There is no town square in Brentwood, Tenn. There are no tourist attractions. In fact, a drive down the town’s main drag, Franklin Road, reveals almost nothing. Everything about Brentwood appears to be utterly unremarkable. There are the usual fern bars, the usual grocery stores, the usual churches and the usual banks. Incorporated only 26 years ago, Brentwood might very well be America at its blandest, a place where nothing happens, a place with no sense of itself.
On the side roads, however, the town’s collective ego begins to gear up. Along Concord Road and Wilson Pike, self-consciously ostentatious subdivisions proliferate. They have names like Twelve Oaks, Indian Pointe and Raintree Forest. The lawns are meticulously landscaped and the houses, jaw-droppingly huge brick affairs, are wedged shoulder to shoulder on precisely measured one-acre lots. It is in these subdivisions that most of Brentwood’s 16,400 residents live.
In Brentwood these days, you don’t find many guys like carpenter Bobby Stem, who grew up there and remembers driving a horse and buggy down Moores Lane. “I didn’ t grow up around Brentwood,” he chuckles. “Brentwood grew up around me.” Indeed, hardly anybody seems to have been born here, and more newcomers are arriving weekly.
The frames of new homes are lined up expectantly along ridge tops and alongside freshly dug roads. Huge trucks, like over-sized Tonka toys, move back and forth. Franklin Road was once lined with spacious farms, and traces of fenced-in pasture land still remain. But much of that land has already been sold, and more high-end housing is on the way. Driving from subdivision to subdivision in Brentwood is like being trapped on the right side of the tracks. There are no apartment complexes and no housing projects. There don’t even seem to be any modest, downscale neighborhoods. Such things don’t exist here. And how could they? In Brentwood, the average household income hovers at $76,000 a year—Tennessee’s statewide average, by comparison, is about $19,000 a year. The city positively, and intentionally, reeks of success and uneventfulness. It is the sort of place that outsiders often scorn and envy, both at once.
The people who live in these subdivisions “think the whole world is like Brentwood,” says Viva Bosland, who retired last fall after 10 years as principal at Scales Elementary School. “They are living in a glass dome. It’s a wonderful, beautiful community, but it’s kind of not real. I’m not sure what would happen if they took their fences down and let the real world in.”
Greg Grove, 39, is the publisher of The Children’s Book Review magazine. He moved to Brentwood from Los Angeles two years ago, and he loves the place. He and his family enjoy the community life in Brentwood, he says, because of the openness of the people and the safeness of the streets. They didn’t have either of those things when they lived in California. “After two years here, we’re more involved with our immediate neighbors than we ever were during the 12 years we lived in Los Angeles,” Grove says. In amazement he adds, “Our kids can play in the neighborhood.”
Grove praises Brentwood’s public schools, which his three children attend. He even argues that Brentwood schools are better than the private schools his children attended when they lived on the West Coast. More than anything, he says, what he likes most about Brentwood is that it does not have a “Southern feel.” The Groves had no reason to feel like outsiders. Greg Grove estimates that 90 percent of the people he meets are not from the South. Already, he has seen people move in and out of Brentwood as they climb up the ladder of success and relocate, say, to corporate headquarters in another city. “The people here have something of a transient nature,” Grove says. “People who move to Brentwood seem to relocate every few years.” Family names don’t mean much in Brentwood, but big houses certainly do. So do jobs. Many of the people who have settled into Brentwood are corporate executives, airline pilots, self-made people. Everybody seems to be a newcomer. Nobody seems to have the privilege of leaving anybody else out.
Real Southerners might easily scoff at Brentwood’s “small-town” pretensions. After all, the town has very little sense of its own history. Nobody is even sure where it got its name. Suzie Ahlberg, executive director of the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce, says there are “several theories” about the town name. “One of them comes from the idea that the trains coming up the hill had to stop here to break for wood. The most logical theory is that the first settlers combined the names of their homes back in Virginia—Woodstock and Brenton. Nobody knows for sure.”
Ironically, everything that makes a small town appealing seems to be missing in Brentwood. There is no historic town square with a century-old courthouse and a cafe where local farmers congregate to drink coffee and chew the fat on weekday mornings. There are no one-man barber shops with swirling candy-cane poles. There is none of the down-home flavor of distinctly “Southern” living. If you want that kind of thing, after all, you can just move on down to Franklin, where historic homes and Confederate memorials abound.
