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At the end of a winding gravel lane that curves off Old Hickory Boulevard in Bells Bend, near the ramp where Cleece Ferry once delivered passengers to the northern side of the Cumberland River, lies a small cemetery. The residents of “the Bend” say it’s called Calvary Cemetery, but you have to take this on faith. There’s no sign to make it official.
Inside the chain link enclosure rest the remains of many of the people who have made Bells Bend a community for over 150 years. The names Barnes and Hulan, Nickens and Thornton inscribe many of the headstones. A number of the grave markers are handmade. Ham Patterson is memorialized by a concrete slab embedded with brightly colored marbles spelling out his name and dates. The final resting place of Ina P. Barnes is a mini-garden, complete with wind chimes and pinwheels, an arbor with roses and a hanging basket of hot pink petunias, and a small wooden plaque bearing a verse by Ina P. herself.
The earth is still raw on the grave of Ruth Evelyn Johnson. Her husband Billy says he buried her there just a few weeks ago. Despite his evident grief, Billy hasn’t holed up in the 150-year-old farmhouse in which he was born and still lives. Instead, in late September, he attended a week’s worth of community meetings devoted to a proposal for a development called Bells Landing. He came because he’s concerned about the changes the development may bring. Many—but certainly not all—members of the roughly 150 households that occupy Bells Bend share similar concerns about the proposed 1,200 new residences: the fact that the water and sewer lines the dwellings will require—the Bend now relies on septic—could usher in further waves of development, and the new traffic all this could generate.
The brainchild of developer Jeff Zeitlin, Bells Landing is a plan for more than 850 acres in Bells Bend, a peninsula inscribed by the river and bisected by Old Hickory Boulevard lying south of Ashland City Highway in northwest Davidson County—one of the last remaining predominantly rural areas in the county. The proposed project site lies east of Old Hickory, near the road’s terminus at the river and across the boulevard from the 800-acre Bells Bend Environmental Park Metro Parks is planning.
Despite its proximity to Nashville’s urban areas, Bells Bend has stayed rural in part because of its topography: floodplain along the river, with much of the inland portion steep slopes sliced by narrow hollows. The lack of good vehicular access has also limited development. The relevant section of Old Hickory Boulevard—the route into and out of the Bend—is two curvy, narrow lanes with minimal shoulders. And a bridge to link the boulevard with I-40 across the river has—as yet—never advanced beyond the concept stage.
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As a result, the Bend is even today a place where homesteads go back for generations, where frequent gunshots ring out during deer season, where natural markers of the land and manmade infrastructure—Whites Creek and Hydes Ferry Pike, for example—bear plain family names. Yet just outside the Bend, Ashland City Highway is now four lanes with urban lighting, lanes that are delivering cookie cutter subdivisions to points north—along Eatons Creek Road—east and west. Development is coming as Metro Nashville’s greenfields are vanishing, and what was once considered topographically and socially rugged territory—the area has always lacked the gentility of southwest Davidson and Williamson counties—is now looming in the cross hairs of those who turn land into real estate.
Jeff Zeitlin is a member of a clan that’s been doing real estate—designing, developing and selling it—for five decades. He’s also a true believer in the beauty of the Bend’s landscape and claims that his plan for Bells Landing is the most reliable way to preserve it. “We’d already platted out the property for what it’s zoned for—a subdivision with one house per two acres,” he explained during a whirlwind tour by mechanical mule. “And then I came up here”—a high ridge with spectacular views of river and downtown skyline—“and I thought, ‘This land deserves better.’ ”
To get “better,” Zeitlin junked the conventional subdivision concept, in which single-family homes are dispersed equally throughout a site, standing in the center of their own lawns along streets that culminate in cul de sacs. He hired a team led by the Maryland-based urban designer Seth Harry and the local Hawkins Partners landscape architects—assisted by a raft of experts specializing in efficient energy use, New Urbanist transportation planning, architecture and economic analysis—to develop a more ambitious plan. And he staged a six-day charrette—an intensive series of workshops in which designers collaborate with citizens—at the Scottsboro Community Center, to get input from the residents of the Bend.
What Zeitlin got—in addition to a much more land-friendly development pattern than he’d started with—was some determined opposition to the whole idea of building 1,200 new dwellings, much of it from residents who live north of Ashland City Highway rather than in the Bend proper.
