East Side Story

So, stranger—what do you think of East Nashville? Is it an urban Valhalla? Dodge City? A progressive, free-thinking mecca for artists and musicians? Middle Tennessee’s Sodom and Gomorrah? Come on, now: if you’ve lived in this town even a couple of years, you know you’ve got an opinion.

Maybe East Nashvillians have heard one too many cracks about “living in the ’hood,” or maybe West Nashvillians just get sick of what they perceive as East Nashville’s hipper-than-thou attitude. Whatever the case, as East Nashvillian William Williams puts it, “We’ve got a healthy chip on our shoulders.”

There’s an intensity, even ferocity, to the feelings Nashville’s East Side engenders in both boosters and detractors that seems far greater than that of other Nashville neighborhoods. Spend some time in Five Points, and there’s a fair chance you’ll run across Christy Perkins, whose community pride has been indelibly inked onto the skin of her right wrist. Interlopers may be befuddled by the tattoo—ENFRK—but if you know Perkins at all, you won’t need a cryptologist to break the code: East Nashville FReaK.

“I don’t know that anybody would be as hardcore about East Nashville as I am, though I know a lot of people are pretty close,” says Perkins, propping up a broken foot in her Lockeland Springs apartment. She’s being modest: it would be hard to find anyone as fervent about any Nashville neighborhood. You don’t see people walking around with Belle Meade tats.

As strong as Perkins’ neighborhood pride is, though, it’s countered in some parts by an equal amount of fear, annoyance or outright contempt toward East Nashville from the other side of the Cumberland. One South Nashville Scene writer’s wife gets anxious every time she hears he’s going over the river. Another local writer and longtime Middle Tennessee resident, who just moved to Woodbine, was overheard last week listing his transitional neighborhood’s fine points—affordable houses, great eating. Then came the clincher: “And it doesn’t have the stink of ‘East Nashville.’ ”

Longtime residents on both sides of the river have heard all the old gripes. Chief among them is crime. East Nashville’s detractors go on about its high crime rates, while boosters claim that perception is exaggerated. On some level, they’re both right. But a new kind of irritation has started to take hold, especially now that East Nashville is booming as a hot spot for scene-making singles. Once considered too rough, now it’s just too…hip.

And with the proliferation of restaurants, bars and retail on the East Side over the last couple of years, residents don’t feel the need to cross the river as often, if at all. That only contributes to the rivalry.

“People in East Nashville are so caught up with defining themselves as being cool, being neighborhood people, people who like to take walks on their sidewalks, people that are open and friendly,” says a mortgage-company staffer in her 20s who lives in a downtown condo, and who did not want her name used. “But the thing is, there’s just as many people like that in West Nashville—it just hasn’t occurred to them to define themselves as being that way.

“In my mom’s neighborhood [Richland-West End],” she adds, “there’s all kinds of friendly people who walk around the sidewalks, with a drink after work or whatever, and visit their neighbors and walk their dogs. They just don’t feel the need to assert their coolness.”

East Nashville now is like the ugly, socially awkward kid in grade school who grows up to be a successful movie star, enjoying the adulation and living life in the fast lane. She’s got plenty of reasons to feel good about herself, yet her confident veneer hides underlying insecurities that haven’t been fully resolved.

West Nashville, on the other hand, is like the cool kid in high school who makes fun of the awkward kid, then grows up, settles down and has a family. She looks back at her former schoolmate with a mixture of scorn and contempt, refusing to acknowledge her own ennui, not to mention her envy of the former geek’s newfound success and bon vivant lifestyle.

Every few years, they meet up inescapably at the reunion. Small talk is difficult, but East Nashville always breaks the ice. “Enough about me,” East Nashville says, firing up another Gitane. “What do you think of me?”