So, stranger—what do you think of East Nashville? Is it an urban Valhalla? Dodge City? A progressive, free-thinking mecca for artists and musicians? Middle Tennessee’s Sodom and Gomorrah? Come on, now: if you’ve lived in this town even a couple of years, you know you’ve got an opinion.
What you may not know is how East Nashville feels about you.
Maybe East Nashvillians have heard one too many cracks about “living in the ’hood,” or maybe West Nashvillians just get sick of what they perceive as East Nashville’s hipper-than-thou attitude. Whatever the case, as East Nashvillian William Williams puts it, “We’ve got a healthy chip on our shoulders.”
There’s an intensity, even ferocity, to the feelings Nashville’s East Side engenders in both boosters and detractors that seems far greater than that of other Nashville neighborhoods. Spend some time in Five Points, and there’s a fair chance you’ll run across Christy Perkins, whose community pride has been indelibly inked onto the skin of her right wrist. Interlopers may be befuddled by the tattoo—ENFRK—but if you know Perkins at all, you won’t need a cryptologist to break the code: East Nashville FReaK.
“I don’t know that anybody would be as hardcore about East Nashville as I am, though I know a lot of people are pretty close,” says Perkins, propping up a broken foot in her Lockeland Springs apartment. She’s being modest: it would be hard to find anyone as fervent about any Nashville neighborhood. You don’t see people walking around with Belle Meade tats.
As strong as Perkins’ neighborhood pride is, though, it’s countered in some parts by an equal amount of fear, annoyance or outright contempt toward East Nashville from the other side of the Cumberland. One South Nashville Scene writer’s wife gets anxious every time she hears he’s going over the river. Another local writer and longtime Middle Tennessee resident, who just moved to Woodbine, was overheard last week listing his transitional neighborhood’s fine points—affordable houses, great eating. Then came the clincher: “And it doesn’t have the stink of ‘East Nashville.’ ”
Longtime residents on both sides of the river have heard all the old gripes. Chief among them is crime. East Nashville’s detractors go on about its high crime rates, while boosters claim that perception is exaggerated. On some level, they’re both right. But a new kind of irritation has started to take hold, especially now that East Nashville is booming as a hot spot for scene-making singles. Once considered too rough, now it’s just too…hip.
And with the proliferation of restaurants, bars and retail on the East Side over the last couple of years, residents don’t feel the need to cross the river as often, if at all. That only contributes to the rivalry.
“People in East Nashville are so caught up with defining themselves as being cool, being neighborhood people, people who like to take walks on their sidewalks, people that are open and friendly,” says a mortgage-company staffer in her 20s who lives in a downtown condo, and who did not want her name used. “But the thing is, there’s just as many people like that in West Nashville—it just hasn’t occurred to them to define themselves as being that way.
“In my mom’s neighborhood [Richland-West End],” she adds, “there’s all kinds of friendly people who walk around the sidewalks, with a drink after work or whatever, and visit their neighbors and walk their dogs. They just don’t feel the need to assert their coolness.”
East Nashville now is like the ugly, socially awkward kid in grade school who grows up to be a successful movie star, enjoying the adulation and living life in the fast lane. She’s got plenty of reasons to feel good about herself, yet her confident veneer hides underlying insecurities that haven’t been fully resolved.
West Nashville, on the other hand, is like the cool kid in high school who makes fun of the awkward kid, then grows up, settles down and has a family. She looks back at her former schoolmate with a mixture of scorn and contempt, refusing to acknowledge her own ennui, not to mention her envy of the former geek’s newfound success and bon vivant lifestyle.
Every few years, they meet up inescapably at the reunion. Small talk is difficult, but East Nashville always breaks the ice. “Enough about me,” East Nashville says, firing up another Gitane. “What do you think of me?”
Christy Perkins may be at one extreme end of the East Nashville devotion spectrum, but there are scores of others who aren’t far behind. When I left East Nashville in 2001 to move to the 12 South area, several neighbor folks gave me hell for becoming a “Westie.” It was good-natured ribbing, but when one of them—a server at the former Radio Café—brought me my breakfast and said, “Here’s your eggs Benedict Arnold,” I sensed something a little deeper.
