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 William Edmondson Park, head north on Henry Hale Boulevard then turn right on Jo Johnston Avenue, turn left at 16th Avenue and follow the park trail inside Watkins Park parallel to the street. Turn right on Clinton, then right on 12th Avenue and right again on Jo Johnston, turning back into Hale Homes with a left on 14th Avenue and then turn right on Capitol Point back to the start.
Cranes: 2
Abandoned scooters: 23 (24, if including the child’s scooter spotted on a sidewalk)
William Edmondson Park is one of those happy little accidents of urban planning. In 1976, Charlotte Avenue was set to be widened, so Metro Public Works cleared the area between the right-of-way and the J. Henry Hale Homes in anticipation. As it turns out, the road didn’t need as much space as anticipated, leaving a little strip of land too narrow for development, so the city turned it into a mini-park and named it for Edmondson, the outsider artist who became the first Black artist with a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
It’s a pleasant little space with a sculpture in the style of Edmondson and a monument dedicated to his memory, sculpted by Gregory Ridley from limestone salvaged from the old Commerce Union Building demolished in 1975. The monument — which includes a dove, one of Edmondson’s favorite subjects — is surrounded by columns from the old Tennessee State Capitol, similar to those found at Bicentennial Mall State Park and elsewhere.
The sidewalks between the houses at the Hale Homes more or less follow the surrounding street grid. They have pleasant shade and little grass medians. At the end of the sidewalk connecting the park to Henry Hale Boulevard sits a broken-down Cinderella carriage, its team of horses having turned back into mice, perhaps. Henry Hale Boulevard climbs steadily northwest, lined and divided with more shade trees and wonderful sidewalks. It’s a strikingly hot May morning and the dandelions have already turned fuzzy, the occasional breeze spreading their seeds. Look south and there’s a great view of “the second downtown” on West End. Look east and it’s a postcard view of the Capitol.
Walk a Mile: Watkins Park
At Jo Johnston Avenue — the thoroughfare through this historically Black neighborhood was named, rather crassly, for the Confederate general who led the Army of Tennessee — students head to class at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet in the former Pearl High School building. The school fronts Watkins Park itself, which holds several interesting distinctions. Its community center is home to the city’s smallest public library. The park is home to the city’s first pump track.
Perhaps most importantly, it was the city’s first public park. Brickmaker Samuel Watkins gave the land, known as Watkins Grove, to the city in the 1870s, and Nashville opened it as a park in 1901. In 1906, the Centennial Club built Nashville’s first playground here. In 1936, Nashville segregated its parks, and Watkins Park was a park for Black Nashvillians until desegregation in the 1960s. It also has what may be the tallest magnolia trees in the city, the trunks soaring to the sky, the waxy leaves pendulant from the shade-giving branches.
There’s no sidewalk along 16th Avenue, so walkers are forced to take the trail inside the park’s walls as they head north. Trains churn by on the edge of the park, intimating the heavy industrial past of the area, made clearer by the massive Marathon Motor Works campus on Clinton Street to the east.
The company began as Southern Engine and Boiler Works in Jackson, Tenn., and began manufacturing automobiles in 1907. In 1910, capitalizing on the resurgence of interest in ancient Greek culture after the 1904 Olympics, it changed its name to Marathon Motor Works and moved to this facility in Nashville (coincidentally, the Athens of the South, of course). It was a relatively short-lived undertaking. In 1914, they stopped making cars. Only nine are thought to exist, and five of them are inside the building.
Occasionally, someone will offer as trivia that the Brass Era cars visible on the reverse of the $10 bill are Marathons, the artist subtly honoring Andrew Jackson, who was president when the pictured Treasury Building was constructed. That is, sadly, untrue. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing instructed the artist that the cars not be of any particular manufacturer, so as the government could not be seen to be endorsing one company over another. Instead, the cars are an amalgam of various models available when the bill was designed … in 1928, 14 years after Marathon’s demise.
Marathon is, however, a stunning example of adaptive reuse. The sturdy brick structure has been steadily renovated since 1988 and yet maintains the early-20th-century look throughout.
It includes an eponymous music venue (Marathon Music Works), the local outpost of Antique Archaeology, two distilleries and a host of other businesses. In an era when many developers have found it easier to simply push down an old structure or renovate to the point where the original is unrecognizable, Marathon stands out.
The property is dotted with little automotive Easter eggs: old Dunlop tires signifying the former tire warehouse that was here between the Marathon days and the redevelopment; various old-school gas station knickknacks sourced from Antique Archaeology and the like. One gravel parking lot surrounds a chimney with no explanation.
The campus ends at 12th Avenue, which hugs the interstate loop. At 12th and Jo Johnston, behind intimidating loops of barbed wire and a high fence, is an absolutely stunning collection of Cadillacs.
But unless you are an enthusiastic fan of, say, Harold & Maude, these Caddies are not for you. This is the home of Ambulance & Coach Sales and the surfeit of Cadillacs are specially designed to carry passengers to their final destination. It’s an absolute jigsaw puzzle of hearses, and it’s across the street from Farm in the City, a massive community garden opened by the Metro Development and Housing Agency in 2010, sitting on land that was the state quarry from whence the limestone used to build the Capitol came. Just a little life-and-death dichotomy in an otherwise vacant stretch of Jo Johnston.
Landscaping is underway back inside Hale Homes, notable as the buzz and whir of the trimmers is really the only sound breaking through despite the proximity of the interstate. Chalk on the sidewalk directs visitors to Trae Trae’s birthday party, while Nashville heads to work on Charlotte. But inside the confines of the Hale Homes, it’s almost weekend-quiet, an easy place to drift away.