In Brentwood, the grocery stores are not mom-and-pop operations. The Kroger meat department stocks filet mignon, veal scallopini and plastic-wrapped lambchops. The walls of Brentwood’s only bicycle shop, Allanti Cycling Company, are lined with Trek mountain and road bikes, but they also carry Klein and Kestral, top-of-the-line, handmade bikes. At this level of craftsmanship, a bike frame alone can cost well over $1,000, but Allanti has no fear of keeping them in stock.
The money in Brentwood doesn’t have the mellow, musty aura of the money in Belle Meade; it’s first-generation money earned by hard labor and ingenuity. What’s more, it’s still being spent by the people who made it.
A lot of the time, too, it’s music money. The influx of recording companies and Nashville’s broadening involvement in the music industry have brought record company executives and stars to Music Row and to Brentwood’s side streets. By and large, Brentwood’s residents protect the privacy of Dolly Parton, Faith Hill, Alan Jackson, Martina McBride and the many other top-flight country singers who live in their midst. Some of this protectiveness, however, is mere self defense. Last summer Brentwood’s City Commission banned sightseeing buses that hold more than 28 passengers. No “Home of the Stars” tours for Brentwood. No gawking tourists. No souvenir shops.
Little Jimmy Dickens, a Grand Ole Opry mainstay, has made his home in Brentwood for over 30 years. He proudly insists that his house, with its wrought-iron gate adorned with musical notes, was the third house built in the Brentwood Hills area. Over the years, he’s found his neighbors cordial and pleasant, but they’re the kind of neighbors that many celebrities like. They cherish their privacy. “I’ve found the people in my neighborhood to be wonderful,” Dickens chirps contentedly. “Down here, we’re not social-function people.”
Mike Glenn is the pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church. At 39 he is tall and slender; his hair is a stark white. He does not wear the red polyester suits of the stereotypical Southern Baptist minister. Instead, he is casually dressed in black slacks, a matching turtleneck and a brown blazer. He looks like everybody else in Brentwood—nicely groomed, unfailingly well-mannered and upwardly mobile. He gives the impression that he is not just another evangelist; instead, he looks like one of God’s corporate consultants.
What’s more, Glenn is well aware of the entrepreneurial spirit of his congregation. On Sunday mornings he preaches to people who are travelling 100-miles-a-minute, making deals and running multimillion-dollar companies. They are people who have three cars in their three-car garages. They do not go to church to hear a bible-thumper rant hellfire and brimstone. Their needs, Glenn says, are “more subtle, more intangible” than those of other congregations.
“A lot of the people in our community have been there, done that,” says Glenn. “They have accomplished the goals they set out to accomplish. They’re at the position they hoped they would be in. Now they want to do something more than have a place at the beach and have nice cars.”
Many of the people in his congregation, he says, are important decision makers. Even on Sunday morning, they do not want to be wasting their time. What they want, he says, is recognition of their “gifts and opportunities” and the chance to use those resources “significantly.” Their main need, Glenn says, is to feel that their lives count for something, that they are important. Apparently, the big houses help.
The people moving into Brentwood’s new homes, built at a healthy rate of around 250 per year, are frequently moving from urban areas. They want streets their kids can play in; they want the protection of strict zoning and the unfamiliar sensation of what they can convince themselves is small-town feeling. They are willing to pay for these comforts. In this subdivision paradise, three-quarter-to-one-acre lots frequently sell for $100,000 or more. In Brentwood’s choicest neighborhoods, lots go for a quarter of a million dollars. It’s “a lot of money for a little piece of land,” admits Catherine Nichol, a realtor for Coldwell Banker. New home prices in some developing subdivisions range from $360,000 to $500,000. Older subdivisions, which are immediately identifiable by the older feel of their comfortable upper-middle-class houses, start out around $180,000 to $220,000, Nichol says.
Brentwood can command such prices because it promises just what the newcomers want: good schools and notoriously strict zoning. “We’ve got a standard we’re trying to maintain,” says former Brentwood planning commissioner Alex Noble. “Brentwood is trying to plot its course. We probably take it farther than some other communities do, and I think that Brentwood is pretty desirable to live in because of it. Some say we are trying to be too elitist. Well I’m not sure what that word means; we’re just trying to build a good community.”