When I moved back to the East Side five years later, I attended a Christmas soiree on Russell Street. Once the neighbors found out I’d returned, I was greeted with high-fives and shouts of “I knew you’d come back!” or “Dude, welcome back to the ’hood!” It was as if I’d shown up at a Pentecostal church and testified that I’d returned to Christ.
Sure, Belmont, Hillsboro Village and Sylvan Park are all close-knit communities—enclaves where residents form neighborhood organizations, unite to fight zoning issues, and host block parties where they can revel in how lucky they are to live in what is undeniably the (hippest/richest/prettiest/most diverse/least diverse) area in the city. Some, like Whitland and Cherokee Park, are stable and firmly entrenched, while others (Woodland in Waverly, 12 South) have cycled through various levels of neglect and rebirth.
But only East Nashville has newly arrived as a destination—a place where diners can walk from clubs to restaurants to grocery stores without leaving a residential neighborhood, where timid hipsters from west of the river can pretend that they’re taking a walk on the wild side. Residents have mixed feelings about this, as they do about most everything.
Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects of the area’s renaissance is that—along with an exceptionally strong sense of community—East Nashville has developed an equally strong testiness and defensiveness about the way it’s regarded. Despite, or perhaps because of, East Nashville’s arrival as a desirable place to live, the two sides of the Cumberland still seem to rub each other the wrong way.
Inherent in any discussion of East Nashville or West Nashville is the thorny issue of what the terms even mean. An informal survey of Scene employees asking them to define “West Nashville” resulted in more confusion than did The Sopranos’ finale. Responses included: “the area between I-40 and 21st/Hillsboro,” “a nice and safe area between Murphy Road and White Bridge Road,” “37205, 37215, Belle Meade, Green Hills, Hillwood—not Bellevue or Brentwood” or conversely “I think of West Meade/Bellevue.” The 15 or so responses provided zero consensus about West Nashville, other than establishing that East Nashville is not a part of it.
To be sure, there are varying definitions of East Nashville too. When William Williams, a City Paper columnist, got wind of this story, he said, “I hope you don’t refer to East Nashville as a neighborhood.” After a brief pause, he continued, carefully enunciating for emphasis—call it the Al Gore professorial tone—“I consider it a geographic region that’s comprised of many specific neighborhoods. A neighborhood is Sylvan Park. West Nashville is a geographical region in which Sylvan Park rests.”
Topographically, Williams is right. There is a geographic region often referred to as East Nashville, in part because it is the area covered by the Metro Police Department’s East Precinct. The territory covers about 20 square miles, bounded by the Cumberland River on the south and east, I-65 on the west and Briley Parkway on the north. Yes, that region comprises many neighborhoods, among them Edgefield, East End, Lockeland Springs, Maxwell Neighbors, Cleveland Park, Inglewood, Eastwood Neighbors and Brush Hill. And let’s not forget East Nashville’s redheaded stepchild, Gallatin Road.
But when many Nashvillians use the term “East Nashville,” especially younger scenesters, they mean a neighborhood: that area centered by Five Points, at the intersection of Woodland and 11th streets. Depending on who’s doing the describing, that East Nashville radiates out anywhere from 10 to 30 blocks in every direction, and it includes parts or all of several of the aforementioned neighborhoods. Some real-estate agents might include or exclude Inglewood, depending on whether they are trying to sell a property on either its hip factor or its suburb-like safety.
This region/neighborhood duality exacerbates one of the primary issues at the core of East Nashville’s chip on its shoulder and West Nashville’s disdain for its easterly neighbor—perceived crime rates. But matters such as property values and retail, or the lack thereof, also factor into the bragging and slagging rights. For those who innocently tread upon one of these sore spots, the backlash can be bewildering.
Food, in particular, has become an issue as touchy as sports-team loyalty. Not long ago, a 12 South resident made the trek across the river to Marché Artisan Foods, one of East Nashville’s hottest dining spots. It is the domain of Margot McCormack, the chef responsible for much of East Nashville’s current cachet as a dining destination.
