Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.

(Originally written in June 2020)

Nashville’s unofficial bird is the crane. From where I’m sitting as I write this, I count eight cranes looming over Music City.

According to the Nashville Business Journal’s “Crane Watch”, as of May 2020, there are 34 tower cranes in the Nashville skies — a number that's held relatively steady, with one crane seeming to appear each time another is dismantled. The tally is nearly as many as Seattle, and more than Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Washington, D.C., according to the firm Rider Levett Bucknall.

We live in the suburbs. I usually cringe when I see the massive, metallic machines looming over the sky. I bitch to myself about how I don’t even recognize sections of the city anymore. I complain about the lack of affordable housing and how musicians can’t even live here anymore.

Since temporarily relocating into the upscale, Gulch neighborhood, I’ve started to rethink my negative attitude. Cranes are a sign of growth. New buildings certainly beat boarded-up ones due to closures, which is the case in many cities and towns across this country (even pre-pandemic).

I came to this realization today as we walked Peggy. We walked north along 11th all the way to Jefferson. We discovered a section of the Nashville Greenway we didn’t know existed.

It occurred to me, as we stood on the NE corner of Broadway and 12th, that this used to be a super sketchy corner. When we first moved to Nashville in 2007, I noticed the only people who walked around were occasional tourists and homeless people. I longed to live in a walkable city.

Walking Cities

One of my favorite parts of traveling is exploring cities on foot. I always make a point to arrive early or depart a little later, so I can have time to walk around. This has resulted in me discovering all sorts of cool places creating my own mental Altas Obscura. Some discoveries that come to mind from such adventures are the doors in Scottsdale, a punk rock shop in New Hope, and a wicked record shop in Tucson.

It is because of all of this construction in Nashville that new walkable areas of downtown areas are appearing. I noticed many people out strolling to work, walking dogs, and jogging. I marveled at how we were able to safely move through the area with ease along the sidewalks and walking paths. I wished the traffic lights would change without a need for pedestrians to press the button, but this was overshadowed by the progress.

Nashville still has a ways to go to become a fully walkable city. It scores 28 out of 100 from WalkScore.com. I looked up my hometown of Toronto and it has a score of 61. Not too shabby.

What’s your city’s walking score?

When I was a kid, we used to walk to our grade school (middle school) every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow. I did the same walk each day for about five years or so.

That’s five years of walking past the same scary high schools, same convenience store, same homes, same trees, you get the idea.

A while back, I heard someone talking about virtually walking to school again using Google Street View. I gave it a try and was totally enthralled by the experience. It brought back such vivid memories of hiding behind a wall and throwing snowballs at cars, of buying candy at the convenience store (or panhandling out front), stopping in at an old apartment building to pick up a friend, a near death from a falling tree during a storm.

It also brought back great memories of my brother Mike and friends, Carrie, Pat, Maria, Richard, Spence, and others whose names are slipping my mind at the moment.

The virtual walk was strange because many of the buildings have changed now. I had no idea that a group of homes had been torn down to build condos. In fact, one of the high schools had become a condo too! Oh, Toronto, when will the condo fetish cease?

Still, the majority of buildings are where they were way back when. Even the old decrepit wall is still there. It's the one that we used to climb to sneak under the fence of the high school’s football field, or to roll down into massive banks of snow. 

The whole experience of virtually walking to school again was an amazing one (I'm a sucker for nostalgia). It took a few minutes and many clicks to get there, but not nearly as long as it did by foot, and it was a heck of a lot warmer this time too. 

Give this a try for yourself. Has your old neighborhood changed much?