Back in 2013, when — like a week-old haircut — our It City-ness was still new but starting to itch a little, I wrote a Weekly Obsession column for the fondly remembered Nashville City Paper regarding the joys of sitting on The Hill at the Iroquois Steeplechase, Nashville's long-running outdoor party and also horse race. Like a low-rent local analog of newspapers reprinting "Yes, Virginia" during the Festive Period, this blog regularly re-posts "Keep Your New South, I'll Be on The Hill" some time in the week before the second Saturday in May.
Every year, it seems a little more on-the-nose and allegorical with its predictions about SUV-driving in-moving parvenus whittling away at the sanctity of the cheap tickets for Just Folks on the hillside next to the beau monde boxes full of the patriciate.
And it ended with a prediction, to wit:
The Hill gets smaller every year — they find more places to sell more expensive tickets than the $15 they get from us.The Hill gets squeezed.
But the Hill People were here before you — when it was just us and the boxes. And you can try to shrink us with your New South boosterism and your fresh entrepreneurial money and your It City enthusiasm.
You can keep it.
Give me the Hill People.
It seems the Steeplechase powers-that-be called the bluff on that particular molon labe. Came and took, they did, indeed. The 78th edition of the Iroquois Steeplechase will be without hillside seating. The $15 tickets of 2013 were $20 by last year's race, and now they've gone the way of the Royal Chase.
Now the cheapest ticket is a $75 infield access pass. The trade-off for paying a 375 percent mark-up on the get-in price is that holders of these tickets now get to slop around in what — even in Atacama-dry years — is a mess of frothy mud, while being aurally assaulted with "Old Town Road" and guys in Croakies sitting on Yeti coolers echoing one another's well-reasoned theses about how "Clay Travis makes some really good points."
Race committee chair Maryanne Byrd told Nashville treasure Mary Hance that it was just unfair to the regular people to cram them on the hillside (though, you know, there are worse things than having to sit next to people you don't know, enjoy spring weather in a beautiful setting and watch horses jump stuff).
"We thought it was inhospitable to say, 'You are the cheap people and you need to stay there,'" Byrd told Hance in the most convoluted attempt at noblesse oblige in history.
It's inhospitable to let people enjoy the races for a relatively affordable sum, but apparently it's the height of honor to tack on 55 bucks so they can wander the infield where you can't see anything or spread out a picnic blanket?
In an interview with WSMV, Byrd alluded to the need to expand the boxes, in place since the Works Progress Administration in the 1940s, because demand is far outstripping supply.
I've never sat in a box at the Steeplechase, and I'm certainly not in a position to do so until my forthcoming offensive-language heraldry podcast goes national. But exclusivity is sort of the point, isn't it? Boxholders are the exclusivist of the exclusive, Nashville's version of The 400 who could fit in The Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Not that I know any of them, but are these people really clamoring for their number to be expanded?
The Iroquois, which prides itself as one of Nashville's oldest traditions, is embracing one of the city's newest: bending over backward to cater to the arrivistes with little regard for those already here of every class and caste from the hoi polloi to the hoity-toity.
