Once a month, reporter and resident historian J.R. Lind will pick an area in the city to examine while accompanied by a photographer. With his column Walk a Mile, he’ll walk a one-mile stretch of that area, exploring the neighborhood’s history and character, its developments, its current homes and businesses, and what makes it a unique part of Nashville. If you have a suggestion for a future Walk a Mile, email editor@nashvillescene.com.
The Route: From Donelson Station east to Donelson Pike, then north to Lebanon Pike. Left on Lebanon Pike to J.B. Estille Drive, taking that north to Old Lebanon Road, turning right and continuing until Old Lebanon Road reconnects with Lebanon Pike, then heading west to McGavock Pike.
Cranes: 0
Abandoned scooters: 0
The parking lot at Donelson Station is an asphalt monument to unrealized ambition.
A multi-acre surface lot adjacent to the Music City Star stop, it was clearly planned for hundreds of cars left by commuters opting to take the train from the woody neighborhood east of downtown Nashville. Under a cloudless April morning sky, there are maybe a dozen vehicles in the lot.
When planning began for the Music City Star in 2004, transportation officials predicted an average daily ridership of 1,900 in its first year. In 2019, its peak year, the train averaged around 1,300. Still, in a region without many public transit options, the train — which operates on Nashville & Eastern Railroad’s line from Lebanon to the downtown riverfront — chugs along with two trips each way every weekday morning and afternoon.
It’s a pleasant place, insofar as parking lots go. The siding for the train is lit with fixtures similar to those made famous by the Paris Metro, with their swooping curves and ornate Art Nouveau lanterns.
A one-way road connects Donelson Pike to the station, running by what is now the Donelson Hermitage Senior Center. For decades, starting in the 1920s, the building served as the elementary school for the area, which is obvious — it’s simple enough to pick out, say, the former cafeteria or the gym, or to look behind the building and see where the playground once was. These days — or at least in times when the world isn’t gripped by a once-a-century pandemic — the building still bustles. The center has a robust set of activities and even includes a barber shop.
Across Donelson Pike is one of the finest business signs in all of Metrodom: Donelson Bowl. Property records will tell you the bowling alley was built in 1960, but anyone with eyes and even a passing interest in American vernacular architecture could tell you the same thing. These days, we’d call the sign retro-futurist — it looks like something from The Jetsons. Form mostly follows function for the building itself, though one side features slightly offset bricks, their exposed ends painted in bright primary colors.
A train’s whistle activates the lights and bells on the crossbuck and sends the arms down to block traffic. It’s not the Star, but rather local freight traffic (two N&E locomotives hauling a container), so the wait isn’t long.
The intersection of Lebanon and Donelson pikes feels like it should be a bigger deal. There’s a gas station, a Lowe’s, a bank, an auto parts store. In essence, this is the center of Donelson in 2021. Some of that “Hip Donelson” we hear so much about should be here. In fact, though Donelson is in its way embracing its new desirability (in 2016, Realtor.com declared 37214 the 15th-most-desirable ZIP code in the country), there’s still a stubbornness for the old ways. While Lebanon Pike and Donelson Pike might be the sensible center of town, it’s a stretch of Old Lebanon Road to the northeast that’s still the heart of the area.
Intentional or not, planners seem dead-set on, in fact, making pedestrians walk on Old Lebanon Road rather than its adjective-free kin. The sidewalk on Lebanon Pike extends only as far as the bridge that carries the road over the tracks, and in fact, it only recently went that far. The construction of a new small strip mall, currently home to a jeweler and a loan provider, required the construction of a new stretch of sidewalk — obviously of a much more recent vintage than the others along Lebanon Pike.
The shoulder on the bridge is far too narrow to use for perambulation, except perhaps for the most harum-scarum of walkers. And so the footborne must cross at J.B. Estille Drive — the Bluefields subdivision, a charming clutch of 1930s homes that was the first housing development in Donelson, is just to the south and, sadly, unreachable by foot in any sensible way from here — and go along Old Lebanon Road.
McNamara’s Irish Pub, perhaps the finest Irish restaurant in a former funeral home in all of Christendom, looms at the corner of Old Lebanon Road and Lebanon Pike. Ace Hardware, which looks suspiciously like a paddock at Churchill Downs, shares space with beloved food-truck-into-brick-and-mortar-do-it-all-restaurant Phat Bites.
Hearing air traffic is part and parcel of being outdoors — and probably indoors — in Donelson, with the airport just a few miles off. So regular is the coming and going of airliners that it doesn’t take long to simply get used to it, one’s attention refocused on the Boeings and Airbuses only when a glint of sun hits a silvery wing and bounces the light back to earth. With the high-shine glass facade of the The Salon Professional Academy catching one of the rays — sun to plane to window — it becomes a bit of a science experiment demonstrating light’s highly efficient method of travel.
Donelson bears the distinction of being the only place in Davidson County with two bowling alleys. In addition to Donelson Bowl (more properly, the Donelson Bowling Center), there’s the Strike & Spare in the lower level of a strip on Old Lebanon Road, down some stairs lit by gleefully 1970s light fixtures and next to a bartending school, another outpost of Southern Thrift and Donelson Air.
Across the street is Fletcher’s Pizza (no buffet at this time) and Uncle Bud’s Catfish. Donelson Church of Christ is a looming structure at the intersection of Old Lebanon Road and Knobview. Crossing the train tracks here and looking back south, there’s evidence that this is where the train station once was, years ago when rail travel was in fashion. And thus, it’s fair speculation that this was the center of downtown Donelson, such as it was.
An insurance company nearby is decorated with a mural on each side of its building, one clearly intended as a selfie spot, though no bachelorettes seem to be taking advantage. Old Lebanon hooks back up with Lebanon Pike in a flatiron — home of a Party Fowl that, to its credit, does a good job of fitting in aesthetically with the neighborhood and has a great sign that nods at Donelson Bowl — and it would seem an obvious place for a crosswalk back across the main drag. Alas, the sidewalks carry on farther along what remains of Old Lebanon Road, past some vintage stores, insurance agents and a compelling polyhedron that’s home to Two Rivers Veterinary Hospital. If you’ve ever wondered where you can get into fencing in Nashville (who hasn’t?), the Music City Fencing Club is nearby on Lebanon Pike.Â
Once Old Lebanon really and truly juts back into actual Lebanon, the latter begins a climb. At the top of the climb is another rise, and at the top of that is the truly dominating brick behemoth that is Donelson First Baptist. (The church purchased the tract in 1923 under a different name, so officially it’s owned by Donelson Missionary Baptist Church.)
A large Baptist church in a Nashville neighborhood isn’t particularly newsworthy, but what’s next door is certainly interesting. In a former bank building is a Romanian Baptist Church — the congregants call it Biserica Baptistă Română. The Baptist denomination has a long history in Romania, particularly in the eastern part of the country near Germany. The fact that there are enough members of the Romanian diaspora to support a congregation in Donelson, however, is a pleasant surprise.
Lebanon Pike slides back downhill after the Baptist churches to McGavock Pike, home of the Donelson Kroger — truly a landmark here, famous for its confounding and always crowded parking lot.
Confounding though it may be, at least it gets used.
