Film
'Nashville: The 20th Century in Photographs' Tonight on NPT
Posted
by Jim Ridley on
Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 3:31 PM
Too bad for any local news stations that tossed out vast quantities of archival footage from the city's past. As Nashville Public Television has proved, there's gold in them thar vaults. The station's Memories of Nashville docs have been pledge-drive blockbusters, and Channel 8 blows dust off the scrapbooks again with Nashville: The 20th Century in Photographs, premiering 7 p.m. tonight on NPT.
Using stills from a number of sources--the Tennessean photo archive, the Tennessee State Library Archives, the Library of Congress--NPT documentarian Justin Harvey sets the wayback machine for 1897 and the Tennessee Centennial celebration. Billed as Volume 1, tonight's episode covers the early 20th century through World War I and the Depression years.
The money shots in the trailer above include Depression-era 5th Avenue, complete with flivvers, horse-drawn wagons and what look like gaslights, and one of the electric street cars that used to run through the downtown shopping district. If this doesn't satisfy your sweet tooth for musty memorabilia, fear not: NPT's Memories of Opryland repeats tonight at 10:30 p.m.
Oh man, I love this crap. I think I've seen the photo of that bike messenger before. There's a good website called shorpy.com that's full of old photograps (including a few from Civil War-era Nashville) and, of course, the "Life" magazine photo archive is hosted by Google. http://images.google.com/hosted/life
I can't wait to see this -- they took us up on our Wood Family vast collection of recently and anciently found photos, collected from the book we wrote over the winter, Nashville, Yesterday and Today. Hopefully, it'll be like a preview of the book!