By Christine Kreyling
These days, Hillsboro Village is running on alternating currents of anxiety and hope. Ever since word leaked out that H.G. Hill Realty is preparing to demolish almost the entire 1700 block of 21st Avenue South, the Village has been in an emotional free-fall.
The planned replacement for the stretch of 1920s one-story shops is a three-story, mixed-use structure combining first-floor retail with 17 upper-level apartments. Twenty underground parking spaces will be constructed for the residential tenants. The basic look is red brick, with limestone, wood, and painted aluminum accents. Bay windows will provide residents with views of the street life below, while balconies and flower boxes will ornament the upper façade.
The architect for the 29,000-square-foot, $3 million complex is Stephen Rick of Street, Dixon, Rick. Rick designed the 1996 Pancake Pantry, the one building in the block that will remain standing.
Last week, H.G. Hill Realty sent letters to its tenants in the block stating that their leases would not be renewed and that they have until the end of April to relocate. Since then, Nashville’s phone lines have been humming. Some area merchants and shoppers hope that adding residential units on top of the Village will create additional consumers for the Village’s healthy mixture of goods and services. Others fear that the change in scale and style could spell the death of Village civilization as we know it.
On a rainy morning last Monday, I headed for Hillsboro Village to take the strip’s emotional pulse. Walking down the hill on 21st Avenue, I thought how deeply the roots of the H.G. Hill Company grow beneath the pavement of the Village. The block on the western side between Belcourt and Acklen was the site of the original H.G. Hill food store. Behind the building was the chicken yard, where dinner fowl were slaughtered and cleaned on the spot.
I remembered that the block to be demolished was bought by the H.G. Hill Company in 1925. This property was once part of Roger Williams University, a Baptist school attended, for the most part, by African Americans after its founding in 1874. In 1905 the main building of the college burned under suspicious circumstances. The fires of segregation blazed brightly during those years, while streetcars made the Belmont area attractive for residential development. The school was relocated and the land was subdivided into lots with the deed restriction that the property could not be conveyed to anyone “of African descent,” although blacks were allowed to live there as servants.
As I passed by the Village at Vanderbilt, I thought how easily even integrationist intentions can go awry in three dimensions. This 1987 complex was designed by Tuck Hinton Everton Architects and was constructed by Vanderbilt University on part of the Peabody campus. The concept was to add housing and offices to the neighborhood while extending the retail commerce of Hillsboro Village into the campus.
Vanderbilt Vice Chancellor Jeff Carr says that the housing part of the Village at Vanderbilt “has worked well” and that the offices have provided much-needed expansion space for the university. “But commercially, the retail section has not really worked,” Carr admits. “The Village at Vanderbilt has never become a part of Hillsboro Village.”
The Village at Vanderbilt has not connected with Hillsboro Village because the new Village is bad urban design. Fortunately, H.G. Hill Realty has no intention of repeating these mistakes. The company plans to build its new complex on the sidewalk line of the old structures, maintaining the current pattern of parking in the rear. “We’re trying to do what’s best for the Village within the confines of economic reality,” says H.G. Hill Realty president John Hardcastle. “We’re responding to the need for urban housing, we’re trying to meet the parking requirements in a visually satisfying way, and we want to maintain the ambiance of the Village.”
Hardcastle says no food emporiums will be part of the retail mix in the new development, adding that current tenants will have first right of refusal to return. He admits that future rents will be at least twice the current rate, but he says the current rents are low because they reflect the uncertain future of the existing buildings. “We’ll do our best to help the tenants find other locations,” he says. “We own some spaces that may become available in the near future.”
The about-to-be-displaced tenants say they were “shocked” to receive their termination letters. Now they mostly seem resigned and very uncertain. They have discussed the possibility of moving together into a strip somewhere, but November and December are their busiest months, and they have no time to look.
The key issue in all of retail is location, and the merchants want to stay in the neighborhood. “We’re just not mall stores,” says Linda Arden of A Thousand Faces. Rhonda Nelson of Cattails, a florist shop, agrees. “I had a shop in an historic district of Southern Pines, N.C.,” she explains. “When I moved here, I wanted a traditional neighborhood. We’re all specialty shops, and our customer base—Music Row, Vanderbilt—is here.” Many say they will consider returning to their current sites, but they fear the neighborhood will not support the much higher rents. “I don’t see how a new building with the same size space will generate a lot of new business,” says one tenant.