“Margot was showing us some stuff in the [display cases],” says the man, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “So we tell her, ‘We know of this property on 12 South that we think would make the perfect location for Margot west.’ Her facial expression soured and she said, ‘Why don’t you try and stir up interest in your own neighborhood.’ End of conversation.”
The 12 Souther retreated across the river feeling castigated—and by one of his favorite chefs, no less. “I meant it to be flattering,” he says. His tone makes clear that, even a few months later, there’s still a bitter taste in his mouth. And it’s not arugula.
McCormack recalls the incident, readily admitting that she probably said it. But she insists she wasn’t trying to be mean. “The thing that I think he misunderstood, and I’m kind of passionate about this, is that I think each neighborhood should have its own character,” she says, reiterating that she cherishes customers from all over the city and credits them with her success. “I get people asking me all the time, come back to West Nashville, come to Belle Meade, come to Green Hills.
“I feel strongly about where I am,” she continues, and it’s clear that she’s had to answer the same question dozens of times. “I would never go to another neighborhood. Why do you want me to be in every neighborhood in Nashville? Find someone who wants to be in that neighborhood to foster that vibe. I can’t be everywhere. I don’t think we have people going to 12 South saying, ‘You need to come over here.’ It’s an interesting dichotomy between the two neighborhoods.”
Last year, food critic Kay West pushed East Nashville’s buttons when she wrote a negative review of Five Points restaurant Batter’d and Fried. “The East Nashville listserv went insane,” West says. Her surname alone seemed to indicate the fix was in. “They could not attack me viciously enough—to the point of vulgarity,” she recalls. “I was astounded at what babies these people were. They just went off on me, and assumed all kinds of things about me personally, for a damn review I wrote. I was the Wicked Witch of the West.”
One listserv post parodies the ubiquitous MasterCard commercials to take a swipe at West: “Cocktails, $5. Grilled Chicken Salad, $11.99…. Telling Kay West to kiss my ass…PRICELESS.” After signing her name, the author of that post listed her location as “Historic Edgefield,” which says it all.
“Finally,” West says, “Matt Charette, who owns [Batter’d and Fried], came on [the listserv] himself, and just said, ‘Chill. This is ridiculous. She did her job, and she didn’t personally attack me. I’m addressing her concerns.’ He reacted more maturely than anybody. And he was grateful for the criticism. Within six months he revised the menu, and the restaurant was better for it.” Former Metro Council member Jeff Ockerman, a longtime East Nashville booster, also came to her defense.
Making matters worse, West was scheduled to be a judge at the East Nashville Tomato Festival the following week. “I was nervous,” says West, who in fact lived in East Nashville in the late 1980s and early ’90s before leaving due to the dismal public school situation at the time. “I didn’t know if someone was going to come up and slap me, or throw a tomato at me, or publicly curse me out. It was so ridiculous and mean-spirited.”
Would the review have stirred up this reaction if the restaurant were somewhere else? West suspects not. “I think if that were to happen in 12 South, people might defend the restaurant,” she says, “but I don’t know that they would attack the messenger.”
Of course people in most neighborhoods think their part of town is special. Yes, 12 South is different than Whitland, Belle Meade is different than Sylvan Park, Woodbine is different than Hillsboro Village. But ultimately, they all feel like…well…Southern residential neighborhoods. There’s no mistaking that you’re in Nashville. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But if those neighborhoods are somewhat different from each other, East Nashville is exponentially different from all of them. With its sidewalks, houses closely packed together, bars and restaurants within walking distance, and cultural diversity, it feels more like an East Coast neighborhood, a phenomenon borne out by the residents East Nashville attracts.
“My perception is that the East Nashvillians who aren’t originally from the neighborhood moved here from other cities, not other parts of Nashville, more often than not,” says longtime East Nashville resident Christine Kreyling. Kreyling, a freelance writer and frequent Scene contributor, says that most people who grew up on the West Side “still feel that you don’t live in East Nashville. You may go to Margot for dinner. But there is still that mental block.”
William Williams agrees. “There’s still a percentage of not just West Siders, but people from the other parts of the city who are either scared of East Nashville or misinformed,” Williams says. “Some of it is that, when you get off the interstate or cross the river, there’s a gauntlet, if you will. If you come off the Shelby exit, it’s Shelby Heights, the Cayce projects. And then there’s Main Street. There’s that rough-and-tumble urban street roughness that [people from other parts of Nashville] just can’t get over.”
