it to the illegals. Hopefully we’ll be here long enough to see the latter group move on (one did nearby and were replaced by Ethiopians, whom are far preferable).