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 the Inglewood Branch Library, north on Gallatin Pike. Right on Richmond Drive, then right on Hedgewood, following the curve through its transition to Littonwood. Then right on Hedgewood and right on Winding Way, following it back to the library.
Cranes: 1
Abandoned scooters: 0
The Inglewood Branch Library is hard to describe, architecturally.
Is it meant to evoke a Swiss chalet? Polynesia by way of Walt Disney? Whatever the designers had in mind, they nailed it. Its whitewashed walls and russet roof meet in sharp angles. Its numerous windows doubtless offer soothing natural light in copious amounts, no matter the sun angle. The central fireplace, its smoke rising to a chimney from yet another vernacular architectural school — National Park Service rustic — surely crackles, offering warmth both metaphysical and actual physical.
The library, on Gallatin Pike and Winding Way, opened in 1969 on land donated by Newman Cheek, son of Joel Cheek of Cheekwood and Maxwell House Coffee fame, and fronts a neighborhood, officially known as Jackson Park, that bears Cheek fils’ stamp throughout.
Across Winding Way, up a short hill, is the Ionic Lodge of the Masons. Formerly it was known as the Jere Baxter Lodge, though the name of the prominent railroad man was dropped for unknown reasons. The lodge leaves no doubt to its purpose. Some Masonic lodges are simply quote-unquote normal buildings with Levantine hints subtly hidden. And some are like the Ionic Lodge, which looks like it was delivered intact from the Near East like the Holy House of Loreto. Alternatively, it could have been purchased at a surplus sale after the wrap of a Cecil B. DeMille cast-of-thousands epic. Whatever the case, the Masons of the lodge, whichever name it used, have done their Masony things inside since 1958, when it purchased the land. The lodge’s then-trustees included future Metro Mayor Beverly Briley.
Completing the three-block troika of neighborhood institutions is the former home of Isaac Litton High School, which operated here from 1930 to 1971.
The side of campus that fronts Gallatin Road is now Isaac Litton School Park, and the backside of Isaac Litton Middle School, but there are vestiges of the old high school still — notably the old gym, which now serves as the headquarters of the high school’s alumni association. The association renovated the charming structure, which was in shambles by the early 1990s, and it now houses a museum and hosts community events, with a special focus on providing after-school programs for kids in the neighborhood. The alumni association also provides financial support to the middle school now bearing its alma mater’s name.
The current sign for the old high school is not the original, which is a bit of a disappointment. Driving through Inglewood in the ’80s and ’90s, one would pass the blue sign advertising Litton High School as home of the Lions and “The Marching 100+,” with a lion in drum-major livery, high-stepping for eternity. If one’s father happened to be an old Madison Ram, one’s father would vitriolically spit out the name “Litton” and recall athletic battles between the two now-shuttered rival schools, the polka-dot-wearing Rams looking to take a basketball victory from Litton in that old gym, or a football win in the stadium that also still remains.
Beyond the school, public-use and fraternal elbow-rubbing gives way to commerce. There’s a mix of that which is typical for farther-flung stretches of Nashville’s pikes (discount tobacco stores), hints that the neighborhood is changing (neighboring vintage clothing stores, including trad-country revival badass Nikki Lane’s High Class Hillbilly) and hints that some things never will (in the distance, the genie-head logo of Mack Pest Control, which has been killing Inglewood’s bugs since roughly always).
Turning on Richmond Drive, the sound of tinkling wind chimes interplays with the whirring of mechanics’ tools, a hint that the bustle and grit of Gallatin Pike is soon to give way to residential bliss. But first, because this is still Nashville, there’s a storefront church.
In the spring, Richmond would surely provide an impressive canopy, and in the autumn, a quilt of yellows and oranges. But it is December — the relatively mild weather notwithstanding — so the mighty oaks are denuded, their bark gray even in the bright sun, their spindly branches narrowing into needly twigs. There are pops of green from some truly mighty and sky-scraping conifers that, if we continue to anthropomorphize these trees, seem like softhearted guardians to protect us from the fearsome malefactors that are the oaks.
