The Seduction

A humid breeze hits with a damp gust as you waltz toward the rooftop pool, which holds the blinding gleam of an automobile showroom. Just beyond a row of crisp South Beach lounge chairs lies a kingly view of the skyline.

Trees in swollen stone pots sway lazily to hip-hop beats that thump from speakers disguised as stones. Flanking either side of you are cabana grilling stations and sizzling fire pits. Back inside, a bar, pool table and flashing flat-screens guard plush seating for you and your closest friends.

With little stretch of the imagination, you're already picturing yourself here with the friends, the job, the money and the sex appeal to match. You are young, sophisticated, aesthetically blessed and elegantly draped in white linen, a smart cocktail in your bronzed, well-moisturized hand. You're wildly successful, well-traveled and highly cultured. You know the choice restaurants, the right bottles of wine, your foie gras from your fricassee.

This view isn't courtesy of a Manhattan penthouse or a Hollywood Hills mansion. It's at the ICON in The Gulch, atop Nashville's largest high-rise condominium.

Welcome to the new Nashville skyline: It's frighteningly high, undeniably modern and so...money. It's no Nashville you've ever seen, because it's every bit an image straight out of Miami or Los Angeles—or at least a show set there. And it's not just the ICON pimping this Metropolitan Home snapshot. Other high-rises with velvet-rope names like Velocity, Terrazzo, Encore! and Rhythm promise exclusive living, stunning views and anointed lifestyles.

It's every decadent desire you've ever imagined—and a lot of bam and bling you haven't—all just a key fob and an elevator ride away.

And it's not just happening in The Gulch: Drive through SoBro, Germantown, West End, Midtown or the East Side and the eye glides along a once low-slung city newly autographed in fresh concrete, glass and stone.

More than a dozen projects are finished or mid-construction, and with each slab of onyx, Nashville emerges as a city slowly donning the armor of the alluring metropolis. But are Nashvillians, who've always prized lawns over lofts and Wal-Mart Supercenters over sidewalk cafes, ready for big-city glamour?

Many think it's an idea whose time has come. Now that U.S. cities are truly post-industrial, downtowns nationwide have reclaimed the neighborhoods once occupied by immigrants, meat packers and factory workers. They're pressure-washing away all the dirt, noise and ill-repute, replacing them with the cosmopolitan hustle of fair-trade coffee shops, vegan eateries and pet salons.

But while cities such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis and Indianapolis redrew their skylines, we slept comfortably in our affordably priced suburban beds. It took the city council's repeal of a dated zoning ban on new downtown residential construction in 1993 for Nashville to lift its sleepy limbs toward regenerating its vital core.

The Cumberland, a 24-story apartment building, first penetrated Church Street airspace in 1998. But the current condo boom, which began with the 31-story Viridian a block away, wouldn't come for six more years.

We can tip our oversized hats to developers such as Tony Giarratana and Bill Barkley for the surge that followed, as well as a slew of studies proclaiming a population anxious to sleep where it toils.

By all accounts it's been a successful surge. Though a blossoming recession has slowed lending to buyers and developers alike, there's no denying that units have been selling steadily.

That's because local wisdom—from developers, planners and downtown boosters—says we've long been underserved. According to a report by the Downtown Nashville Partnership, many similarly sized cities have double or quadruple Nashville's downtown populace.

In 2001, there were only 1,380 residential units available to accommodate a workforce of over 47,000. That number is expected to triple by the end of next year.

Healthy sales imply that Nashville's been seduced by city living. ICON sold its top-tier units in less than 48 hours. Encore! announces 85 percent sold. Velocity in the Gulch claims 60 percent of its units are contractually bound. (Calling a unit sold doesn't mean the buyer has closed on the deal.)

Call it the Sex and the City Effect: Thanks to a generation of yuppie sitcoms like Friends, Melrose Place and the aforementioned fashionista romp, the rite of passage into young adulthood means chucking two-car garages for fifth-floor walkups, the coziness of marriage for the excitement of endless hookups. With younger generations veering off the marriage-and-breeding track, they now enjoy several years of post-collegiate socializing with the walking-around money to support it.

They want everything closer, faster and sooner, with the status of a hip city address. And they aren't quite ready to grow up—at least not by their parents' definition.

"This whole urban living deal has been brokered in pop culture for a while through New York," says Richard Lloyd, a Vanderbilt sociology professor who's writing a book about Nashville's downtown renewal.

"What they're selling is this idea that essentially your adult life, for some period of time, will be exactly like being in college, only with better shoes. You saw that with Melrose Place, Friends and Sex and the City. Adult life means you're still with your friends all the time, you still drink all the time and you serial date. You do all the stuff you did when you were an undergrad, and you live in these big, very well-appointed dorms. That's what these amount to."