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.

Despite Germantown’s proximity to downtown, its sense of community, and its convenient access to amenities such as the new Kroger store, living in the neighborhood remains a challenge, largely because the people of Germantown are not in control of what goes on in the areas around them. West of Germantown lies the Cheatham Place public housing project. East of Germantown are Metro’s water treatment plant and the landfill where ash from the Thermal plant is dumped.

The Germantown area is surprisingly small. It stretches from Jefferson Street on the south to Werthan Packaging on Hume Street on the north. It runs east to west between Third and Eighth Avenues. For all the prettiness of its three-shaded streets—the Nashville Tree Foundation has designated it an arboretum for its 92 varieties of trees—it is a diamond surrounded by the typical roughness of North Nashville. Many of the properties on Warren’s street are drastically in need of improvements; so are some of the properties even closer to the heart of the district. For all that, Germantown has the feel of a village. The upscale residents of the neighborhood are friendly, professional types, at ease living alongside people from a different socioeconomic bracket. The upscale types are urban pioneers, history buffs, and—in some cases—simply bleeding hearts who want to be a part of preserving and improving the remains of a historic district.

Many of the grandest and most important homes in Germantown have long since been demolished, and industries and businesses have been built in their places. Still, as evidenced by last weekend’s 17th annual Oktoberfest celebration, which attracted thousands of visitors, Germantown retains many of its old-style attractions and much of its antique charm.

Diners turn out in impressive numbers for Sunday brunch at the popular Monell’s family eatery or for a Friday-night dinner at the gourmet Mad Platter restaurant. But not many of them are people who live in the neighborhood. In Germantown right now, there simply are not that many available houses. The neighborhood has undergone a severe shrinkage since its pre-World War I heyday. Industrialization, a series of bad zoning policies, and problems with crime have all taken their tolls on the Victorian village.

Germantown has been making a slow comeback since its first Oktoberfest in 1980, and neighborhood residents are encouraged by the nearby construction of the state’s $51 million Bicentennial Mall. They also like to brag about the new Kroger store at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Monroe Street and the kinder, gentler Farmers Market, featuring the traditional offerings of fresh produce, now showcased alongside international food shops and smaller versions of The Mad Platter and Swett’s Restaurant.

Since the settlement of Nashville, the area north of Jefferson Street has had several names. It’s been known as North Nashville, Germantown, and Butchertown. Throughout the first half-century of Nashville’s history, the area spreading upward from the foot of Capitol Hill was uninhabited hunting territory. Settlers could always find food and fur there because the salt lick and sulphur spring, located where the Bicentennial Mall now stands, created a natural gathering place for animals.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s, when a wave of Europeans—particularly Germans—began to move to Nashville, that the residential and business community known as Germantown began to take shape. In the 1850s, Dr. David McGavock, whose family had been deeded the land as a reward for service in the Revolutionary War, began to sell parcels of property. Germantown was eventually incorporated into the Nashville city limits as the Ninth Ward in 1865.

In her old textbook, Early History of Nashville, Lizzie Elliott says that, as early as 1714, Charleville, a Frenchman, opened a store and traded with the Shawnee Indians on the bluff where North Nashville now stands. In 1779 early settlers such as James Robertson and George Freeland crossed the Cumberland Mountains, pitched tents, and planted a cornfield there. The first white child in Nashville was born at the settlement known as Freeland’s Station, near the site of the present-day Werthan Packaging plant. That child, Felix Robertson, son of James and Charlotte Robertson, later became mayor of Nashville.

The McGavock family established the first important settlements in North Nashville, but their homes have long since been demolished. Real and rapid development of the area got under way when the Germans arrived in the 1830s. In the wake of the Congress of Vienna, Germany became a loose union of 38 independent states. Surrounded by political unrest and constant turmoil, many Germans fled in hopes of finding a safer, more stable life.

Among the first Germans to arrive in Nashville were John H. Buddeke and his wife, Mary Ratterman. In the late 1830s they built a mansion at Monroe and Vine Street (now Seventh Avenue). As Buddeke became more successful in his business dealings with food, liquor, and land, his wife returned to Europe to gather furnishings for the house. According to historian John Connelly’s North Nashville and Germantown, the Buddeke home became the center for fashionable German social life. It was also the place where at least a dozen German families gathered for religious celebrations before a church was built across the street. The Buddeke home still stands today, serving as headquarters for the neighborhood organization, Historic Germantown Nashville Inc.

The Buddekes’ success led to the arrival of friends, relatives, and other Germans. On Fifth Avenue North, Mary Buddeke’s brother, George Henry Ratterman, built a large brick Federal-style residence, which also still stands. It had fallen into utter disrepair and was ready for demolition when, 20 years ago during the neighborhood’s initial rebirth, Joe Herndon bought the house and renovated it.