While some of the houses on Richmond bear the neighborhood’s distinctive stone exteriors, there are plenty of brick ranches (one still has a “Bernie 2016” sign out front, head-scratchingly) and duplexes. Some of the duplexes have been converted into single-family homes, while some still serve their original purpose. Some of these homes would be Levittown-esque matchy-matchy, but the owners in many cases have chosen to paint their bricks. There’s white brick, olive-drab brick and pastel-blue brick, with accents dotted about that give each home individuality without diluting the character of the whole street.
The lot sizes are big here — bigger than most in town — and get bigger the farther away from Gallatin one gets. One such large lot, at the corner of Richmond and Hedgewood (a street that comes by its name honestly), includes metal yard art of two pugilists, boxing forever and ever at the corner of these quiet streets.
The brick ranches of Hedgewood sit on slight rises from the street, the elevation sloping ever downward into an expanse of green in front of the impressive facade of Litton Middle. The school has an air of a grand ceremonial entrance, as if the Fusiliers will pass in review at any minute. Hedgewood curves slightly left beyond the schoolyard — a guardrail protects drivers from careening into a yard, though the bigger drop-off from the roadbed is opposite — and turns into Littonwood, which continues east. Hedgewood, however, returns, branching off to the right from Littonwood — which, again, itself sprouted from Hedgewood. And this isn’t even close to the most confusing road design in the neighborhood. A large hawk, too big to be a Cooper’s but in too much of the morning glare to discern precisely, flies east. A large cat stalks in the underbrush. Tiny rodents are surely scrambling away from both.
Unusual for the neighborhood, a two-story house is on the corner of Hazelwood and Winding Way, but it too is bedecked in stone. And there’s a reason. When Newman Cheek opened up this land for a subdivision, he wrote in three particular covenants. Blessedly, none of them are racist.
First, all building plans had to be approved by him. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that, in the interest of practicality, the homebuilders in those years repeatedly submitted designs that were similar to ones Cheek had already granted his imprimatur, thus accounting for the stylistic consistency. Second, the homes could not have a wooden exterior; all had to be brick or stone. (The covenant doesn’t specifically prohibit corrugated metal, though that particular novelty in residential construction appears to be a modern one.) And finally, no outhouse could be constructed until the main home was near completion, and no outhouse could be within 150 feet of the street.
The final requirement is of course funny to modern eyes, and it’s possible the term refers more generally to any outbuilding. Cheek, though, did have a general interest in plumbing, indoors and out, as one of the men behind the Madison utility district. Was constraining the location of outhouses a clever way to encourage people to hook up to the water line? Maybe, or maybe he just wanted folks to keep their sheds in the backyard.
As honest as Hedgewood’s name is, Winding Way’s is a touch deceptive. From the hawk’s-eye view, it doesn’t wind so much as roll and billow gently between Gallatin and its terminus at Brush Hill along the river. It does, however, climb steadily. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the homes along Winding Way date from the 1930s through the early 1950s. There is, however, one Georgian-style home from 1960, a popular architectural choice for the upwardly mobile of the time. New builds are starting to make inroads here, as they are along Gallatin, the tall-and-skinnies elbowing the old-brick charm.
Winding Way runs alongside a park — it’s actually a private park, a rarity, owned by the Jackson Park Community Club — but not before passing signs explaining which road goes which way. While the pleasant open space surrounded by roads has an obvious Continental sensibility, the road design, which makes it frightfully easy to just drive in circles interminably, may well have been designed by the Cheshire Cat: If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which direction you go, so long as you get somewhere.
In the midwinter, evidence of an old roadbed can be seen bifurcating the park. It seems it may have been the front drive for the house now at the far east end of the park, built in 1930, its builder having purchased the land from Cheek himself, making it one of the oldest homes in the subdivision.
And those early sales contained the covenants as the ones that came later, but with the more infamous racist prohibitions as well. Given the near-ubiquity of Black Lives Matter signs in the neighborhood these days, the attitudes of the homeowners have changed, even if the houses haven’t.
