For years, few people who ate, shopped, ran businesses and even lived in the Upper Broadway/West End part of town knew what to call that bustling, if seemingly unidentifiable, area of Nashville.
But this summer, Won Choi, the owner of J&J’s Market & Café, helped gather local merchants to name the neighborhood and form an association. The debate, which wasn’t exactly the stuff of Lincoln/Douglas, focused on two names: Uptown and Midtown. Midtown won, and in August the Midtown Business Association was born.
“We wanted to make the area more visible,” says Choi, who now serves as president of the group. “We have more retail businesses to offer than Hillsboro Village, and we are more multiuse. We have more offices and lots of residential capacity.”
For the record, the association defines Midtown as stretching from West End to Grand Avenue and from 16th Avenue to 21st Avenue. It’s an important part of the city—a gateway to downtown and adjacent to Vanderbilt, Music Row and the West End area. And with restaurants, an art gallery, a market, apartments and a gas station, the area is more or less self-sufficient.
“Everything comes together here at Midtown,” says Fred VonColln, the owner of Midtown Printing. “I see it becoming even more of an urban area with people living, working and shopping in one place.”
One of the main motives for the merchants to join forces was to address the kinds of mundane but important issues that can confront an urban neighborhood—zoning, planning, marketing and panhandling.
Perhaps predictably, the trendy Hillsboro Village, which has no such identity problem, became a role model. “We noticed how Hillsboro Village formed a group and improved their neighborhood,” says Jay Young, the co-manager of Noshville Delicatessen. “We figured we’d do the same thing.”
Right away, the group faced its first test. Not long after its formation, an out-of-town developer announced plans to build two towers, each about 280 feet tall, across from the Bound’ry restaurant. Many of the merchants worried that the towers would strain the area’s limited parking areas, while appearing distinctly out of character amid an otherwise low-flying neighborhood. They met with the developer—something the newly formed association enabled—and won a few compromises. They coaxed the developer to reduce the height of the towers to 199 feet. They also persuaded the developer to construct both buildings at the same time, reducing the time of construction.
“That would have been a huge problem for our Music Row neighbors, having two back-to-back construction projects like that,” Choi says.
Other projects for the association include creating an urban overlay for the area and convincing city officials to build the new symphony hall somewhere near the new Music Row roundabout—which now spins off to the east to a row of shuttered storefronts.
“The city is spending all this money on the Gulch,” Choi says. “If we built the new symphony hall on the roundabout, it would help that area become economically viable again. If you revive that, you’ll have inflow to the Gulch on both sides.”
The association has little chance of luring the new symphony hall away from downtown. But the fact that there is any group at all mobilized to fight for it says something about Midtown’s evolution.
