Also part of the Scene's Gimme Shelter issue: stories on a YWCA program that puts victims of abuse in homes they can call their own, a small business that makes home furnishings while giving folks in need a leg up, a tour bus company with some big-name clients and the award-winning home of Mayor Megan Barry and her husband Bruce.
Kim Hayes and Joel Friddell recently bought a residence, an office space and a large room with high ceilings that they plan to convert into a gallery. They're all part of the same property — 2,400 square feet in all, built in the 1920s or earlier, with an upstairs, a mezzanine and a spiral staircase. There's no telling what such a property would fetch in The Nations, Germantown or East Nashville, given the right zoning.
In Columbia, Tenn., they bought it for $180,000.
The site that housed White's Camera Shop for 21 years and its roughly 7 million negatives will need a lot of work, Hayes admits, leading visitors up a steep back staircase past two indifferent cats, lots of unpainted drywall and an enormous Deardorff portrait camera dating back to the 1920s. But when they're finished fixing it up, she believes they'll literally be on the ground floor of Middle Tennessee's next magnet for relocating creative types.
That magnet is the public square in Columbia — pop. approximately 36,000 — some 45 miles southwest of Nashville. Anchored by the Maury County Courthouse built in 1904, it still has the feel of county seats from Murfreesboro to Lebanon: meeting places where old men whittled, farmers transacted goods and neighbors met to exchange news. On Columbia's square, mothers still escort boldly unsteady toddlers and residents still watch passersby with interest.
What's different is the energy feeding into the square these days. Startlingly affordable property, coupled with a zoning mix downtown that allows first-floor commercial and second-floor residential, is luring tech businesses, music companies, restaurants and a variety of boutiques back to the once fading town hub. So far, they say, there's no sign of the hipster poisoning, ruthless development or chain proliferation that has infected many Middle Tennessee hot spots.
Rick Clark made the move from East Nashville to downtown Columbia seven years ago. A music producer and film/TV music supervisor whose credits include the Oscar-nominated George Clooney comedy-drama Up in the Air, Clark could be found one recent weekday in his large second-floor office overlooking the courthouse. Flanked by guitars, tens of thousands of painstakingly filed CDs and banks of multi-terabyte hard drives, he was busy matching music tracks for his current project, the AMC railroad drama Hell on Wheels.
Like Clark, Hayes and Friddell found that superior technology meant they could conduct their business — a marketing and app-development company called neXpiria whose clients include Tennessee Bank & Trust — from anywhere. Other companies have reached the same conclusion, drawn to Columbia by its combination of low property costs, access to Nashville and small-town charm. Among them is the esteemed record label Putumayo World Music, which relocated its distribution operation to Maury County from Brooklyn. Instantly popular additions such as the Muletown Coffee java shop, the revived Variety Records, the clothing boutique Lily Jane and a Columbia-centric outpost of Puckett's are also drawing visitors back to the town's center.
And yet the newcomers have not dislodged longtime Columbia businesses such as Ted's Sporting Goods, now in its 60th year. Instead, they've tried to lift all the downtown area's staunch retailers through efforts such as the recent Muletown Musicfest, organized by Clark, Hayes, Friddell and others. Where other fests gather listeners to a central outdoor stage, the inaugural festival turned the spotlight on Columbia's downtown businesses, making each a venue for performers (e.g., a Nashville Opera harpist at bridal-wear shop Lace and Company). Sponsors — some initially skeptical — had started lining up for next year's event before the first year's was over.
"Downtown is certainly more active than it used to be," says Columbia city planner Liz Olmstead. Not only is the economy better in general, she says, but property on Columbia's main drag is less expensive than in nearby Spring Hill or Franklin. She herself relocated to Middle Tennessee earlier this year from the Seattle area, driven by "better weather and less people."
Walking a shaded sidewalk on a sunny autumn afternoon, Hayes points out eight spaces available for residences above the shops and small businesses that line the square. Lily Jane staffer Susan Leach grew up in Columbia but moved not long ago to Franklin. Would she consider coming back?
"Yeah, probably," Leach says, "the way that it's growing."
