Do you ever wonder about architecture? I do. During years of drive time and the occasional dog walk off the beaten path, I’ve discovered that Nashville’s highways and byways feature a number of buildings whose style or evident age, unknown purpose or sheer inaccessibility render them enigmatic. Here are some of my favorite architectural question marks, and some answers.
Dolly Did It
The stucco-and-timber compound at the corner of 12th Avenue South and Elmwood Avenue is a sort of Alamo-in-hiding. Diners emerging from Mirror restaurant across the street are confronted by opaque gates and high walls, over the top of which can be glimpsed red tile roofs. A mission-style dome—the kind with a bell inside and a cross on top—is a miniature version of the campanile from which Kim Novak plunged, fleeing the verbal harassment of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.
Inside, the complex is a curious blend of strip mall and casa, with a rustic aggregate car courtyard, a pine colonnade and fiberglass cacti. On one corner the stucco has chipped off, revealing a wall of mundane brick. A lone staffer, emerging from what appears to be the sole occupied office, explains that the complex was once much like the surrounding pre-World War II commercial architecture—until Dolly Parton purchased the property for her Nashville office in 1989 and engineered the mission makeover. Fantasyland architecture in 12 South, courtesy of one of Tennessee’s most fantastic creations.
What’s in the Dome?
In 1992, local architect Kem Hinton was giving Michael Graves—who recently got the nod to design Nashville’s new federal courthouse—a tour of our major monuments. Because of Graves’ devotion to ancient architecture, the emphasis of the excursion was on the classical.
“We were driving on Church Street from the State Capitol to the Parthenon, when Graves said 'Stop’ and pointed to the NES building,” Hinton recalls. “He said 'wow, that’s an exposed limestone dome. I’ve never seen one before. What’s in it?’ I felt embarrassed because I’d never even wondered about it.”
A decade later the answer is: what’s in most attics. I found softball and basketball trophies won years ago by the jocks of the Nashville Electric Service. There’s an artificial Christmas tree, shelves of old ledgers, and yellowing records. A canvas tool bucket hangs from the ladder leading to the glass lantern on top.
Climbing out on the roof, I was impressed—as Graves was—by the smooth texture of the dome’s limestone exterior. Having never taken a good look, I’d always thought it was concrete. Then again, I’d always placed the building in the ’30s because of its stripped classical style, popular in the Depression.
The home of NES was actually done in 1950 by the firm of Hibbs, Parrent and Hall. Henry Hibbs designed a structure to make the utility seem solid as a rock. Power lines may sag and fall, but the building won’t. Says NES staffer Tim Hill, “I watched the tornado of 1998 come right over the top, and the winds didn’t faze it a bit.”
Palladio With a Plus
The name, according to the historical marker out front, is Washington Hall. But this residence at the corner of Whitland and Craighead avenues is more Monticello than Mount Vernon. The marker mentions, in addition to Jefferson’s home, Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House near London as an influence on the design.
Thomas Jefferson and Lord Burlington were both ardent admirers of Palladio, who designed villas with domes and classical porticos for patrons in the Veneto in 16th century Italy. Nashville’s version—built in 1914 by Judge John B. Daniels—is less severe in form, more ornate in surface texture than anything Palladio or his followers would have contemplated. The nation had recently entered what would later be called the American Century. And this home builder felt free to add ornament to Renaissance and Enlightenment tradition in expressing his—and his country’s—self-confident mastery of time and place.
Derelict Romanesque
The old buildings of our downtown appear a lot healthier at street level than if you look up. Take 206 Fourth Ave. N. Nicholson Cleaners occupies the ground floor, all bright sign and bland aluminum. Up above is much better architecture, in bad shape.
This tall thin building, made of brick with a stone front in the Romanesque style, was designed in the 1880s by Hugh Cathcart Thompson, the architect of the Ryman. The structure began life as a saloon and restaurant, and later became the Hotel Utopia. During these days Fourth Avenue was Cherry Street and this block—devoted to boozing and gambling—was known as the gentlemen’s quarter, avoided by ladies except those of the night.
Today, the windows of the upper stories, like those of so many of downtown’s small historic structures—look with blind, boarded eyes onto the street below, a victim of zoning that favors the tall tower and codes that make rehab difficult if not impossible. Thompson, and his building, deserve better.
The Case of the Shelby Hut
One Sunday morning I took a walk on the east bank of the Cumberland, checking out the rehab work on the Shelby Bridge. I noticed a small hut resting under the arch of the bridge’s eastern pier. I couldn’t imagine what purpose something that looked like a storage structure could serve, suspended in the river, apparently inaccessible to every creature but pigeons.
The answer wasn’t easy to find out. I bounced back and forth several times between Metro Public Works—they do bridges—and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—they do rivers. I finally learned from Bill Barron of the Corps that the hut was once used as a “gauge house.” Barron explained that “the Corps continuously records the level of the river” by means of “a stick with numbers on it that’s attached to electronic equipment measuring the surface water elevation.” The electronics lived in the gauge house, until technological innovation condensed the equipment to a size that can now be kept in “a stainless steel box the size of a suitcase.” No longer useful, the hut has been left to molder—with sagging siding and a roof pockmarked with holes—until it falls into the river and drowns. Case closed.
Hammer and Tongs
The sign over the the broad arched door at 311 Jefferson St. says “John Geist & Sons, Forges.” Lawn mowers are parked three deep in front of the old brick building. Inside, the wood floor is splintered with age. Parts of lawn mowers, tools and other pieces of equipment litter every surface.
