Hill Town

On mornings in Germantown, Mary Loretta Warren gets up early. Dressed in bright red overalls held together by safety pins where the buttons used to be, she wanders through the back alleys of the North Nashville neighborhood—some of the last back alleys in Nashville—searching under the lids of garbage cans and behind bushes for aluminum cans she can recycle for pocket change. Ask Mary how long she’s lived in Germantown, and she replies, “A real long time, Honey.” She was there long before the new Farmers Market and the Bicentennial Mall began to suggest that the neighborhood was getting a new lease on life. She was there long before the urban pioneers moved in, long before the gourmet restaurants, long before the repainted gingerbread moldings.

It does not look as if Mary Warren is going away anytime soon.

Her routine seems to be set. After every morning’s cycle of scrounging for cans, she makes her way back to her Section 8 bungalow on Fifth Avenue North. Before passing through the front door, she empties plastic Kroger bags full of cans into the large garbage bin she keeps on her front porch.

Like the neighborhood just beyond hers, Warren has had a tough life, and it doesn’t take a second glance to see it. She claims she’s had a long-standing feud with another can collector in the neighborhood—some guy who drives a van. She says he packs a pistol, and that he’s shot at her when she’s stepped beyond her “can boundary”—whatever that is—and onto his turf.

Warren’s age is anyone’s guess. She says her birth certificate was misplaced just after she was born in Nashville. No doctor was present, just a midwife. She has emphysema, and that condition isn’t helped by the fact that she chain-smokes unfiltered Camels. Her husband died years ago, after suffering from an illness that kept him bedridden. After that, she survived by selling greens and tomatoes in the front yard of a ramshackle house she was renting on Monroe Street

Eventually, however, that Monroe Street house was sold to Rich Boyd, assistant director at the Tennessee Arts Commission and a former antique furniture dealer. In recent years, Boyd, one of a handful of newcomers to the tiny Germantown neighborhood, has renovated the house, spiffing it up and preserving its architectural heritage. The entire Germantown area was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Yet Boyd and the other newcomers have not managed to transform their neighborhood completely. They are still just blocks away from industrial warehouses, empty lots, and a few problem apartment houses.

Over the last 20 years, as do-it-yourself preservationists have begun the painstaking process of settling into and fixing up Germantown, they have become accustomed to break-ins and car thefts. One urban pioneer has even been known to fax photographs of suspicious-looking panhandlers to his neighbors.

Michael King, co-owner of the popular Monell’s family-style restaurant on Sixth Avenue, admits that his business suffered after the shooting of Jerimayer Warfield at the Seventh Avenue Market several months ago. “For about two or three weeks after that, our business dropped dramatically,” he says.

Even though the Warfield shooting did not actually take place in Germantown—the Seventh Avenue Market is located several blocks north of the neighborhood—the community has still suffered from the resulting bad publicity. Over the years, such incidents have led the community at large to piece together an undeservedly negative image of the entire area north of Jefferson. Some would-be visitors and even some potential investors lump all of North Nashville together.

Initially, some of the people who live and work in Germantown have been troubled by stories of assaults, break-ins, and harassments. Some of them are even disconcerted by the every-morning ritual of a tiny, deeply wrinkled, harshly weathered woman sorting through their garbage cans. Nevertheless, they have had to learn to coexist with Mary Warren. If they moved to Germantown seeking diversity, they have found the place where they want to be.

The National Register of Historic Places describes Germantown as “one of the most architecturally and socially heterogeneous neighborhoods” in Nashville. That’s a nice way of describing the contrasts of the place. Warren lives in a run-down cottage on Fifth Avenue, on the outskirts of the community. But just a few blocks to the south on her street live an insurance executive, an attorney, a lobbyist, and a retired Vanderbilt University professor.

It was the sulphur spring and the salt licks that originally brought Indians and animals to the bluff where Germantown now stands. It was an influx of German immigrants who gave it its name and helped develop one of Nashville’s most affluent and diverse neighborhoods. It was, in turn, the anti-German sentiment of World War I that caused them to abandon their pleasant Victorian townhouses. In short order, Germantown went into a slow but sure decline. But a sort of neighborhood renaissance began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.