But first, the plan. The latest version, rather than dispersing the dwellings, clusters them in a series of “hamlets” surrounded and penetrated by open space. This layout allows 55 percent of the site to be preserved as common greenspace, minimizing the development’s impact on the land. Of the 1,200 new residences, 75 percent are planned as single-family detached, the remaining 25 percent as attached single family and condos. The price range is $175,000 to $2 million.
Each hamlet is composed of fine-grained, irregular blocks and is punctuated by some sort of civic building, village green or lake; there’s also a soccer field and amphitheater. The largest of the hamlets contains a village center with small retail shops, to allow residents to walk to the store for basic necessities rather than have to drive out to Ashland City Highway—to the Lewis Country Store and points beyond. The hamlets are knit by a well-connected network of streets and walking trails. The trails are laid out to take advantage of the natural amenities—the streams that flow through the site, the patches of heaviest forestation—and link with greenways planned for Bells Bend Environmental Park, so that Landing residents and park visitors alike can hike along them. At the request of Metro Parks, which will oversee the maintenance of the trails, the plan also avoids development within the viewsheds from the park into the Landing, to minimize the development’s visual impact on the park.
In response to the priority expressed by the citizens during the charrette to preserve the Bend’s rural character, new construction is set back a quarter-mile from Old Hickory Boulevard. What will occupy this frontage is more open space, including pasture leased for farming, thus devoting “more of the site to farming than there is now,” Zeitlin says. This green stuff will be protected by conservation easements overseen by the Land Trust for Tennessee. The plan avoids the obvious temptation to sell off the million dollar views to the highest bidders. Instead, the loftiest knobs and ridges will be open space or the location of a village green, so that the best sightlines are not the private property of a single owner.
To build Bells Landing as planned, however, Zeitlin must get a zone change to allow him to increase the average density to 1.5 units per acre, to cluster rather than disperse these units, and to put some retail in his village center. Because basic Metro zoning isn’t geared to this traditional neighborhood development pattern, Zeitlin will need a special zoning overlay—designed to be specific to the site rather than generic. To get this zone change, he’ll need the support of Metro Council member Brenda Gilmore, which means he’ll need the support of the community as well.
Gilmore says she plans to have a meeting of the Scottsboro community, with a formal vote, to gauge the opposition and support. She’s not yet decided, however, whether that “community” will include only Bend residents or also those who live north of Ashland City Highway—some of the project’s most vocal opponents. “My sense,” she explains in an e-mail, “is that those in the Bend feel that the residents on the north side should not be making decisions for the residents in the Bend.”
Gilmore herself believes “that the project is too ambitious for the community” and says she’s finding it “challenging” to convince her constituents “that 1,200 units will not change the character of the community.” She’s also concerned that the new development could raise land values and therefore taxes, pricing some residents out of the place they call home.
The Bells Bend master plan is clearly superior to conventional subdivision platting in its sensitivity to preserving the visual character of the rural landscape, as even opponents of the project, such as environmental consultant Barry Sulkin, acknowledge. But Sulkin, who lives north of the Bend in Pecan Valley, says “it’s just too many homes, which will bring too many cars.”
A traffic impact study Zeitlin commissioned says that there are currently 1,044 trips a day on Old Hickory Boulevard in Bell’s Bend. The study estimates that the opening of Bells Bend park will add 3,693 more daily trips. A conventional subdivision built to the current zoning would add another 4,364 trips a day; the Bells Landing plan, by way of comparison, would add 8,198 daily trips, for totals of approximately 9,000 and 13,000 trips respectively. To compensate, Zeitlin’s transportation planners propose widening the two lanes of Old Hickory and expanding the shoulders along the road, while reducing the posted speed from 50 to 40 mph. This solution is cold comfort to George West, who drives his tractor down Old Hickory to the fields of turnip greens he grows for the Farmers Market. “A tractor goes 15 miles per hour. Are you telling me all these new people are going to be willing to go that slow behind me? They’ll run right over me.
“What they’re proposing paints a pretty picture,” West says. “It looks rural, but not as we’ve known it.” For years, he says, the Bend’s defenders have fought the good fight against unwanted development. They blocked a landfill on what will become Bells Bend Park. They were forced to accept a sewage treatment plant operated by the Harpeth Valley Utility District. “Now here they come again,” West sighs. “I guess they’ll always be coming, as long as it stays pretty.”
Whether is stays pretty will depend not just on residents opposing change, but also on deciding what form change should take if and when it does come.