By the middle of the 19th century, elaborate brick homes lined Germantown’s streets, sharing the sidewalks with more modest workers’ cottages and shotgun houses, the same sort of architectural mix that persists today. German immigration continued for several decades. In 1850 alone, 583,000 Germans immigrated to the United States, accounting for 26 percent of the nation’s total immigrant population. As the Germans arrived, they not only built houses; they also built public gathering places. When a fire destroyed the Cathedral of the Holy Rosary on Capitol Hill, the fire-scarred bricks were used to build a new church on Vine Street right across from the Buddeke house. Christened the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it was dedicated in 1859. A priest of German descent, Father Bernard Niedergeses, is now the parish priest at Assumption, a church whose charm and history draws parishioners—black, white, rich, and poor—from all over Nashville.

Both the Buddeke home and Assumption Church suffered during the four years of the Civil War. The church was commandeered for use as a hospital. According to historian and former Nashville Banner writer Ed Huddleston, “the beautiful Buddeke house was battered, its garden a trampled mass.... On its drawing room walls at least two large paintings still hung, the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the Roman Pantheon. Both bore saber cuts.”

It was after the Civil War that the Germantown area experienced its greatest growth. Still more German immigrants were attracted to the area because of the substantial number of Germans already living there, and North Nashville became the hub of German influence, not only in Nashville but all across Tennessee. The leaders of most of the German clubs, organizations, and immigrant societies lived there, and many of them went on to become influential figures in Nashville’s civic life. By century’s end, German families with names like Gerst, Heiman, Jacobs, Kuhn, Neuhoff, Meier, Ratterman, and Wessel made up more than half of the population of the neighborhood.

All the while, Germantown had another nickname. Because there were so many meat peddlers in the neighborhood, the area was also known as “Butchertown.” Butchers would slaughter and cut up meat in their backyards, where they would also sometimes smoke it before selling it to residents of the neighborhood. Gradually, door-to-door sales began to fall off as butchers began selling their goods to markets. After the Chicago meat-packing houses developed processes to refrigerate meat, small-time peddlers found themselves out of work. In Nashville, they survived by merging their businesses. Several of those meat-packing firms, including Munn & Tillman, are still around today.

Germantown reached its peak in the years before World War I, but it was the war, and its anti-German hysteria, that caused the neighborhood to fall apart. Not wanting to be trapped in an all-German enclave, residents of the neighborhood began to move away, hoping to be assimilated into more diverse communities. When they left Germantown, their neatly maintained residences were left behind to be become rental property or to be divided into apartments or boarding houses.

However, other forces were at work too. Some of the same advances that had helped Germantown grow and prosper also led to its demise. The streetcars and automobiles that took people to and from Germantown could also easily take them to other neighborhoods. From 1910 and on through the 1930s, as Nashville’s suburbs began to spread farther and farther out from the downtown area, still more Germantown residents opted to move to the newer, more desirable outlying areas.

As a result, the neighborhood languished, and it was dealt yet another blow in the 1950s, when the city rezoned the area for industrial use. Until that point, the neighborhood was zoned for private residences, but its reputation had deteriorated. By then, Germantown was thought of as a place of low-income warehousing, a neighborhood haunted by the growing problems of inner-city life.

Germantown’s problems were only compounded in the 1960s by the arrival of Urban Renewal. Federal officials proposed that the neighborhood be leveled. Instead, the slum housing and bordellos that had surrounded Capitol Hill were simply forced farther out, piling even more burdens on the already weakened Germantown.

The area’s downward spiral continued, and Germantown’s historic houses began to disappear or fall into disrepair. By the early 1980s, even the last of Butchertown’s small smokehouses were gone.

Germantown’s renaissance can be traced back to 1979, when local architect Michael Emrick found a house that he wanted to buy on Sixth Avenue. However, two other houses came along with the deal, and Emrick needed to find buyers for them as well. One of the buyers he recruited was George Zepp, an editor at The Tennessean, who still lives across from Emrick on Sixth. In those early years, Emrick, Zepp, and neighbors like Herndon learned to deal with open prostitution and drug dealing on the Germantown streets, problems that have since been eradicated.

The next year, John Connelly, who had spent his youth in the Germantown area, instituted the neighborhood’s Oktoberfest celebration of German tradition, food, and beer. “What I wanted was for it to be a kind of homecoming for people who had lived here or whose families had lived here,” he recalls. The result was overwhelming. “We had so many people we didn’t know what to do with them.”

