Battle of Nashville historical marker
Let’s start this column with a bunch of disclosures, so you know where I’m coming from when I talk about this plan to move the Metro Historic Zoning Commission and the Metro Historical Commission and put them under Planning. I served on the board of Historic Nashville Inc. during COVID. It’s a nonprofit devoted to historic preservation, and unless you’re a member, you probably best know them for their annual announcement of the Nashville Nine. They also have a historic easement program, which, frankly, I was never smart enough to understand entirely — but basically, it seems like historic building owners can opt into the program, and then HNI tells them they can’t have glow-in-the-dark shutters on said building, because they aren’t period-appropriate. HNI is an independent group, but they work closely with the Metro Historical Commission on efforts to preserve Nashville’s history.
I also have contacted Caroline Eller at the Metro Historical Commission by my estimate, just this month alone, probably 700,000 times about things ranging from, “Do you think this weird rock could be a grave marker?” to, “Did I do my slides for the Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture correctly?” to, “My mom and I saw this other weird rock behind a fence — do you think it could be a grave marker?” I ask her a lot of questions about Davidson County cemeteries, because she knows the most in the whole city about Davidson County cemeteries.
I attend the aforementioned Nashville Conference on African American History and Culture almost every year, and this year I was invited to speak at it. And it was amazing. And I can’t think too much about it or I get weepy. It’s co-sponsored by the Metro Historical Commission.
The Metro Historical Commission has been deeply involved with preservation efforts at Fort Negley (a space near and dear to my heart). And they have been instrumental in locating and preserving local cemeteries.
One of the weird rocks in question
From my perspective, they are easy to get a hold of, very responsive and very helpful. So imagine my surprise when I learned that they’re apparently ruining the city and single-handedly running up housing costs, and so they need to be brought to heel by being moved under Planning. You’d think having a bunch of housing stock being taken out of circulation because it’s being used as short-term rentals might be more responsible for that, but who knows?
But The Tennessean story mentions an independent audit,* so I asked Historical to send it to me so that I could read of their dastardly deeds. They did. (Read it here.)
And, y’all, I read it. I wish I hadn’t, because now I’m having about five existential crises. This report is so bad. Like, it makes me question why I even bothered to learn how to write. Because apparently you don’t need to actually be able to put down your ideas in a coherent way that is persuasive and makes sense in order to upend a whole city department. Why did I even bother to go to college? Why have I spent the past nearly 20 years writing for the Scene? Apparently I could have just swigged a bottle of NyQuil, dropped out of eighth grade, and gotten a job at HDR Brentwood writing reports.
Except! Except, then I go and look into the named authors of the report — Mike Brink, Stephanie McCullough and Haleigh Tieken — and they are all fine writers. Everything else I could find that they’ve written is clear and informative. If you looked at all their other writings side by side with this, you would never guess that they wrote this. What is even going on? Brink. McCullough. Tieken. Have your identities been stolen? Is someone holding you hostage and making you put commas everywhere? Blink three times if you need rescuing. Are you OK? That’s existential crisis one.
Two, why would anyone in this city who read this report take it to mean anything? Are we just regularly handing the Metro Council incoherent piles of crap and asking them to make decisions based on it? And my God, are they doing it?
Three, who is paying for this report? Are my tax dollars going to paying for this report? I want a refund. Unless we’re paying for the report in order to ransom Brink, McCullough and Tieken from whoever has them captive. I support that.
Also included in Historic Nashville Inc.'s list of endangered properties are Belle Meade Theater, Merritt Mansion and small music venues
Four, am I wrong about AI? Sure, it’s an existential threat to everything I love, but do I think that ChatGPT would put “they are sometimes perceived as an obstacle to growth” or “they are frustrated by losses” or “they feel organizationally isolated” under the heading of “Historic’s Justifications"? No, no I don’t. Fine, let the robots have report writing. I give up.
Five, Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια? And if we can’t come to a common consensus about what is truth and how to find it ... I mean ... this is the kind of question that is supposed to haunt you late at night in college after you’ve smoked too much ditch weed or while you’re contemplating putting a god to death. It’s not supposed to come out of a bureaucratic report.
But fundamentally, this is the crisis at the heart of this report. Are the things in the report true? Sometimes I had that question about the claims that were being made, the problems that ostensibly would be solved by moving Historic. Other times I had that question about basic facts in the report.
Take, for instance, the following claims in the report about how Historic is making life difficult for the businesses downtown: “They mandate that everyone’s neon signs must be the same size and of the same character.” Is this true? When I look with my own eyeballs at Lower Broad, I don’t see a lot of signs that look like each other. But an informative report would have, you know, reported whether this was true. Maybe it would have provided some pictures of neon signs that the owners felt were forced to be too similar to other neon signs so that we could judge if the sign owners were being forced into an unreasonable conformity.
