One of the things you're sure to hear about if you read up on Nashville is a local dish called "Nashville hot chicken," a local culinary specialty. To listen to people talk about it, you'd think eating Nashville hot chicken was some kind of ancient local religious rite. In fact, Nashville hot chicken appears to be a dish of fairly recent provenance. According to the Wikipedia entry for it: Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville for generations. The current dish may have been introduced as early … [Read more...]
The Promise and the Peril of Rust Belt Chic
What do you do when you're a post-industrial city fallen on hard times? There's a sort of default answer in the marketplace that I'll call for want of a better term the "Standard Model." The Standard Model more or less tells cities to try to be more like Portland. That is, focus on things like local food, bicycles, public transit, the arts, New Urbanist type real estate development, upscale shopping, microbreweries, coffee shops, etc., etc. The idea seems to be that the Rust Belt city model is a failure and should be chucked in favor of … [Read more...]
Nashville Rolls On
I have a friend in Nashville and try to get there about once a year for a visit. He knows my insatiable desire for urban exploration, so tries to take me around to new places each time, which is awesome. A couple of my previous trips were documented in the posts "Impressions of Nashville" (from 2007) and "Nashville: Next Boomtown of the New South" (from 2008). As with previous visits, I want to highlight a few observations I had. The first is, "What Great Recession?" Yes, Nashville surely suffered from this, and there's a notable absence of … [Read more...]
An Examination of City-County Consolidation
[ This piece will serve as a warm-up to a forthcoming series on the downsides of the consolidation of US city and county governments. I updated it from the original with a bit of information about the current mayoral election in Louisville. ] H. V. Savitch and Ronald K. Vogel of the University of Louisville authored the paper "Suburbs Without a City", analyzing the merger of Louisville and Jefferson County, and in the process making many good observations about or relevant to other consolidated cities like Indianapolis and … [Read more...]
Nashville: The Next Boomtown of the New South?
I traveled to Nashville for the first time in 2007, spending most of my time in the downtown area. I posted my impressions here, noting the high growth and high ambition level as well as the fantastic freeways, but also the generally unimpressive development and built environment. I did another fly-by in April of this year. I made a conscious effort to try to get out and see different areas this time around. My tour guide was an Indy native who had spent the last decade or so in the northeast. He'd moved to the city about a year previously, … [Read more...]
Impressions of Nashville
I spent a very brief Memorial Day weekend in Nashville, Tennessee. It was my first visit to the city. While I normally focus on Midwestern cities, Nashville and some others in the southeast are very much along the lines of what I would call "aspirational" cities. Of course, this is based on a too-brief visit, but let's face it, first impressions matter. Two somewhat contradictory things stand out in my mind. The first is that Nashville is a city on the make. Like many Sun Belt metros with heady growth, Nashville really has the feel that it … [Read more...]