It’s difficult to believe that the area east of Centennial Park — bookended by hospitals and filled with medical offices and surface parking lots — was once, for a fleeting moment, the finest residential section in Nashville. Only a few hints remain.
One remnant sits at 317 21st Ave. N. — but it too requires a sort of architectural X-ray vision to see its former splendor through the patina. Parking lots sit at its shoulders as the skeleton of a multilevel medical office building rises behind. It is not the only old house in the district — there are a handful strewn about, often grander and with more exquisite brick facades — but 317 21st is the only one that has not been converted into professional offices or some other modern use.
It is the Last Single-Family House in the Murphy Addition — and in its twilight, it tells the story of how other streetcar suburbs survived.
A Refuge From the Slums
The Murphy Addition was the first of Nashville’s splendid, turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs. The electric streetcar, innovations in finance and public infrastructure drew many of Nashville’s elite families out of the inner city. Top-tier status was short-lived — within a decade of the Murphy Addition’s 1902 groundbreaking, competing developers had begun work on the even more exclusive enclaves of Richland and Belle Meade — but it remained protected by restrictive covenants that barred commercial uses, cheap construction and Black occupancy.
A humble landmark on Jo Johnston Avenue tells the story of how Nashville’s Black neighborhoods have been erased and redrawn
The boom of exclusive streetcar suburb development was driven by elite flight from the inner city and its growing slums. After the Civil War, Black people newly freed from enslavement streamed into the city and settled alongside Irish immigrant laborers in dense slums — tenements mixed with saloons, brothels, factories, merchants and other commercial uses around railroad tracks and low-lying, flood-prone land. By the 1880s, the Irish had begun to assimilate and ascend to the middle class, and the slums were increasingly left to Black residents alone.
The city’s health department in 1899 reported that disease and “the high death rate among the colored people is due to ... improvidence, ignorance, lamentable neglect of personal cleanliness ... [and] marked racial susceptibility to all forms of tubercular disease.” Police cracked down on vice in slum areas like Black Bottom, disproportionately arresting Black Nashvillians at the behest of “City Beautiful advocates anxious to clean up the area [and] white property owners fretting about depressed land values” — a push that culminated in 1909 with a bond issue to clear the worst part of Black Bottom with construction of the Shelby Street Bridge.
A Map of Morals
City Beautiful advocates and business progressives also made genuine physical improvements to combat slum conditions — even as they dovetailed with Jim Crow laws, the religious fervor of moral reform and a broader segregationist trend. A sewer system was laid, though most families couldn’t afford to hook up to it. A building code was implemented in 1909 and expanded into a 236-page document declared “the best in the United States” by 1916.
317 21st Ave. N.
These efforts built the coalition for city zoning — joined by Nashville real estate interests, the chamber of commerce and suburban homeowners — with heavy promotion as early as 1918. A 1928 Tennessean editorial made the case: “City zoning and a proper scheme for city development will prevent the tragedy of property value declines through shifting and changing populations. … It is the purpose of those who advocate zoning bills to make a situation of this kind virtually impossible.”
When a permanent zoning plan was presented in January 1933, its engineer explained, “Residential neighborhoods will not be invaded by ill-suited uses which so blight the areas surrounding as to cause drastic lowering in the values and character of the neighborhoods and the moral problems which arise from the types of inhabitants which move into such areas.”
Over the prior half-century, “moral problems” had become associated almost exclusively with Blackness, and the affliction of immorality was transferred to whites only through interracial contacts. White notions of morality were tied to the “types of inhabitants” of mixed-use and mixed-race neighborhoods, and not merely to the actions of individuals.
This context is critical to understanding how commercial uses located along major streets could present an existential crisis for entire neighborhoods. The acute problems caused by commercial encroachment — traffic, noise, odors — would be felt most immediately by those next-door, and not at all by those further down the block. But the depreciation of next-door homes due to those nuisances would invite lower-class occupants — often Black — who were willing to endure inconveniences to live in an otherwise desirable district, thus setting off a chain of flight and blight that would spread throughout the entire neighborhood.
Zoning was the tool to stop it.
The Zone of Interest
As the years wore on, new suburbs were developed, slums expanded, and the Murphy Addition lost its luster. The threat of “shifting and changing populations” had come to its residents’ doorsteps. By the time a zoning ordinance was proposed, a Black enclave had grown on the other side of Charlotte Avenue — the northern bounds of the Murphy Addition — and Black Nashvillians had followed commercial expansion from downtown right up to the eastern boundary at 20th Avenue North.
More than 200 citizens attended the public hearing of the zoning ordinance on July 11, 1933. More than half were residents of one small neighborhood: the Murphy Addition. Homeowners noted that the deed restrictions that had protected their neighborhood from commercial uses — and Black occupancy — were soon to expire, and they “wanted them perpetuated.” Residents of the Murphy Addition protested a handful of commercial classifications along the borders of the neighborhood. Each protest was successful — a protection not granted to Black neighborhoods.
A decade of public statements from homeowners and zoning proponents — and half a century of racist associations between Black residence, mixed uses and blight — were distilled in one public hearing. The white, higher-class residents of the Murphy Addition leveraged immense political capital to protect their property values, with the public police power and a new zoning code to stand in for the private covenants that had maintained exclusivity.
317 21st Ave. N.
The Murphy Subtraction
But the color lines that surrounded and defined the Murphy Addition did not hold. By the 1950s, classified ads for real estate in the Murphy Addition were led with all-capital letters: “COLORED.”
As the neighborhood began to transition racially, the protection of white property with zoning was no longer paramount — the entire neighborhood was soon rezoned to commercial to absorb the pressure of hospital expansion. References to the Murphy Addition disappeared from Nashville newspapers by the 1960s. As with many other neighborhoods, including its neighbor to the north, the Murphy Addition’s identity and residential character were contingent on its status as a white enclave. The house at 317 21st Ave. N. stands as a remnant of this history, never wavering from its original single-family residential use. Whether it remains this way for many more years or will soon be demolished, the themes it has witnessed continue to be replayed.
The Metro zoning code still cites the protection of morals among its purposes. Commercial encroachment continues to be a top target of homeowner activism. Zoning decisions remain deferential to neighborhood protests, with little separation between public powers and private covenants.
These themes survive because every other streetcar suburb prominent in the period of early zoning has survived — only the Murphy Addition is lost to history.