Sure enough, if you ask around East End, Lockeland Springs, Edgefield or any of the neighborhoods that have experienced the great East Nashville migration of the last decade, you’ll find that most of the residents who aren’t lifelong East Nashvillians are originally from other cities—larger ones such as New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.—not from the other side of town.
Kreyling and her husband moved to East Nashville from New Orleans. Christy Perkins, who owned the defunct East Side vintage clothing store Nitwit and is preparing to launch iameastnashville.com (a website featuring East-centric T-shirts, stickers and the like), lived in Birmingham, New Orleans, Los Angeles and New York before winding up there. And though she grew up in West Nashville, Margot McCormack—co-owner and chef at both Marché and Margot Café—spent 10 years in New York City before landing there.
“After coming back from New York City,” McCormack says, “I definitely didn’t want to be in a strip mall, or near a mall, a very popular thing to do in the South. The other thing was affordability. If I was going to pay the kind of rent I’d have to pay at a place like F. Scott’s, I might as well stay in New York and open a restaurant there.”
Like New York City’s hottest ’hood, Williamsburg, East Nashville lies just across a river to the east of downtown. Both neighborhoods have become hotbeds for their respective music scenes—Williamsburg has the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Interpol, TV on the Radio, Nada Surf and Les Savy Fav, while East Nashville has Falls City Angels, Carter Administration, Hands Down Eugene, Ole Mossy Face, Todd Snider, Alcohol Stuntband, Amelia White and, as of recently, How I Became the Bomb. And most of all, both are riding that seemingly unstoppable trajectory from blight to bohemia to BMWs.
Nowhere is the cosmopolitan vibe of the new East Nashville more evident than at Marché’s weekend brunch. On a recent Saturday morning, eight überhipsters—including one young lad in an ascot who looks like he just stumbled off Jay Gatsby’s couch—are sitting at a pair of tables pushed together, a Nylon magazine ad come to life. Two stylishly dressed twentysomething women, one white and one black, sip champagne drinks interspersed with gulps of Marché’s coffee, a bewitching brew strong enough to dissolve titanium.
Marché is considered trendy by some, and given the throngs who flock there—not to mention a revolving menu that features phrases such as “with artichoke mint pesto”—it’s understandable. But “trendy” implies faddish and superficial, and as the throngs of Nashvillians who eat there regularly can attest, Marché may be the most consistent breakfast/lunch/brunch spot in town. Five bucks will buy you a killer BLT. The omelets are excellent, the desserts worth the trip from Bellevue all by themselves.
The restaurant, flooded by natural light, hums with energy. The clientele offers a heady mix of the young and beautiful, art punks with their hair in their faces, well-heeled middle-aged couples and mom-and-baby foursomes. Weekend brunch can be an hour wait. One patron eyes the lengthy waiting list, then glances at the high-end jams, olives, pastas and condiments that line the farm-style bookshelves and cupboards. He sighs to his girlfriend, “It’s the yuppie Cracker Barrel.” A woman from Bellevue peruses the crowd, then looks at her friend and says, “I’m not cool enough to live in East Nashville.”
The view through Marché’s full-length windows, however, is anything but yuppified. It looks onto Hunters Custom Automotive, catty-corner to the bustling eatery. In Hunters’ parking lot sit two Hummers, one silver and one black, along with six or seven pickups ranging from big to ridiculous. Hunters provides rims, nerf bars, spoilers and whatever else you need to pimp your ride—one of the few places where the worlds of monster-truck rednecks and bass-bumpin’ homeboys intersect. And you can take it all in while savoring your marinated chickpea salad—a surreal juxtaposition that is uniquely East Nashville.
Soon after opening the restaurant, McCormack and her partner Heather moved to the East Side. She says East Nashville is friendlier to the gay and lesbian community. “I mean there’s a certain vibe, a certain relaxed freedom over here,” she says, though she’s quick to add that she’s never been a victim of any real discrimination anywhere in Nashville. What really drew McCormack east is just the community vibe, something she says can’t be found in West Meade, where she grew up.