Brentwood businessman David Watson has mixed feelings about Brentwood’s community standards. Watson owns 16 Sonic drive-in restaurants across Tennessee. He lives next door to the Brentwood Country Club. Still, he ran into trouble when he made plans to open Brentwood’s first Sonic. Brentwood’s zoning regulations demand that all commercial buildings have brick facades. Watson says the members of the Brentwood Planning Commission didn’t tell him he had to use brick to build his new Sonic, but he says they did “strongly suggest it.” According to Watson, he was told that, if he wanted his Brentwood Sonic to fly, he’d better brick it.
The cost of bricking the exterior of the building was significant, but David Watson’s tasteful white-brick Sonic opened on Franklin Road in March. Now Watson admits that he loves the look of the building so much that he’s bricking the Sonic he owns in Franklin. More brick Sonics will likely follow.
Allen Sullivan is less enthusiastic about his run-in with the Planning Commission: Sullivan insists that all he wanted was a place where his son’s wrestling team could practice. Sullivan had become concerned when overcrowding at Brentwood High School forced the school’s wrestling team out of the classrooms it was using for practice sessions. Early last summer, Sullivan met with other parents. Together, they resolved to finance the construction of a practice room, to be added onto the back of the high school.
Sullivan estimated that the cost of a one-room building with a concrete floor would be about $30,000. He went to a local bank and arranged for a personal line of credit so that construction could begin immediately.
Nevertheless, when Sullivan took his proposal to the Brentwood Planning Commission, he was astonished at the reception he was given. The city flatly refused to approve construction of the building unless it adhered to strict local planning codes. In short, it had to have a brick exterior.
There is lingering resentment in Sullivan’s voice when he recalls his first encounter with the Planning Commission. “They very much felt they didn’t want [the building].” Sullivan says. “Their role is to help out the community, not to set some ironclad rule that they won’t change. There is no need for a Planning Committee if they say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to give out any permits if the buildings aren’t bricked.’ ”
The Planning Commission told Sullivan that it would open itself to lawsuits from commercial developers if Sullivan was allowed to build an unbricked building. Members of the commission insisted that the building be bricked, at least on two of its three sides. Sullivan argued that he was not proposing to build a “commercial” building. In any case, he insisted, the new structure would only be seen by people who actually entered the school parking lot and drove around to the back of the building.
Members of the Planning Commission expressed its gratitude to the parents who wanted to build the building. Still, they refused to budge. Fuming parents were caught in a dilemma. They could either spend an additional $20,000, or they could give up the project altogether. The Brentwood High wrestling team moved into its new practice building this past December. Two sides of the room are tastefully bricked. The total cost of the building was $50,000.
If Brentwood’s self image makes life difficult for some of its own residents, the city’s isolationism has stirred up even more resentment in neighboring communities, particularly in the nearby county seat of Franklin. Brentwood has invested a lot of effort, time and money into creating the idyllic cocoon it calls home. Its citizens live, play and worship within the invisible borders of their world. So, if these people are just trying to raise their families in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where a kid can safely ride a bicycle down the street, how come they managed to piss off so many other Williamson County residents?
Choosing his words carefully, John Hancock, chairman of the Williamson County Commission, says, “I think people seem to love [Brentwood] or hate it. Williamson is a very diverse county; we go from one extreme to the other. Most of the people in Brentwood are new to Williamson County, and Brentwood is more of a boudoir community. Those demographics cause a wide diversity of lifestyle and aspiration, and therein lies the difference between Brentwood and Franklin, and the love-hate relationship.”
Many longtime Franklin residents roll their eyes when they hear talk of Brentwood’s “good community” standards. While the rest of Williamson County lives in the real world, they might say, Brentwood exists in a self-constructed cocoon. Historically, the two communities have wrangled over issues as disparate as apartment zoning (Brentwood doesn’t allow it) and school-crossing guards. The crossing-guard issue has yet to be resolved. In a dispute over whether the city of Brentowod or Williamson County should pay for school-crossing guards in Brentwood, the students have lost out thus far. None of the schools in Brentwood has a crossing guard.
