Love Among the Ruins

Contemporary photographs by Eric England

All that remains are the photographs, like daguerreotypes of dead soldiers at Shiloh and Antietam, Gettysburg and Chickamauga.

But these were buildings. They were not casualties of minnie balls and cannon fire. They were felled by warfare of another means, victims of bulldozers and wrecking balls. They are the faces of the lost architecture of Nashville.

When I moved from New Orleans to Nashville in 1985, one of the first things I did after unpacking was head out in search of architecture. I had discovered, in the unsettling experience of many U-Haul “adventures,” that reading a city’s history in three dimensions made me feel less of a stranger in a strange land. I knew that the fabric of a city not only documents the passage of time, but reveals the fundamental character of the people who live there.

My introductory course in the city’s structures told me many things. At First Avenue North, the no-nonsense warehouses remind us that Nashville was once a river port. Up Broadway, the Customs House and Union Station tell us that to the 19th century, the “cathedral of commerce” was not just hype, but a visible symbol of a belief system. The Metro Courthouse and the Broadway Post Office explain that when the Depression made citizens call into question the republican form of government, that government answered in the classical architectural languages of Greece and Rome to reassure them. And our post-World War II skyscrapers lay plain the fact that large corporations have a penile sense of form.

This much the architecture of Nashville could tell me. But what I could not find was the connective tissue that bound the city together. On the streets and roads of Nashville I was surprised to find only fragments of the past—a Ryman here, a Hermitage there. I asked a neighbor what had happened to all the old buildings. She smiled vaguely, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “I’ve only lived here since 1976 myself. I guess there just wasn’t that much to start with.”

My neighbor was wrong. Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, Nashville had an architecture that told the rest of the story. The photographs of Charles W. Warterfield Jr. prove it.

These images are merely a representative sampling of Charley Warterfield’s passion for architecture and its preservation. In the process of photographing Nashville buildings, he has amassed a collection of over 3,000 slides that present an amazing panorama of the city’s architecture. Unfortunately, approximately 25 percent of his images document structures that are no longer standing.

Warterfield took his first architectural photograph in 1939 when his parents took him to the New York World’s Fair. He began taking pictures of Nashville’s buildings in 1949, while a student in business administration at Vanderbilt University.

“One of my class projects was to photograph the historic churches in the city,” Warterfield explains. “It’s good that I started early, because many of them were torn down shortly after.”

Warterfield proceeded to study architecture at Yale, where he was trained as a straight-line modernist. The curriculum was geared to a philosophy that saw little value in history. Ironically, one of Warterfield’s first assignments when he returned to Nashville as an associate at the architecture firm of Woolwine, Harwood & Clark was the restoration of one of Nashville’s most distinguished historical structures: the Tennessee State Capitol. “Working on the Capitol made me really see historic buildings,” Warterfield says.

He has been seeing, and photographing, our architectural past and present ever since.

Unfortunately, much of the story that Warterfield’s photographs tell is of loss. A variety of forces combined to destroy Nashville’s graceful buildings, but perhaps the most insidious was urban renewal.

Condemned as urban blight, Nashville’s old churches and office buildings, its homes and stores, were routinely bulldozed in the name of urban renewal in the 1960s. Across the nation, other cities were undergoing the same sad experience, leading urban critic Jane Jacobs to demolish the demolishers in scathing tones. “This is not the rebuilding of cities,” she wrote. “This is the sacking of cities.”

Thirty-seven years later, the sacking of Nashville continues. Despite the lessons learned, and the passage of time, the citizenry has few tools beyond Warterfield’s Nikon to protest the destruction.

“Nashville has almost totally changed its architectural character in the years since I began photographing it,” Warterfield says. “Yes, I want to document our history, but it’s more than that. I use my camera as an emotional reaction to all we’ve lost.”

In 1784, Tennessee wasn’t even a state—it was part of North Carolina. But that year, the North Carolina Legislature passed an act that called for a four-acre public square to be laid out at the bluff overlooking the Cumberland River, near Fort Nashborough.

The square ultimately became the civic living room of Nashville. Standing at its center were the City Hall and Market House, a rambling structure that combined certain city government offices with a farmer’s market. The square also included the Davidson County Courthouse. Those buildings, and the landscape that surrounded them, made the public square a prime destination for Nashville’s citizenry. It was the place to buy a tomato, lobby a politician, or both.