“It’s a palpable difference,” she says, “and not just the demographics. [In West Meade] there are acre lots, 3,000-square-foot homes and you’re very much in your own little bubble. You don’t see as many people out walking their dogs, there’s not a neighborhood store or coffee shop where everyone convenes on Saturday or Sunday morning.”
Bil Breyer moved to East Nashville in 2000 because it reminded him of burgeoning neighborhoods in his hometown, Washington, D.C. He opened Alegria Gifts on 16th Street in 2003. The store is just five buildings away from his house, providing him with an exceptional perk. “If you ring the bell here, it rings at my house,” he says. “I can see you [on a camera mounted outside the store] and say, ‘I’ll be right there.’ So I don’t have to be here all the time. And I open the store at all hours.”
For Breyer, the sense of community is just as strong among merchants as it is among residents. “We’re all so close,” he says. “We discuss what we’re going to sell. We try not to cross over each other. And if we do, we make joint orders to keep the costs down. The more the merrier. It’s going to be better for everybody if there are more places to go.”
“It’s a village in the truest sense to me,” Perkins says, her intensity rising. “I’ve never found anything that’s quite like here. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
In many ways, Christy Perkins personifies East Nashville—arty, edgy, eccentric and a bit of a paradox. On one hand, the slender, blond 34-year-old might be mistaken for an idealistic beatnik. Her ENFRK tattoo was designed by her iameastnashville.com business partner, artist Lisa Cornwell-Collins, who goes by the handle “Five Points Muse.” A long tattooed quote from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl—“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo”—snakes around her upper right arm and shoulder, with images of Ginsberg and William Blake below. “This sums up my life up so far,” she says with a laugh.
But ask her about the gun debate that crops up intermittently on the East Nashville listservs, and she quickly parts ways with the peaceniks. “There’s a lot of those bleeding-heart liberals that go, ‘No more hand guns,’ ” Perkins says. “But the criminals are still going to have them. I think people should have the right to defend themselves in their own homes.”
Crime drove Perkins out of East Nashville once. She and her musician ex-husband Jeffrey settled on Ordway, the same street where she currently lives, in 1997. But they only stayed about a year-and-a-half. The last straw was a violent domestic disturbance almost on her doorstep. “I was nine months pregnant, and broke my foot running for the phone to call 911 because I thought someone was getting killed behind my house,” she recalls. “They didn’t die, but they came real close. There was blood everywhere. It was a domestic thing.” She pauses, then notes the irony: “And here I am with a broken foot again.”
For Perkins, and for many of the new-guard East Nashvillians of that time, the issues of crime and parenthood met head-on. “One of the reasons we thought we had to leave was the kid thing,” she says. “I was a stay-at-home mom and people we’re getting shot on our street. And I was like, ‘OK, I can’t be here by myself.’ At the time, I would never have in a million years taken [my daughter] for a walk in the stroller.”
But crime is just a part of city life, Perkins says. After she moved to tony Love Circle, her house got burglarized. By that time, the challenging aftermath of the 1998 tornado had galvanized East Nashville and given rise to neighborhood organizations that were now addressing, among other things, crime. She moved back in 2001. Perkins felt better about East Nashville’s suitability for child-rearing, a trend that she feels has continued to improve over time. “Now you walk out and there’s people on bikes, people pushing strollers,” she says.
Yet for those outside East Nashville, the area has a lingering, almost irrational reputation as a lawless snakepit that far exceeds its actual crime rate. One 20-something East Nashvillian who works for a Brentwood investment firm says her West Nashville co-workers are convinced the East Side is crackhead central.
“They’ll ask if there’s a Target where I live,” she says. “When I tell them I don’t really want a Target, they say, ‘If they built a Target, there’d be less crackhouses.’ ”
Of all the issues that irk East Nashvillians, none remains more infuriating and polarizing than crime. In part, that’s because East Siders are sensitive to what they consider a double standard. When a local newscast covers a murder on Dickerson Road or in Shelby’s rough James A. Cayce Homes—both under the purview of the East Precinct—it’s not uncommon to hear a reporter sign off with something like, “Reporting live from East Nashville, this is [insert name here].”
