Inconvenience started as an asset for Wedgewood-Houston. It’s close to downtown and owes its warehouses to a central train yard, but it’s hostile to traffic — there are two inefficient ways in and one good way out, and no reason to cut through. A little corner of the city grew here at the foot of St. Cloud Hill between the highways and railroads, moving through a now-familiar gentrification rhythm: from last century’s pasture to single-family plots to industrial sites that became affordable and inhabited by Nashville’s creative class in the early 2000s.
Around that time, when getting the copper stripped from an HVAC system was a regular nuisance for property owners, punk and hardcore bands played area hotspots like Little Hamilton and visual artists worked out of Fort Houston and The Packing Plant — the latter still an active community arts space on Hagan Street. Contemporary arts galleries from David Lusk (David Lusk Gallery) and Manuel Zeitlin (Zeitgeist) moved into the area, and the Nashville Sounds moved from Greer Stadium — once the area’s signature landmark — to First Horizon Park in Germantown. (Greer’s iconic guitar-shaped scoreboard now lives a few hundred yards down Chestnut Street as a lawn ornament outside Live Nation corporate offices.) At some point, people started calling the area “Wedgewood-Houston” for its north and south boundary roads, a brand popularized by the area’s art crawl.
Bigger money followed. The arts culture became a primary selling point for corporate developers — none with a grander vision, greater impact or bigger checkbook than AJ Capital Partners, which moved its headquarters from Chicago to the old May Hosiery building in 2020. With almost $6 billion in assets across the U.S. and Europe, the company specializes in rehabilitating old properties for a luxury market. Its master vision is Wedgewood Village, an 18-acre campus with more than 1.6 million square feet of mixed-use space that builds “upon the fabric of Wedgewood Houston as a crossroads for culture and commerce,” according to marketing materials.
Councilmember Terry Vo says developer needs to address community concerns before moving forward
To get there, AJ has turned the neighborhood into a building site. A small army of contractors and construction workers gets first dibs on the area’s free parking each morning, ushering in the day’s chorus of noise and debris. During business hours, cars crawl through Wedgewood-Houston like a labyrinth, avoiding bucket trucks and men in hard hats pointing at the sky. Foot traffic, the lifeblood of local retail, has not materialized despite hundreds of local apartment units, many of which struggle with double-digit vacancy rates.
Even if a new, shining neighborhood has been promised on the other side, some people in the area aren’t sure if they can make it there. The speed and scale with which AJ has pursued its singular vision have frustrated longtime residents who built the area’s cultural selling points. Many smaller independent businesses, specifically galleries and recording studios, are struggling to find a new equilibrium with the powerful corporation — akin to a Wedgewood-Houston “overlord,” one artist tells the Scene — working on its own timeline.
“ It’s like we’re operating with an arm tied behind our back financially,” says Loney John Hutchins, a recording engineer who bought 444 Humphreys St. in 2011 to turn the duplex into a professional downstairs studio. Artist Julia Martin has a gallery upstairs. “I think AJ is a net positive when you consider alternative developers, but we’re on round three of ‘tear shit up,’ and we all thought things would be more settled by now. This last year in particular has been the hardest for me as the property owner.”
Jackhammers and blasting are prohibitive obstacles for Hutchins’ recording studio. Rapid high-dollar investment also jacked up his property taxes after this year’s reappraisal, an inadvertent city burden that threatens to drive out the “little guy,” Hutchins says.
Crowded parking, construction debris and piled-up street trash — left by city waste management, which irregularly services the area due to construction obstacles — further discourage an otherwise pleasant and walkable pocket of Nashville. Clothier Savas, new Italian deli Ingrassia & Sons, and Julia Martin Gallery all set up in the area betting on a healthy neighborhood with regular walk-in customers, not years of cranes and scaffolding. Many local favorites have left, like Earnest Bar & Hideaway and Clawson’s Pub & Deli.
More than a decade ago, a raging party at Jon Sewell’s Chestnut Street house earned Sewell a visit from neighbor Roger Moutenot the next day. Moutenot, a legendary rock producer with a nearby studio, told him to keep things clean and pick up after his guests. In other words: Be a good neighbor. Over 15 years, Sewell — a former union carpenter — remodeled his 130-year-old house into a towering work of art full of tacked-on half-stories and nooks resembling a real-life version of The Burrow, home to the Weasley family in the Harry Potter series. Sewell turned another lot down Hagan Street into The Packing Plant, a home for arts efforts like WXNA-FM and Coop Gallery.
“ It’s these small-time places whose social capital subsidizes the developers,” Sewell tells the Scene in his kitchen. “ People want to be around things cooler than them, and artists are cooler than them. AJ seems to at least have an inkling of what they’re doing here. They pretend they’re adding to this arts ecosystem, but they want to create a new one — I mean, there are things with French names coming in. I think we can coexist because clearly there’s a mutually beneficial arrangement here, but is this even a neighborhood anymore? We have to figure it out together.”
Fifteen years ago, Sewell apologized to Moutenot for a few beer bottles left strewn around his house. Three years ago, Sewell spoke at a planning commission meeting encouraging AJ to do an archaeological survey across the street before starting excavation for a new project; Sewell quickly pulls up a picture of the AJ Capital rep staring at his phone during Sewell’s prepared remarks, seemingly ignoring him. The survey didn’t happen. While he can see them from his top-floor deck, Sewell hasn’t been invited to AJ Capital parties either — a simple gesture regularly extended even to neighbors you don’t like, Sewell says.
These small incidents of neighborly grace, or lack thereof, seem to impact Hutchins, Sewell and other longtime area residents just like the concrete inconveniences of parking or blasting. They also threaten to make or break ongoing neighborhood diplomacy between newcomers and their predecessors, the people who refashioned the neighborhood with a little money and a lot of effort. Along with, or maybe in spite of, a new Hermès store and the members-only Soho House, AJ Capital may not even know how badly it needs independent creative culture to credibly claim Wedgewood-Houston as an arts district.
The Scene spoke with a representative from AJ Capital in reporting this story, but AJ did not provide an on-the-record statement in time for publication.