Then there’s this claim: “For example, the new sign permit process, [sic on the comma there] requires that notice be sent to every neighbor within every 250 feet. The process is unwieldy and time-intensive, taking up to six to nine months.” Is this true? How “new” is this sign permit process that people know if it takes six to nine months? It seems like it would be easy enough to investigate and find out how long the process actually takes and whether the hold-up is in Historic. Because it sure would suck to move Historic under Planning only to find out that there is some other issue causing the delays.
Or this: “People have reached the point of frustration with Historic that they have demolished buildings that could have otherwise been preserved.” Is this true? Which buildings? What were the frustrations?
I could go on, but it’s more of the same. The report states a claim that a critic of Historic makes and then moves on. I guess we’re just supposed to take the report at face value that what’s written in it is true.
Which brings me to the second, more fundamental problem. Because there are no specific examples, no analysis of the veracity of these claims, we have to rely on the judgment of the people who wrote the report. But there are so many red flags aside from the lack of specific examples that suggest that the people who wrote the report don’t understand the department they’re reporting on.
First, they interviewed just 23 people — five of them currently associated with Historic, four of them firefighters, two of them in Planning (the department they might be turned over to), and none who currently live in a neighborhood with a historic overlay. Wouldn’t you want to interview everyone who works for Historic, to try to figure out what the problem is? They might have learned that the list of staff positions included in the report isn’t accurate. The Davidson County historian isn’t a staff member of Historic. He or she maybe should be, but right now that’s an honorary position that some knowledgeable person who can afford to work for free accepts. You think Carole Bucy has been an awesome Davidson County historian? (The answer is yes.) Consider that she’s done all that she has out of the goodness of her heart. That’s fucked-up. But that’s neither here nor there in this discussion, except as an indication that the report writers seemingly didn’t try too hard to understand the department. One of the possibilities for “fixing” Historic in the report is that they should hire an architect. They have at least one architect on staff that I know of, and I’m pretty sure a number of folks have architectural backgrounds. How did the report writers not know this?
I could go on, but I’m not Jon Krakauer over here.
Here’s the thing. Any historic overlay is something the people within that overlay have asked for. If the bar owners on Lower Broad don’t like the overlay and don’t find it useful anymore, they could take the necessary steps to dissolve it. If residents living in a neighborhood with a historic overlay find it burdensome, they can move to dissolve it. Granted, it would be harder to get the consensus necessary to dissolve a neighborhood overlay, but downtown? It seems like they all want things to be different, so let’s just do away with the historic overlay downtown. I don’t understand why that’s not the move here. Seems quicker and less contentious.
All right. Now we have to get into gossip. After the Tennessean story hit, I started hearing from people who were upset, and the first thing they said was, “She finally got him” — meaning that the ordinance’s sponsor, Councilmember Emily Benedict, had found a way to get rid of Tim Walker, the executive director of Metro Historical. Oh? Do they have some personal vendetta against each other? Does Tim Walker get drunk and dress up like Jesse Benton and have his staff stuff his enemies into trees? Was Benedict one of the tree-stuffing victims?
Dear readers, I’m always ready for petty fights with historical drama. But when I pressed for details, no one seemed to know the source of a beef. I reached out to Benedict and Walker, and neither indicated they had any issues with the other. I asked the mayor’s office, and they also said they had no idea of any beef. Well, technically, Alex Apple said, “That is not our understanding of CM Benedict's interest, and it is certainly not our position.”
And I could be wrong. Sometimes nuance or implication that might be obvious in person is less clear over email, but I think Benedict was genuinely surprised by my question.
But if we go back to the dreaded report, you can see why people get the impression that this is about someone wanting to get rid of Walker and Historic all together. The report contains a chart of possibilities for “fixing” the “problems” with Historic. The first one? “Change Historic’s leadership.” The second? “Eliminate the Department of Historic Preservation and move Historic’s functions (MHC and MHZC) into the Planning Department.”
Development has become concentrated along corridors and in low-income areas
This report is, as much as it is anything, an argument (a poor argument, but an argument) for getting rid of Historical and giving its duties over to Planning. The give-a-little/get-a-little bargained compromise position that is supposed to keep the most people from being pissed is keeping the department, but subsuming it under Planning.
But why? I’m not saying there are or aren’t good reasons for doing that. I saying that, in the report that is supposed to explain and justify why we should make this change, there’s no real explanation for why — no actual solid examples.
Most confusing, the report is dated Jan. 23, 2025. The bill was filed on Feb. 12 and is going before the council on Feb. 18 for the first time. And yet the report itself reads, in bold, “Further legal and other research is required to refine these ideas for ultimate implementation.”
Has this research been done in the three weeks between when the report came out and the bill was filed? And what is the council doing to ensure that Metro Historical can continue to provide the services and programming that Nashville’s historical community has come to rely on?
A lot of us rely on Metro Historical as it is right now. And the council might just be trading one pissed-off bunch of constituents for another if the bar owners get what they need and the historians are no longer able to.