Let a drug deal go sour in a high-activity West Nashville area, though—such as the housing projects along 12th Avenue South around Edgehill—and you’re not likely to hear someone sign off from “Belmont” or even “12 South.” Nor are you likely to hear “Sylvan Park” at the end of a report about violence in one of the gritty neighborhoods north of Charlotte Avenue. Yet the distances between these crime scenes and neighborhoods are much closer than the distance between Dickerson Road and the great majority of East Nashville residents.
But East Nashvillians have their own double standard. Publicly—as in conversation with West Nashvillians—they pooh-pooh the Westies’ phobias about burglaries and break-ins, which are just as common (if not more so) on their side of the river. Privately—among themselves, on home soil—they obsess over petty crimes like that perpetual bane of East Side existence, lawn mower theft.
A hub for these concerns is the East Nashville Crime listserv, tended by longtime East Nashvillian Bob Acuff. Acuff, who owns Jaguar repair shop Classic Auto Works on Main Street, is never far from his police scanner. On any given day, he typically sends out one or more emails (featuring “EN Crime” in the subject line) reporting all of the activity he’s overheard from the East Precinct—everything from shootings to missing children. Other subscribers (there are over 700) chime in regularly, reporting any suspicious activities.
The EN Crime listserv is a prime example of East Nashville’s proactive approach to neighborhood involvement. When Earnest Fred Brown, a notorious East Nashville figure with a long criminal record, was released from prison after serving three years for theft, burglary and assault, the listserv was on him like Larry King on Paris Hilton. Fast Fred, as he’s known, had a habit of stealing from his neighbors, so his release generated quite a buzz among EN Crime subscribers. (Brown was also identified as a person of interest, though never a suspect, in the Tabitha Tuders disappearance.)
“That’s the thing about the listserv,” Acuff says. “Neighbors will [post], ‘I saw Fast Fred this morning. He was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt. He left the house. An hour later, he returned and had a string trimmer. He walked to Little Rick’s market, he walked out and now he’s carrying a 40.’ ”
“The guy doesn’t need a GPS locater on him,” adds Bob Borzak, a fixture at East Nashville’s weekly crime meetings, which police credit with having a noticeable impact on crime rates. “Everybody knows where he is now.”
Yet even some East Nashvillians harbor degrees of suspicion about each other’s neighborhoods. On the East Side—as with the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, or the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq—the hostilities are often greatest between those who have the most in common. Last month, a debate over new bars in Inglewood prompted resident and former Metro school board member Kay Brooks to fire off a missive on the Inglewood listserv.
“Let’s start with the fact that I don’t live in ‘the ’hood,’ ” Brooks wrote. “We have one of the safer neighborhood’s [sic] in Nashville—do you seriously think we will maintain that with more bars and adult businesses? Have you seen the posts to the East Nashville Crime List? I don’t want that to happen in Inglewood.”
Her comment was reposted on a larger East Nashville listserv, prompting a flurry of reprisals. “I wasn’t aware we have such a bad reputation,” one writer said, “nor that we’re all that far from Inglewood and that they just don’t have any crime....sigh.” Another chimed in, “We tend to be protective of our part of East Nashville. For folks further out, caution when pointing fingers and characterizing what works and what doesn’t.” Another response put it more bluntly: “Them’s fightin’ words.”
So where does the truth lie? According to Robert Nash, the commander of Nashville’s East Precinct, crime has been going down all over Nashville in recent years, especially in East Nashville. Three years ago, East was precinct of the year and had the largest drop in crime of any Nashville precinct.
“Most of the area east of Gallatin Road has more suburban crime patterns,” says Nash. “It’s not crime-free, but I would equate it to suburban-type patterns. The stretch between the Ellington Parkway and Dickerson Pike up to Trinity Lane or Hart Lane is more of an urban pattern.
“Where you have higher concentrations of people, you have higher concentrations of crimes,” Nash continues. “The lower Dickerson Road area, although getting better, continues to be challenging. We’ve got several long-entrenched open-air drug markets—in and around Cayce Homes, North Second and Hancock, 14th and Straightway. McFerrin Park and Cleveland Park are getting better.” If you’re not buying drugs, dealing drugs or hanging out with drug dealers, the commander says, with dry humor, “you are increasing your safety quotient tremendously.”
