Belle Meade’s feisty old guard has won the battle for their city’s signature thoroughfare. Last week, the satellite city’s three commissioners voted to defer indefinitely proposals to make Belle Meade Boulevard safer for the motley collection of motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and joggers who awkwardly share the street. The commissioners also scrapped a plan to build sidewalks in areas where walking on the side of the road is about as safe as camping out in the Gaza Strip. Oddly, the issue of sidewalks, whose construction is warmly welcomed throughout other Nashville neighborhoods, are controversial in Belle Meade.
“It is the hope of each commissioner in deferring the resolution indefinitely that the community will work to reach a consensus on an acceptable plan,” the city commissioners wrote in a letter to their constituents. “As every study has clearly demonstrated, the safety issue in Belle Meade is real, it is very serious and will not resolve itself.”
For years, the enclave has been engulfed in an intra-class civil war over what’s best for the Boulevard. The question is what, if anything, should be done to a street on which speeding cyclists, runners and Mercedes SUVs seem primed for a showdown. To forge some sort of consensus, the city’s commissioners have appointed citizen panels, hired consultants, hosted contentious public meetings and bankrolled $60,000 in studies.
Last fall, Hodgson & Douglas, the landscape architectural firm the commissioners hired to study the Boulevard and other streets in Belle Meade, recommended that the city close two of the street’s four lanes and create 4-foot-wide sidewalks instead. Patches of grass would separate the sidewalk from the road. A citizen’s panel appointed to study the issue agreed with that recommendation.
As an alternate plan, Hodgon & Douglas suggested the city develop a walking and running path in the grassy median. Cyclists, meanwhile, would still have used the Boulevard under this less expensive option.
The older residents of Belle Meade, many of whom have owned property since the Eisenhower administration, were not impressed with the so-called single-lane plan. After months of opposition, they helped pressure the commissioners to abandon even modest proposals to change the look of the street. The commissioners even shelved a commonsense proposal to build sidewalks along some of the city’s busy streets.
“I don’t think the commissioners really thought it would raise so much opposition,” says city manager Beth Reardon. “It would have been a big change for the city, probably one of the biggest changes that has ever been introduced to the citizens.”
The city’s newer residents, many of whom have young children and like to bike and run along the Boulevard, were largely avid supporters of the single-lane plan. To them, closing two of the lanes and converting them to sidewalks would have cut down on drive-through traffic while making the street safer for its users. The older residents, however, along with most of people who live on the Boulevard, preferred the status quo. To them, revamping the look and feel of the Boulevard would lure a dangerous element, increase crime and ultimately decrease property values. They worried that the single-lane plan would make the street an extension of Percy Warner Park.
“I don’t think it’s the responsibility of the commissioners to provide a recreation destination,” says Dorothy Earthman, who lives on the Boulevard. “I like to be able to go out my door on my bike or on foot, but I don’t think we have to provide a place for the world to exercise.”
Others were even more adamant. At last week’s meeting of the commissioners, one resident reportedly suggested banning joggers from the Boulevard. A resident who was there heard him say that “those joggers, we know what they look like. They shouldn’t be here.”
Reardon says that’s not a possibility. “There have always been people who say that the best solution is to outlaw pedestrians, but that has never been an option for these commissioners.”
Peter Zimmerman, who has been one of the more fervent supporters of the single-lane plan, says that issue has incited misinformation. “There are a group of people in Belle Meade who find the notion of outsiders coming here to be objectionable.... In reality, the people who come to use the Boulevard are people from Green Hills and Vanderbilt. They are not undesirable.” (Memo to East Nashvillians: Keep your bikes parked at Shelby Bottoms.)
The residents in favor of the status quo say that the city has taken steps to make the Boulevard safer—lowering the speed limit from 40 mph to 35 mph, requiring cyclists to bike in a single file and banning baby strollers. In fact, last fall, a city police officer ticketed a man who rode his bike with an attached baby trailer. With her sirens on, the officer then escorted the scofflaw outside the city limits, presumably for his own protection.
Boulevard resident Ted Lazenby, a former president of National Life and Accident Insurance Co., helped lead the opposition to the single-lane plan. "Everybody was up in arms, from [Boulevard resident] Jimmy Bradford to me." Lazenby, who also served as U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson's finance chairman, says that the single-lane plan is both unnecessary and dangerous. "You can't pass when you only have one lane. There is no room for error if you only have one way each way. The plan also destroys property values. "The best thing is to leave the Boulevard alone.”
In January, the commissioners thought that they had forged a compromise in which the city would go with the alternate plan of the foot path along the grassy median. Pedestrians would have their own place to walk apart from all the traffic, and nobody would have to tear up the street. The commissioners even traveled to Atlanta to look at a similar path.
But the commissioners were wrong. Instead of the path representing a compromise, it was actually the one plan both sides hated equally. So last week, the commissioners voted to scrap that plan and provide time for additional debate. In a statement that seemed to invoke visions of the apocalypse, Belle Meade Mayor Peggy Warner warned that at some point, the tempestuous issues surrounding the Boulevard would have to be reckoned with. “But the passage of the motion does not resolve the safety issues facing motorists, pedestrians and cyclists in our city,” she said. “This safety issue is apparent. It is growing day by day. It will not go away. It must be addressed.”
