By mid-afternoon on Wednesday, the FBI had announced they were finished at the Second Avenue crime scene. By the end of the day, they would return it to the care and custody of local authorities to begin healing the damaged city.
Fire and codes inspectors had begun examining buildings, approving some for their owners and tenants to re-enter. Still others remain off-limits for safety’s sake, and sadly several structures were destroyed altogether.
This opens a new set of questions for Nashville, including our municipal government:
· How should this historic, scenic zone that Nashvillians first called “Market Street” be put back right?
· What new tools, including tax abatement, will this work require?
· Who should join in for this complicated job of restoration to succeed?
First and Second Avenues have always been the work of many hands.
This zone was Nashville’s first distribution center. In some of these buildings there are still signs of the mule-drawn carts that unloaded goods from steamboats on the Cumberland. In fact, several of the buildings with Victorian-era fronts on Second still have river frontage onto First Avenue for just this purpose, just down the hill from Fort Nashborough.
Many hundreds of merchants and many thousands of workers have occupied these busy quarters over centuries. Some of Nashville’s oldest employers were established here.
Business activity ebbed and flowed. Second Avenue between Lower Broadway and Union Street likewise thrived with life driven by visionaries and investors who believed there was value in the potential of this geography owing to entertainment, related employment, and more recently the arts and professional sports. Through it all, with few exceptions, proudly stood the Victorian facades on the east side of Second.
For the longest time, we didn’t notice them so much, our eyes mostly fixed on the storefronts of tradesmen and the bustle of foot-traffic at street level. In the 1980s, that began to change as significant public events – the Market Street Festival, the Italian Street Fair, to name a few – invited more of us downtown and also to look up.
There, high above the street, we now saw the architectural wonders of an earlier age – the high windows, cornices, and trim from the time of Nashville’s very commercial founding. We learned that Second Avenue, from Union down to Broadway, held the longest and best example of a continuous row of Victorian-era warehouses in the United States. That row of extraordinary architecture is still largely uninterrupted.
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Today we credit a handful of leaders who made civic magic over the past 50 years in this particular streetscape:
Robert C. Mathews
The late developer Bobby Mathews began, in the 1970s, to acquire many of the old Second Avenue warehouses. Many of them were vacant or in need of significant repairs. Bert Mathews, his son who now heads The Mathews Co., told me how his father believed in the future of Nashville’s downtown.
“When other people were looking at downtown as a place of drunks and buildings being abandoned,” Bert said, “my father believed there was a lot of value in those buildings. At one point he owned more than half the buildings down there on Second Avenue.”
Jimmy Johnson & DeWitt Ezell
In the late 1980s, Johnson was the Tennessee president of BellSouth, and Ezell succeeded him. It was on their combined watch that BellSouth developed its headquarters tower at Fourth and Commerce.
This was a major shot in the arm to Nashville’s economic standing and downtown revival, drawing a couple thousand full-time employees into the central city. That activated sidewalks at lunchtime and drew a new generation of retail shops and restaurants.
E.W. Wendell
Bud Wendell was CEO of Opryland USA and a leader within the NLT Corp. (which owned WSM Radio and the Grand Ole Opry). The same company, in the middle 1990s, established the Wildhorse Saloon on Second Avenue, remaking its street-front façade to be in harmony with its neighbors.
I credit Wendell with saving the Ryman Auditorium, when his corporation considered closing it. Preservation advocates (including Historic Nashville Inc.) first organized around that cause and, in time, their work also helped rescue Second Avenue from standard developments, too.
Steve & Judy Turner
These Kentucky natives, both of whom had attended Vanderbilt University, moved back to Nashville permanently in the mid-80s when Dollar General Corp. relocated its headquarters here from Scottsville. The Turners soon bought the old H.G. Lipscomb building from Mathews, undertook a major interior renovation there, then moved into it themselves in 1995. They would rename it “Butler’s Run.”
In the process Steve Turner introduced Nashville to the “mixed-use” concept combining street level retail, upstairs residential, and offices in between - but not without a fight at city hall. Before Turner, Metro Government did not permit mixed-use downtown.
And on Christmas morning, in a single senseless act, this section of our city that’s on the National Register of Historic Places was shattered, scorched, or some of it outright ruined.
We need to build it back.
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Skeptics may immediately jump to the question, “But what will this cost?” That should not be the first question. Instead, as with our flood recovery of a decade ago, the first thing to know is how will our city comprehensively address a complex recovery.
This is a good time to remind ourselves that our city is bigger than city hall. There are technical things we need government to do and municipal leadership is one of them, but Nashville has progressed best when projects blend big ideas, key leaders, and good organization.
In rescuing historic Second Avenue now, it may not be necessary for Metro Government (whose resources are currently stretched) to spend any cash on this. As one example, the city’s toolbox may need a new kind of tax credit that helps building owners afford the repairs and other recovery work they will need to undertake in the wake of this new disaster.
We do need Mayor and Council to empower the kind of broad-gauged planning that this immense new task will require, to do it soon, and possibly to enable other creative financing, as well as to draw in help from federal agencies. (That federal aspect will be a test of our new U.S. senators.) Overall, both public and private sectors needs to work fast within a multi-disciplined solution, not just one more inter-agency committee inside Metro Government. Its goals should be the right regard for history and taking care to prohibit new incursions that might foul it up.
Around this hybrid planning table, we won’t need the designers of more steel-and-glass boxes, thank you, but people who appreciate where Nashville came from and thus how to make ‘Market Street’ live again. Good ideas can come from anywhere.
It is not too soon to raise these questions. As you read this, I can imagine there are developers already making sketches that would give Second Avenue a very different look. One or more of these instant proposals could surface sooner than you think.
These things can come at a city fast.
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The main work for Nashville now – thinkers and planners both inside and outside government – will be to give some concentrated thought to all this: Not for building more of the anonymous structures of “Any City USA” but that remembers and honors what we all nearly lost in our city on Friday morning last.
Before that Christmas Day, our Second Avenue looked as it did because it was a living tribute to history and civic memory, to caring owners and persistent advocates. In our own time, too much of Nashville’s heart and soul have been lost to flood, fire and the fury of opportunism. The re-born Second Avenue that rises from this destruction should respect the iconography, the form and the function of how our city, in the first place, came to be.
Some day in the future, we should not have to mourn that our historic Second Avenue was just another lamentable loss that our grandchildren will only see on old postcards.
Keel Hunt is a regular columnist for The Tennessean, frequent photographer and travel aficionado… and recently the author of his second book "Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee into the 21st Century and Could Save America," debuting this October.