A man emerges from the chaos and identifies himself as George Geist. “We mostly repair lawn mowers today, because the art iron business just doesn’t pay. You can’t charge what it costs you to make it,” he says, showing me a trivet which his wife designed in the shape of an interlaced heart and diamond.
George is the third generation of Geists to work here, and this 1900 building is the third Geist forge on the block. His German immigrant grandfather, John Sr., established a blacksmith business here in 1884. “They had that skylight,” George says, “because there wasn’t any electricity then.” He points to planks lining the walls, on which finished horse shoes were hung, sorted by size. “They shod horses right in the shop; charged 10 cents a shoe, made and put on.”
When the horse was no longer a means of transportation, the Geist business evolved into fabricating ornamental iron and the sharpening of tools. When people began to grow lawns, they repaired the mowers.
Two coal forges—now converted to gas—still stand next to the wall, with anvils in front. On one anvil lies a very hefty hammer. “My father used that 3-pound hammer every day until the day before he died, age 88,” George says proudly. “Dad could always out-hammer us—any day, all day.”
WaterWorks
Standing on the banks of the Cumberland near the railroad trestle in Shelby Park, I’ve often glimpsed the Omohundro waterworks just across the river. From this distance, the strong, simple geometries of the brick complex remind me of New England’s water-powered textile mills, which brought the Industrial Revolution to the New World. Today that revolution is over. But Omohundro, designed in the 19th century to bring decent water to Nashville, still delivers—50 million gallons a day.
The pumping station was the first building in the complex, part of an 1888 city plan to update aquatic infrastructure that also included the Eighth Avenue South reservoir. Water is sucked from the Cumberland, filtered, then carried four miles to the reservoir for storage and distribution.
The pumping station is a three-story brick-and-limestone shell housing humming machinery, lit by arched windows and a clerestory on the roof ridge. The adjacent boiler house and smokestack were constructed in 1926, burning coal to power the pumping machinery. Today the boiler house serves as the electronic control center for the entire water system.
From the exterior, the boiler house looks like a Romanesque basilica, with two-story, multi-paned arched windows and decorative brick corbels in the cornice. Also basilican in plan, the 1928 filtration plant has a nave with diamond terrazzo floors, flanked by brick arcades and covered by a gleaming wood ceiling. The gospel of Jesus and the gospel of technological progress are complementary theologies at Omohundro.
The 1889 Eighth Avenue reservoir stands on Kirkpatrick’s Hill, once the site of Fort Casino, a Union stronghold during the battle of Nashville. Elliptical in shape, the reservoir is divided in half along its shorter axis. Originally water was pumped into one side, where a man in a row boat would scatter alum into the water to settle the mud, before the water was pumped into the other side for distribution. Atop the reservoir’s 15-foot-thick limestone walls rests the picturesque gabled valve house, an orange brick building with carved limestone Romanesque details and an octagonal tower.
Nashville’s waterworks were carefully crafted to dignify up-to-date engineering with an architectural skin, softening the shock of the new with the patina of history. Today these buildings remind us of the visual possibilities inherent in daily life—that our public works don’t have to look like the thermal plant.
Masonic Monuments
The lodges of the Free and Accepted Masons have always seemed mysterious to me. In my hometown, the Masonic hall is a grim and forbidding block of a building with sphinxes out front, just the sort of place—in my childish eyes—to sequester secret rituals and weird handshakes. I’ve been intrigued by Masonic lodges ever since, by two of Nashville’s in particular.
The Grand Lodge of Tennessee, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, is an imposing cube. But its classical design is not grim, just a little stern. Designed by the firm of Asmus & Clark in 1925, the exterior features a massive base, topped by a colossal Ionic order and a curious roof structure in the form of a Greek temple. Light standards in the form of hairy bronze paws and white glass globes flank the steps.
Inside, I find architecture designed to impress, but not intimidate. The lobby has a Doric frieze and green marble columns—with a touch of Egypt in the form of a lotus and winged sun disk design on the air duct. The library contains portraits of past grand masters, such as Andrew Jackson, James Polk and Andrew Johnson. A museum of Masonic curios includes Jackson’s Masonic apron, and a collection of antique slide projectors.
Upstairs is the 1,400-seat auditorium, which hosts the annual confab of Masons from across the state—and has the best acoustics outside the Ryman. The jewel in the Masonic crown is the auditorium chandelier, a glass and bronze structure 12 feet in diameter weighing 2,000 pounds. Grand Secretary Alvin Hill says it takes two weeks to lower the light fixture, change the bulbs and raise it again. He also tells me that the Nashville Symphony has performed in the auditorium, and that Willie Nelson taped a spot here for Monday Night Football.
Willie never played the Jere Baxter Lodge at 4400 Gallatin Pike, but the lodge is a landmark nevertheless. No one expects Egyptian Revival in the suburbs. Named after a Nashville railroad entrepreneur who took on the L&N line and lost, this windowless and therefore tomb-like 1960 building features battered buttresses and a cornice frieze with fluted panels in blue, lavender, orange and yellow. Masonic symbols on stone panels are set into the brick walls. The interior is less startling, with the standard Masonic meeting room, dining hall and office.
Not all Masonic lodges are architectural curiosities. In many towns the Masons gather within bland walls that would be equally appropriate for a chamber of commerce or a Rotary club. Nashville is lucky to have at least two which impress us with their sense of secret purpose.
