Walk a Mile: Sylvan Heights

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 Sylvan Supply east on Charlotte. Right on 38th Avenue then right on Dakota. Right on 40th and then left into Hill Center Sylvan Heights, then back to the start.

Abandoned Scooters: 0

Cranes: 1

Abandoned 1970s Winnebagos: 1

They used to make baby gates here.

On Charlotte Avenue, the Madison Mill factory — flush against the old Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway line, just east of 42nd Avenue — churned out various wood and steel products starting in 1959. (By then, the NC&StL had been absorbed by the Louisville and Nashville.) In the last several years of its manufacturing life — it sold to a developer in 2015; by then, the L&N had been absorbed by CSX — it primarily made baby gates.

There are no baby gates to be had at what is now called Sylvan Supply. There’s beer and bespoke ramen and punk rock sushi. But no baby gates.

Madison Mill used to be next to, among other things, a car wash. In 2010, H.G. Hill Realty paid $950,000 for the small tract at 40th and Charlotte where the aforementioned car wash stood. H.G. Hill paid a 300 percent premium for it. On its face, it’s bizarre: One of the city’s premier real estate companies paid three times the value for a car wash on what was (and in many ways, still is) Nashville’s most utilitarian and unheralded thoroughfare? But that little tract was just the final piece of a puzzle. The Hill family bought its first plot on the block in 1926. The car wash gave the company a huge contiguous parcel. 

Now it’s Hill Center Sylvan Heights, with Double Dogs and Farm Burger and Chaatable. Charlotte’s glow-up in the past decade or so has come in pockets. Yes, an old factory is now a shiny steel mixed-use project, and the former car wash and its neighbors are a Hill family outpost, but across Charlotte there’s still some kind of light industrial work getting started on this April morning, crisp and clear after overnight rainstorms.

There’s still an AutoZone at 39th Avenue, and Rosie’s Market is across the street with a cavalcade of color on its cinder-block exterior.

And so it goes in fits and starts. On the south side of Charlotte, next to the AutoZone, is an auto glass shop and a mechanic, with their chewed-up asphalt parking lots and concertina-wire fences. On the north side, next to Rosie’s, is L&L Market. It began life in 1929 as the Se-Ling Hosiery Mill, then became a Genesco factory and eventually a restaurant supply. Now, like seemingly every one of the numerous former hosiery mills that dot the city, it’s a mixed-use space, with pasta shops, yoga studios and Trumpist brewery Bold Patriot. 

38th Avenue meets Charlotte just west of a sign for the former Wishy Washy — whether it’s the Wishy Washy where Dolly Parton met her husband Carl Dean on her first day in Nashville in 1964 remains a mystery — and then climbs hard into the sky.

This is Cat Town Hill, all 690 feet of it. At one time, 37th Avenue marked the boundary between the City of Nashville and unincorporated Davidson County, so a completely plausible theory is that Cat Town Hill got its name because there were houses of ill repute hidden in its wilds, just outside the jurisdiction of the city constabulary.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the truth of the name is far less scandalous. Cat Town Hill is the most prominent topographical feature of Cat Town, which was bound by 33rd Avenue, Charlotte and the rail line. It got its name because someone who lived there … well, they liked cats. Certainly Sylvan Heights is a far more marketable name, but there’s no denying the charm of Cat Town Hill.

There’s a smattering of newer homes on the lower reaches of Cat Town Hill. Some have shades of contemporary architecture, but many just seem to have been built to match the older stock across the train tracks in Sylvan Park. There are plenty of original stock homes remaining though, built in the 1930s as what we would now call “workforce housing” for the factories and mills that were situated west of the city. Those laborers sent their children to Park Avenue School, which is still at the corner of Park and 38th, where it has been since 1915. It’s quiet this morning — MNPS students are on Easter break.

Water rushes in rivulets down the sides of 38th Avenue, confined to small channels in the pavement worn by years and years of drainage. The rush of water echoes from storm sewers too, long-ago buried creeks still doing their work of carrying away the rain to the Cumberland. There are two distinct ages of sidewalk along 38th. Generally, the older (and wider) ones are on the east side of the street, laid down decades ago to safely deliver children to the school, minimizing the number of times they’d need to cross a street that slopes like a ski ramp and propels even careful drivers at treacherous speeds. In front of the newer homes are numerous narrow sidewalks-to-nowhere doing the bare minimum to comply with Metro’s oft-scoffed sidewalk ordinance.

One of the older new homes — if that makes sense — is at the corner of 38th and Dakota. It was built in 2007, long enough ago that the exposed sheet-metal siding that’s so popular among gentrifying developers is now completely rusted. According to property records, a permit pulled in 2006 called for the existing house to be moved to 57th and Louisiana in The Nations. The permit expired before that undertaking could take place. There are tall-and-skinnies at 57th and Louisiana now.

Two houses down from there on Dakota, a sign promises “New Construction” on the lot a developer recently purchased for $420,000 from owners who paid $155,000 nine years ago. The year before that, this two-bedroom house could be rented for $850 per month.

Above Dakota is the summit of Cat Town Hill and a sprawling hilltop apartment complex, separated from the single-family homes by tall trees and dense undergrowth (and a fence). Back in 1956, WSM started work on a 1,379-foot television tower around here to replace the 578-foot tower at 14th Avenue South and Compton, near Belmont University. On Feb. 4, 1957, for reasons that are still unclear, the unfinished tower collapsed, killing four construction workers and hospitalizing a fifth for shock. One 300-foot section skidded down the hill, stopping just short of crashing into a home. Another piece fell through a house on Lookout Drive to the south. The only casualty in the neighborhood was a dog. Viewers who happened to be watching the station the afternoon the tower fell could hear screaming and someone yelling, “Oh my God, send help — the tower has just fallen down, help quick.”

Ultimately, WSM (now WSMV) built its tower on Knob Hill, west of White Bridge Road, because at the time it was a relatively secluded area, and a second collapse would have been relatively risk-free.

After the hill crests, Dakota — on this end, still largely hosting older homes — slopes gently down to a lot that serves as Montgomery Bell Academy’s auxiliary athletic fields. On 40th Avenue, a feral cat — his ear marked to show he’s been neutered — stalks the alleys, presumably intrigued by the birds chirping at the feast of worms and plant matter left about by the storm and rain. 

Once 40th passes Nevada Avenue, the momentum of redevelopment from Charlotte takes over from the stubbornness of the deeper neighborhood. The sidewalks narrow, and the homes tighten and crowd the street. (In large part because of the topography, the lots on Cat Town Hill were drawn relatively large; because of the economics of who intended buyers were, the original houses are relatively small, resulting in massive yards.) Signs warn dog owners to not let their pooches poop or pee on the grass. 

There’s a remarkable number of what may be communal swings. They look like porch swings, but they aren’t — in a technical sense — porch swings, because they aren’t on porches, because, by and large, the new-builds don’t have porches. Each little block that’s been filled with cut-and-paste homes seems to have its own clutch of these swings, a trend that continues even as 40th forks and becomes the back entrance to the Hill Center, where a truly astounding number of the swings sit in a grassy patch near the Station 40 apartments.

The swings are as quiet and empty as the railroad tracks and the surrounding developments at this hour. The bars and restaurants will surely be noisy later, filled with happy-hour devotees and long-weekend lovers. It used to be loud all day. They used to make baby gates here.