When Hancock describes the animosity between the two cities, he is careful not to draw a line in the sand, probably because, right now, he’s doing his best to negotiate the fiercest battle ever between the two communities. Not surprisingly, the current controversy involves the children of the two cities. It is the dream of a new public high school that has given long-simmering tensions the chance to boil over.
Public schools in both Brentwood and Franklin are part of the Williamson County School System. No one denies that Brentwood High School is overcrowded. Centennial High School is being constructed in Franklin in order to house the overflow from Brentwood High, as well as students from Franklin and Page High Schools, which are in Franklin. Nevertheless, when Centennial opens its doors in August, it will have a population of about 800, in a facility constructed to accommodate 1,800 students. Centennial’s only problem is that it is being built within the Franklin city limits. When plans for the new school were made public, Brentwood parents took up arms and organized a citizens’ group that the “Yes for Nashville” campaign would envy. They fought the county school board vehemently—and effectively.
School Superintendent Rebecca Schwab held public meetings all over the county to get input on the Centennial controversy. From the beginning, however, Brentwood’s resistance was fierce. Parents said that, if their children were forced to attend a Franklin school, Brentwood property values would plummet. They insisted that, if they had wanted their children to go to school in Franklin they would have moved to Franklin in the first place. They argued that the zoning plan, as proposed, was unfair because it separated a few Brentwood students from their friends and classmates. Inevitably, many of the Brentwood arguments smacked of snobbery. Nevertheless, when the dispute finally came to a vote, the Brentwood parents got their way. In December, the school board voted 8-4 to exclude Brentwood subdivisions from zoning for Centennial High.
The action infuriated some members of the County Commission, among them Clyde Lynch. “A lot of the Brentwood people feel like they’re a little above the rest of the county,” says Lynch, a farmer who maintains that Brentwood residents act as if they should be considered separate from the rest of the county. “They feel like they’ve got their own little clique down there.”
Lynch now says that the Williamson County School Board “out-and-out lied” to the county commission, that they knew their responsibility was to build a high school that would draw students from all three of the county’s overcrowded high schools. The commission ordered the school board to reconsider that decision. Schwab was sent back to the drawing board. This time she was ordered to come up with a more equitable plan, one that would zone Brentwood students to Centennial without isolating just a few and separating them from their friends.
Again, public meetings were held. This time, Brentwood parents were even better prepared. They showed up by the hundreds at meetings. They wore stickers that screamed, “Community schools!” Again, they were effective. The school board voted in February to open Centennial without zoning any Brentwood students to it.
Bruised feelings notwithstanding, the issue might have died there, except for one problem; Brentwood High School really is overcrowded. Unless some alternative plan was offered, Brentwood city officials knew that, in less than two years, they would be faced with having to send students to Centennial. To prevent that eventuality, the City of Brentwood stepped in. Although city commissioners are not directly involved in the funding or administration of schools, they had indirectly supported the efforts to keep Brentwood students in Brentwood. Now they made an offer which some Brentwood parents deemed a brilliant strategical maneuver. Other people in the county considered it an indecent proposal.
The City of Brentwood offered to spend $1 million to build eight new classrooms for Brentwood High School, provided the school board would not zone any Brentwood students to Centennial High School. When the offer was made public, Clyde Lynch and other county commissioners went ballistic. Lynch asked publicly whether the county commissioners couldn’t just dissolve the school board and run things themselves.
“Of course what they are doing with that million dollars is trying to bribe [the school board],” Lynch says disgustedly. He is also convinced that Brentwood city officials are banking on the possibility that when another new high school is built in the next few years, it will be built on Brentwood turf. Lynch says they have another thing coming. “If the people in Brentwood think that the County Commission is going to approve $25 million to vote for another high school, I believe they’re going to learn a lesson,” Lynch says. “I believe that will never happen. It would be stupid to build a $25 million high school when you’ve got 1,800 students who can go somewhere else.”
Brentwood officials seemed genuinely baffled by the outcry that greeted their offer. Brentwood City Commissioner Bob Higgs says, “We don’t consider ourselves to be elitist. We offered to the school board to build eight additional classrooms that would solve their overcrowding problem. We’re just trying to solve a problem and trying to be part of the county. I can’t see where that’s elitist.” Higgs says the parents who live in Brentwood are caring, wonderful people who work hard and want to ensure a good life for themselves and for their children.
