Eillie Anzilotti over at The Atlantic's City Lab blog is writing about Nashville's efforts to preserve Music Row. Her piece is really interesting and I highly recommend you read it.
I want to talk about this part:
If you live in Nashville, says Carolyn Brackett, the senior field officer for the National Trust, “you get the sense that there isn’t anything else like Music Row.” There isn’t. The National Trust, in gathering its defense for the preservation of Music Row, examined music centers around the country, from Chicago to Los Angeles to Muscle Shoals to Detroit; nowhere comes close to mimicking the intense proximity that characterized Music Row at its peak in the decades following the war—a culture that was all but inextricable from the streets and buildings that housed it.To cope with the economic growth following World War II, the newly established Nashville city planning commission decided that the residential neighborhoods surrounding the downtown area could also be zoned commercial. Music executives, seeking less expensive property to expand their burgeoning businesses, took to the outskirts of the city, including the neighborhood that would become Music Row. Quaint, turn-of-the-century streets produced some of the U.S.’s most significant sounds: Elvis Presley recorded “Heartbreak Hotel” at RCA in 1956; Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” came out of Columbia Records in 1966; Quadraphonic produced Joan Baez’s “Blessed Are” in 1971.
In her new book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and its Limits, historian Ansley T. Erickson looks at the ways that school desegregation worked and the ways in which it failed to make cities more fair to African Americans.
She has a long discussion of Nashville. Erickson's description of what happened in Edgehill (she includes Music Row on the border of the neighborhood) when that aforementioned city planning commission "decided that the residential neighborhoods surrounding the downtown area could be zoned commercial," as Anzilotti puts it, is brutal.
These [community] groups emphasized the destruction and displacement that would come to the neighborhood, pointing out that "not all of the houses . . . are substandard," and that many homeowning families in Edgehill would "be forced into becoming renters" when the NHA bought houses for less than replacement value given the restricted pool of housing available to black purchasers. The gathered organizations asserted that via the project "an aspiring middle-class segment in the Negro population in Nashville is being destroyed."
Erickson goes on to explain that many of the black people in the Edgehill and Music Row area displaced by urban renewal projects moved south and then saw their houses torn down for 440.
Don't get me wrong. I think Music Row should be protected. But, at the same time, certainly we can acknowledge that it's pretty damn rich for people to be complaining about the loss of a part of town we wouldn't have even had except that we already willfully lost the part of town it sits in.
Oh, the city changed and developers got big ideas and now your precious Music Row is threatened? That's just History's way of saying "Welcome to the neighborhood. Here's how things work here."
Maybe now that we see first-hand how much it sucks, we should be more humble about what we did in the past.
