The Tennessean ran a couple of op-eds about the potential development at Fort Negley Park. Alice Ganier Rolli has a nice piece about the importance of the park and the necessity for the whole city to carefully consider the park’s fate. And she brings up the point I’ve already made, but have not yet received a good answer for — why doesn’t the law that would protect this park if it were named for a Confederate protect this park named for a Union fort?
The pro-development piece is by Van Tucker. She raises some good points. I, in fact, agree with her that the Cloud Hill proposal is great. I was having a discussion with a District 17 resident just the other day who was complaining about the “affordable” housing in another nearby proposed development, and I said that I thought Cloud Hill’s thoughtfulness about how to make sure housing was actually affordable to real people was a better model.
If the Cloud Hill proposal was for this exact development, but on the other side of Chestnut, I would be writing weekly posts in support of it.
The question is not whether the development is a good idea. It is a great idea. The question is whether we should give up parkland in an area already very light on parks for this development. Especially, should we give up parkland of such enormous and understudied historic value?
Tucker writes, “I first met Bert Mathews while serving on the Adventure Science Center board, at a time when the future of that Nashville institution lay in peril. As board chairman, Bert thoughtfully led the organization through a sticky process of reorganization through community engagement and collaboration, respect for the history of Fort Negley, and an understanding of the significance of a place where all children could experience the wonders of science.”
Y’all, I love the Adventure Science Center as much as the next person, but you just can’t use “Adventure Science Center” and “respect for the history of Fort Negley” in the same paragraph. Go up to the back of Fort Negley. Look out toward the Adventure Science Center. We know from the many, many artistic representations of that hill that the Union encampment was right there.
What more can we learn about that Union encampment in future archaeological investigations of that area? Jack shit, because someone blew up that part of the hill and stuck a science center there.
For many, many years, Nashville has convinced itself that as long as it doesn’t touch the fortifications at the very top of the hill, it’s not fucking up this important, irreplaceable Civil War site. So we have blown things up and carved things out and put parking lots and a ball field down on top of what, if we had not been lying to ourselves, we would recognize as important and irreplaceable.
My gravest concern about the Cloud Hill proposal is that it continues our grand tradition of lying to ourselves in order to not have to see what we’re truly proposing. There is no “Greer Stadium site” that is separate from Fort Negley Park. That is and always has been parkland. The part of the park Greer Stadium and the parking lots sit on isn’t “abandoned” or “neglected” for any mysterious reason. God didn’t turn His back on it. The city just has never gotten around to making that parkland usable again by the public, and now we see that’s because, in part, the city wants for us all to pretend that’s not really the same thing as Fort Negley Park, so we can all feel okay about turning it over to a developer.
Yes, we need affordable housing. But we need parks, and we need to preserve our irreplaceable history, and those things shouldn’t negate each other.