County Commission chairman Hancock says he is confident that Brentwood will finally settle its differences with the rest of the county because, ultimately, everybody in the county has the same goal: They all want good schools for their children. Ultimately, he suggests, this common goal will heal the rift between Franklin and Brentwood. Clyde Lynch is not so sure.
“What the school board is telling the students all over Williamson County is that, if you live in an affluent neighborhood and you’re well-off, you don’t have to follow the rules everybody else follows,” Lynch fumes. “To me that’s just as wrong as wrong can be. Because when [affluent youngsters] get off and get in life on their own, they are going to have to follow rules just like everybody else.”
In the parking lot behind Taco Bell in the Brentwood business strip known as Maryland Way, three high-school dropouts are taking a smoke break. All three wear identical uniforms, brightly colored golf shirts and matching caps imprinted with the Taco Bell logo.
Jason Beadnell, a wide-eyed, lanky 19-year-old, has lived in Brentwood for seven-and-a-half years. He says he moved to Tennessee from Ohio, where his family lived in a town almost identical to Brentwood. Like his two co-workers, Jason dropped out of Brentwood High School, but he has gone ahead and earned his GED. When Jason talks, he swings his arms idly. When he dropped out of Brentwood High, he says, he was making good grades. Academics was not the problem.
“Actually, the school isn’t that bad,” Jason says, his arms in constant motion. “It’s just that it’s a college school. They want everybody to go to college. They want everybody to go to college so they would push everybody into honors classes and all that stuff. They want everybody to go to college, get a good job and move back to Brentwood.”
Jason and his friends laugh at the idea of spending the rest of their lives in Brentwood. Greg Ford, 18, wears his long hair shaved high on the sides so that it forms a sort of wide Mohawk. He says there isn’t much to do in town. More than once, Greg says, he and his friends have been harassed by the local police.
Scott McKibber wears his dark-brown hair long; it hangs down well below his collar. If you don’t drive the best cars or wear the nice clothes, and especially if you have long hair, Scott says, you can expect to be pulled over in Brentwood. When it comes to social activities, Scott, Jason and Greg agree, the only thing to do is to leave town. Most of the time, they head for the strip in Franklin or the CoolSprings Galleria.
“You don’t want to be a teenager and grow up in Brentwood,” Jason says.
Scott grew up in Knoxville where, he says, he never got into trouble. Brentwood is different. In Brentwood, he has been called into juvenile court. That sort of thing, he says, never happened in Knoxville. If anybody makes even the slightest trouble in Brentwood, Scott insists, the town tries to get rid of them as quickly and as quietly as possible. “They want [the town] to be all good. They want one of those Beaver Cleaver family communities,” Scott snorts.
Between puffs, the three admit that Brentwood does have its share of “cool” people. They say that Brentwood High has the usual assortment of adolescent cliques. There’s a heavy-metal crowd, a long-hair crowd, a leather-wearing crowd, a hippy/druggy crowd, a preppy crowd, and a dork crowd. There is, however, little distinction between the haves and the have-nots. Scott says that there aren’t any “have-nots” in Brentwood. In Brentwood, he explains, the dividing line is between the “spoiled or non-spoiled.”
“We had to work for what we’ve got,” Jason says, glancing over his shoulder at his car, which is parked at the other end of the lot. “There’s a girl with a Mustang around here that has the license plate LUVUDAD. I mean, come on.”
Indeed, watching the afternoon traffic on Franklin Road at rush hour, you can learn a lot about Brentwood. This is a town where houses and front yards mean a lot, but it’s also a place where people define themselves by the vehicles that they park in their driveways and store away in their garages.
Around 5:30 on Brentwood’s main drag on a weekday afternoon, cars are coming into town, other cars are leaving. Every classy make and model can be found—Mercedes, Jags, Hummers, Integras and on and on. Because Brentwood is a family town, however, Cherokees seem to be the status vehicle of choice. All of the cars driving into Brentwood seem to be bright and shiny. A lot of the drivers are talking on cellular phones.
It seems that no one would dare drive through Brentwood in a car with a tied-on bumper or a tail light covered in electrical tape—that is, unless he is headed out of town at night.