In the intervening years, with the help of two of the area’s churches, Assumption and Monroe Street United Methodist, Oktoberfest’s success has continued. At this year’s festival, the food was gone by 2 p.m., several hours before the event was scheduled to end.

By the 1980s, Germantown had begun to show signs of reviving its identity. When Metro announced plans to build an auto-emissions testing plant in the area, the neighborhood rose up in protest. At the time, part of Germantown was still zoned for industrial use; nevertheless, Metro backed down. The large lot where the testing plant was to go has since been rezoned for mixed use, allowing commercial and residential development to coexist.

Germantown’s comeback was helped along in 1989, when then-Gov. Ned McWherter announced plans for a Bicentennial Mall stretching from the Capitol building north to Jefferson Street. The 19-acre mall, completed earlier this year in time for Tennessee’s 200th birthday celebration, has been lauded as an overwhelming success. For Germantown residents, the mall answered often repeated pleas for help. Planning for the mall prompted the city’s development arm, the Metro Development and Housing Agency, to create a redevelopment area encompassing Germantown and other parts of North Nashville. As a result, MDHA established guidelines for use of land around the Mall. Germantown residents had been asking for these sorts of guidelines for years.

Now visitors to the Mall can shop at the Farmers Market, still along Jefferson Street, or wander along the brick sidewalks of Germantown.

“I think the Bicentennial Mall has helped change the image that it’s not safe here,” says Michael King of Monell’s. “Crime was a big issue in the 1970s and ’80s—and it’s something we still have to keep our eyes on—but the Mall is helping to relax people a little.”

There are other reasons for optimism as well. Architect Michael Emrick recently oversaw the renovation of the turn-of-the-century Elliott School, a building that, just a few years ago, was one of the neighborhood’s most painful eyesores. The run-down school building, a depressing reminder of inner-city blight, re-emerged as a bright, beautiful home for Dede Wallace Center’s new Ella Bullard Hayes Center. The renovation of the school at Sixth Avenue and Jefferson Street transformed a quadrant of the neighborhood.

Because of its status as a redevelopment area, Germantown is also becoming a target for new residential developments that complement the historic homes already there. Developer Allen DeCuyper has purchased a lot at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Monroe Street, opposite the Mad Platter, where he plans to build four townhouses costing in the range of $150,000 each. Realtor Nancy Hardaway, a neighborhood pioneer who left Germantown about four years ago, is also planning a townhouse development. Hers will be at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Monroe Street.

Meanwhile, real-estate developer Charles Jones has agreed to lease the two main buildings of the Werthan Packaging plant on Eighth Avenue. Those two buildings—one built in 1869, the other in 1882—will provide him with more than 400,000 square feet of space. Jones has dreams of 50 loft apartments and offices, about 1,000 square feet each. He is also talking about using some of the space as a center for graphic arts and a trade-show space.

For many Germantown residents, the most promising development of late is a “gift” to the neighborhood that Mayor Phil Bredesen is scheduled to announce next week. The idea is simple, but for the people of Germantown it is a godsend: The mayor is expected to allocate funding to replace some of the area’s worn-out brick sidewalks.

Those with a stake in the neighborhood, such as Hardaway, who plans to move back, say Germantown is more appropriately identified as a part of downtown than as a part of North Nashville. Hardaway points out that Germantown, like Rutledge Hill, is one of Nashville’s few historic districts “in the inner loop.”

And after nearly two decades of cleanup and renovation, Germantown hasn’t lost its diversity. The area has defied national precedent by upgrading its image without losing its racial and economic mix. Normally, planners say, renovated neighborhoods take on an air of gentrification; as a result, they usually become whiter and more affluent.

But the 1990 U.S. Census indicated that the Germantown area’s black-white ratio had remained 50-50. What’s more, residents say, housing renovation has brought new black and white families into the neighborhood. Germantown continues to confound stereotypes. Lots of middle-class blacks have moved into renovated homes, in some cases taking the place of white families.

Still, the going will always be tough for Germantown. It is surrounded by less prosperous, less energetic neighborhoods that have not even begun to tackle the ugliness Germantown has been battling for two decades. Despite the neighborhood’s Victorian feel, its sidewalks and empty lots still serve as shortcuts for homeless squatters; the ground is littered with the leavings of workers on their lunch breaks.

For the foreseeable future, the back alleys of Germantown will always know people like Mary Warren, the can collector. It is a prospect that the residents of Germantown don’t seem to mind. The Warrens of the world are not what they fear. The true challenge is to continue to preserve the spirit and community of Germantown amid the trash and urban blight that surround it. The challenge is to retain a feeling of neighborhood when ugly garage-like businesses are only a block away. And the challenge is to make sure that Germantown, a neighborhood that has come so far in many ways, is safe for everybody—even Mary Warren.