Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Monday, April 12, 2021

Tearing down, building up

I had a moment of mild distress over the weekend, when I was out riding my bike in the Sylvan Park neighborhood of Nashville and came across yet another recent teardown. There are lots of those here, as the building/housing boom proceeds apace. Damn the pandemic, full speed ahead. But the mindset (not just in Nashville, in the U.S.) has always seemed to be devoted to "progress" of a sort that obliterates tangible traces of the past.

 

One of those old and reassuring traces for me was a house on Utah Avenue that was once home to a continuing series of my friends and colleagues in grad school at Vandy in the 80s. Fortunately for once, memory misled: that house was at the corner of 44th Avenue, not 42d. It still stands, it's not reduced to a fading pile of rubble just yet. Confirmation of its precise location came from a former resident, now living in Seattle, who requests that I snap a photo of the place that holds such fond memories for her next time I'm in the neighborhood. I'd better get on that, the dozers are restless. Historic preservationists have their hands full... (continues)

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