In the unlikely event that you ever wake up on Christmas morning to see that your city has literally been bombed, you should anticipate some cognitive dissonance. You’ll be confused and will feel like curling up in a ball and wishing it away. That’s sort of how I took events on Friday morning, working with only some images at a distance and reporting from the astonished, holiday shift B-team on the TV news. They said there were three minor injuries and no fatalities, so that put us at ease. Sort of. Yet with the air as thick with uncertainty as our downtown was with smoke, it was just very hard to know how much damage had been done to our historic Second Ave. We saw burned out cars, blasted trees, broken glass and a charred streetscape, but they weren’t allowing photographers into the blast zone. So maybe it was superficial, we could tell ourselves.
Then came Saturday evening, when News Channel 5’s Phil Williams posted these images and the infuriating truth became clear.
This obscene and unbelievable sight, just blocks from and months after the wrecking path of the 2020 Tornado, reaffirmed the wonder that nobody died in this blast. It clarified the bravery of the police, who didn’t stand around seeking advice about what to do but who rousted the folks who live or were staying in the upstairs apartments and short-term rentals above the businesses over a four block area as the ominous messages coming from the RV counted down, ultimately making good on its threat. But we also learned that the true casualty of this tragedy is our history, our public space and trust.
Second Ave., called Market Street until 1903, has been an important hub of commerce and Nashville life for more than 150 years. Photographer Keith Dotson summarizes at his gorgeous architectural portfolio of the avenue, which you absolutely need to visit for closeups of facades and details we’ll never get to live with again:
Most of these buildings were constructed between 1870 and 1890, when the street was still called Market Street. They were originally used as warehouses and retail shops selling goods transported in from riverboats on the nearby Cumberland River.
The 2nd Avenue buildings run a block deep, with their backsides forming the historic 1st Avenue row of warehouses (1st Avenue was called Front Street in that era). Riverboats would dock and offload goods and produce, which would be received on the Front Street sides of the warehouses, and then retailed from storefronts on the Market Street (2nd Ave.) ends of the buildings.
I’ve heard these three long city blocks called the longest unbroken stretch of original 19th century Victorian urban buildings in the southeast, though I don’t know. But it has been an impressive feature of Nashville. Second has long been the quiet sibling of boisterous Broadway, a tree-lined and strollable street even in the crowded “it-city” era. It starts for me with a building I particularly love (and which was well outside the damage), the quirky 1893 Silver Dollar Saloon building, which has since about the time I moved here has held the Hard Rock Cafe gift shop on the Broadway corner. From there, Second slopes gently uphill toward Public Square Park, the Metro Courthouse columns visible all the way. The buildings on the left side between Broadway and Commerce are older and attractive, but not nearly as rich as the river-side facades, with arched brick windows, cornices, capitals and terra cotta decor. It’s hard to believe these were utilitarian buildings - warehouses with winch cranes that hauled dry goods and tobacco and barrels of booze up and into spacious floors to serve the riverboat traffic on their Eastern side. Journalist Demetria Kalodimos posted this remarkable photo on Monday to give a sense.
Then there are the personal memories attached to the place. No, I never darkened the door of Hooter’s, and the now-destroyed fondue restaurant the Melting Pot was never my hang. But there was a good stretch of events at B.B. King’s (limited damage) and I’ve endured some weird work shows or parties at the Wildhorse Saloon (unharmed). In my early years in Nashville though, two Second Ave. establishments were quite dear to me. One was Market Street Brewery and Pub, which was one of the first if not the first craft beer maker in town and where I spent many happy turn-of-the-millenium nights under its high beamed ceilings, catching my young friend Dierks Bentley play bluegrass on its stage with half the Del McCoury band and other hotshots. I even got up and sang a few with him a couple times.
More central to my life for a time was a long-gone magical venue called Windows On The Cumberland. In the late 1990s, I’d drive from East Nashville over the Shelby Bridge (now a pedestrian skyway over the Cumberland) and park easily and free on the street. You’d enter through a door near the Wildhorse that led to some interior professional offices and, oddly for Nashville, a little head shop selling bongs. Past that, along the creaky wooden floor, was the joint, with a bar on the right, a stage on the left and, as advertised, windows! They were tall and thin and graceful, offering a spectacular view of the water, the Shelby Bridge, perhaps the General Jackson riverboat paddling by. We saw the structure of the Titans football stadium being erected and its lights come on in the late days of the 1990s. Owner Boots Hill was a mensch and a benefactor of nobody songwriters and musicians like myself. He sold domestic beer in bottles and cans. It’s the one room in Nashville where I played a lot with pickers who became great friends.
Second Ave. has survived much, including waves of mind-stunting plans to raze it in the name of urban renewal. It was finally listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and granted a historic zoning overlay in 1997. Buildings of similar vintage have been demolished just recently, though in fairness some of them were truly irreparable. Second Ave’s buildings seem indestructible, and perhaps the scars of the Christmas Bombing can be made coherent and meaningful with smart architecture and planning.
Clubs and bars and restaurants come and go. Things change. But our lived environment subtly stitches us together and grounds us, and to lose any of it to some nihilist suicide bomber amid a rising tide of national anger and pointlessness is profoundly sad and emptying. My mother taught me to notice and enjoy and protect old architecture. It’s shared heritage and public beauty, of which there’s always too little. I love modern architecture as well, but clean lines only work in cities when set against classic forms. The new is made more valuable by the old, and vice versa. Hey, I could hear that as a topic for a bluegrass song, and with time I’m sure somebody who loves good old Music City will write a ballad of a bombing on Christmas day that took away a little part of us.