When Christy Frink moved to Nashville to attend Belmont, she and her best friend/roommate Morgan Levy immediately hit the town in search of points of interest. On a prowl through Printers Alley, they discovered the late, lamented Parco Cafe, where the friendly proprietor, Tsuo Chuan Fu, offered them bubble tea and began opening the restaurant early for the girls and their friends on Saturdays while she prepped the place for the dinner crowd. "We love those little things about Nashville," says Levy, 22. "That's what makes it a great place to live."
They managed to find the city's lesser-known kicks without a guide. But Frink never forgot the way the informative blog DCist.com helped the city come alive when she lived there for a semester by keeping abreast of happening goings-on.
"As soon as I found DCist, I started finding things I was interested in doing," Frink says. "It gave the city a lot of personality that it didn't have otherwise. We had kind of been complaining that Nashville didn't have something like that, so we both ended up unemployed at the same time and decided to start up Nashvillest.com."
The result is a distillation of the city's breaking news, freebies and events, glossed up with daily user-submitted photos. And it's a decidedly civic-minded affair that draws 1,000 hits a day and readers that range from 20-something college kids to stay-at-home moms looking for bargains, traffic jams and the occasional jab at John Rich.
Together, the duo set eyes on some 500 RSS feeds a day. So what have they learned about Nashville from their web traffic? People love free stuff. And beer. "Our most popular post—it still gets comments—was when we wrote about New Belgium Brewery bringing Fat Tire to Nashville," Levy says. "And that was six months ago."
Photographed at Bongo East by Eric England