But do East Nashvillians want it both ways? On the one hand, West Siders say, they’ll argue that crime isn’t significantly worse in East Nashville than it is in other neighborhoods. Then they’ll brag about how tough they are for “livin’ in the hood,” adorning their cars with bumper stickers that read, “32706: We’ll steal your heart and your lawnmower!” or wearing T-shirts that say, “East Nashville Gun Club.” As one person put it, “Y’all can joke about it, but when someone else says something about the crime, you’re all up in arms.”
Even so, you can find East Nashvillians who, er, shoot pretty straight when it comes to their neighborhood. One is stand-up comedian Chris Crofton, frontman for the Alcohol Stuntband, who riffs affectionately on his own slice of East Side heaven. Asked about East Nashville’s “neighborhood vibe,” Crofton replies, “It depends who your neighbors are. When your neighbor from across the street comes over to your house to try to mow your lawn because they need money for drugs—I’m not talking about some guy wandering down your street, but your actual neighbor—and you’ve already explained to him that you have a lawn mower, and the atmosphere on your front lawn turns into the atmosphere you might find in the parking lot of a convenience store when someone’s trying to get $40 for gas ‘to go to Goodlettsville,’ that’s a little weird.”
Evidently one of his neighbors also swiped his rose-colored glasses. “It’s part arts community, mostly auto body shops,” Crofton says of East Nashville. “There’s this little zone where you can feel totally a part of something cool, but a stone’s throw away, it’s Gallatin Road. There’s still 150 ‘we tote the note’ car dealerships to every one pottery studio in East Nashville. And just because you’re safe in your pottery studio doesn’t mean that at any moment someone isn’t going to kick in the wall and ask for your wallet.”
Does that mean Crofton wants to live elsewhere? Not at all. “If you’re over 30 and you’re not planning on having a baby anytime soon,” he says, “you’ll feel more comfortable in East Nashville than you would, for instance, in the baby greenhouse that’s known as 12 South. I just wish they’d move Springwater over here.”
If Chris Crofton, like scores of other musicians, artists and creative people, had wanted to live in a place with a more rural or suburban feel, he could have found a cozy nook in any of a dozen communities on the other side of the river. But he didn’t. He, and they—and I—chose an ever-shifting area where the noise and bustle of city life is a short walk away. Where the streets are narrow and the possibilities are wide. Where the occasional missing lawn mower is a small price for being part of a vibrant urban organism like nothing else in the city.
Will the wary mutual regard between East and West Nashville ever go away? Maybe not. But maybe that will help both sides of the river hang onto what is becoming a precious commodity: the individual identity of a single neighborhood, be it East Side or West Side. The question comes up all the time, as East Nashville’s first wave of urban pioneers is joined, inevitably, by a less adventuresome second wave.
“Christy [Perkins] and I have talked about this,” William Williams says. “ ‘We’ as the ‘cool’ people, the bohemians, the artists, we get upset, and Christy particularly so, when the more mainstream yuppies come in. But consider this: 10 or 15 years ago, when the non-mainstream, the bohemians and the cool people came in, what about the working-class black and white people who said, ‘We don’t want them.’ Why was it OK for us to come in, and maybe displace the mainstream, old-school, fifth-generation, working-class black and white East Nashvillians, but now it’s not OK for the new, upscale yuppies to come in? I think we’re a little hypocritical, is what I’m trying to say.”
“I love it that [East Nashville] inspires such loyalty,” says Perkins. “I’m weird about it. My family thinks I’m crazy. They know I won’t leave, that I hope to die here, as long as things stay relatively the same. I told somebody recently that I think of Five Points as the family living room, the gathering site. It comes right after family, as far as my loyalties go.”
Christine Kreyling is equally adamant. “I would never live anywhere else,” she says. “Never. Not if I stay in Nashville. I don’t think [East Nashville] is better, it’s just mine...you know? I just get it.”
And best of all, according to Chris Crofton, “If you get too drunk to drive, you can ride a stray dog home from the bar.”