Henry Foyer’s Bari-Mor Gifts is typical of the longevity and informality that characterize Village retail. His 39-year-old establishment is famous for its clutter and its basset hound greeters. “Years ago we decided to remodel, and so we asked for advice from a rep with Gibson Greeting Cards,” Foyer recalls. “He walked in and said, ‘I try to get other stores to look like this. You’ve done it by accident. Don’t change a thing.’ And so we didn’t.”
Hillsboro Village has always changed incrementally, but this radical surgery is a source of concern for people other than the displaced tenants. Scott Davis, whose family has been in the Village since 1970, says his main fear is that the traditional relationship between landlord and tenant will change with the H.G. Hill development. “There’s always been a low wall between landlord and tenant in the Village,” he explains. “Owners of businesses have made a long-term commitment even if they rented.” According to Davis, “They personalized their buildings” and felt a sort of quasi-ownership. “Now I see a high wall of dollars coming. The Village is unique because the merchants are unique. When Vanderbilt did the Village at Vanderbilt, they thought they could build a part of the Village with bricks and mortar. It didn’t work.”
For Bob Bernstein, the proprietor of Fido, the restaurant and coffeehouse, bricks and mortar are a real issue. “I don’t see extending the architecture of Pancake Pantry as keeping the spirit of the Village alive,” Bernstein says. “The Pantry is fine by itself; but a whole block of it will have a strip-mall feel.”
There’s the rub. The H.G. Hill developers are replacing a collection of one-story buildings with a single, three-story structure. This is not an impossible urban-design situation, but it’s a damned difficult one to bring off. Only the Educators’ Credit Union building, at four stories, is taller and broader.
Architect Rick has responded to this problem by dividing the new project into 10 bays on the first floor, and three main sections with a corner quasi-tower on the upper level. But the stylistic detailing seems uncertain, perhaps because Hillsboro Village doesn’t have an obvious style to imitate.
The architectural language of Hillsboro Village was quiet to begin with, and it has been considerably muted by alterations from the ’50s through the ’70s—a Tudor gable here, a plate-glass window there. What Hill Realty plans to demolish are buildings that over time have developed permutations on the basic storefront. When the company tries to construct a single, obviously historic “style,” it will look like a theme park.
Ann Reynolds, executive director of the Metro Historical Commission, says she’s “very concerned about demolition” and begs to differ with those who say the buildings aren’t worth keeping because they are not historic. “The fact that the buildings have been altered and are therefore not eligible for the National Register is irrelevant,” she says. “Many cities have several Hillsboro Villages; Nashville has only one.”
In Hillsboro Village there is general agreement that H.G. Hill Realty has been a good landlord for a long time and that the company’s concept of living upstairs from the shops is a sound one. Stewart Clifton, the neighborhood’s representative in Metro Council, says that Hill Realty has always been responsive to community interests and civic responsibility. “If someone has to take down a sixth of the Village,” Clifton says, “we’re lucky it’s them.” But there is also a general fear that maintaining the character of the Village will be difficult with a mass of new construction that could stimulate further demolitions.
For Nashville, Hillsboro Village is as much a state of mind as a place to eat and shop. It’s the only neighborhood in our city where it’s possible to experience old-fashioned, small-town urbanism. It is certainly true that the buildings to be demolished do not have significance as monuments to our architectural history. The Ryman Auditorium, Union Station, and The Hermitage are civic icons because we connect with them as high-water marks of our culture. These are the places where a president lived and died, where we went off to war, and where we first heard Patsy Cline sing.
The Village is comfort food—coffee beans ground by the owner, advice about a sweater that will fit Dad, and, yes, pancakes. Disregarding the Village’s character in the creation of a new, block-long building may produce a paste with all the texture of gruel.
Some facts in this story were taken from Gene Teselle’s Hillsboro Village: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
Some facts in this story were taken from Gene Teselle’s Hillsboro Village: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
