Progress comes to an old corner

2025

2009

Progress grabs my old corner For a renter, I don’t change addresses a lot. Those places tend to stick with me. As the first stop in a major life change, 5100 Delaware Avenue in Nashville was probably the place on I checked most. I could see the house from Interstate 40 and passed it often when driving through West Nashville. I always had to look. Once I left for Colorado, I scouted it on Google Maps. 

The house changed over the years. The landlord cut down trees, installed sidewalks and an actual driveway for the central apartment. Hard to believe now, but for almost three years I just parked on the grass near the gate and mailbox. The fence became overgrown with shrubs, forming a decent hedgerow. Unfortunately, my digital check-ins fell off. Nothing could shake the surprise of driving south on 51st Avenue and seeing the house replaced by the same shoddy overpriced apartments that dominated Nashville neighborhoods since The It City moment began in 2012. 

A decade later, the developers finally got to the corner of 51st and Delaware. I should have know its days were numbered. After I moved out, the vacant lot next door became an apartment complex, with the same drab construction that plagues the rest of Nashville. 

The lot was on a busy corner, even in the late 2000s, when Nashville felt sleepy compared to its current incarnation. The old house had been divided into three apartments. Mine came with the porch, and large rooms with high ceilings. A large garage near the alley was home to Mr. Poole, an older man with a lisp and heavy Southern accent. He was the kind of interesting character you don’t often find in post-It City Nashville. He took care of the grounds, mowed the lawn, and trimmed hedges. Even after I moved out, we exchanged waves if I saw him when I drove past. He was old, and a few years later I saw a car that definitely wasn’t his parked by the garage regularly. 

The busy corner provided subtle entertainment. One evening I counted 17 police cars making the turn. The neighborhood was on a rebound, but that never made me feel completely safe. At dusk, Mr. Poole would his two cats on dog run cables in the yard. Some nights I would sit in the living room window, pretending to watch TV when I couldn’t take my eyes off the flannelled man and his cats. He never saw me, watching the dusk as he smoked a corncob pipe. 

Less friendly people walked by at all hours. Many nights I watched television in the dark, so I could keep an eye on who passed by. During the drought and heat wave during my first summer there, I once frolicked in a rainstorm that broke a streak of 100-degree days. No one saw me. 

The place was far from perfect. I hear plenty of sex through the kitchen wall. Percy got a horrendous case of fleas after we moved in. I went through several cans of expensive spray to banish those little fiends. Having hardwood floors and two small rugs helped. The heater was a single unit in the living room that often forced me to sleep there on the coldest nights. At least the Nashville winter is short and brown, and rarely sees more than one good snowfall. A week after I moved out, I saw the whole unit on the curb, its weakness finally apparent to someone other than me. 

But I had a wraparound porch where my potted plants received ample sunlight. Even on hot days, it never felt too bad.  At the time, it was 10-15 minutes from work. I could walk to a few things along Charlotte Pike, although 51st was a collection of gas stations, bars for old locals, and thrift stores, not the hipster playground it has become. 

 After I left Nashville, I checked on the place. My Donelson house got more views, as a few monstrosities rose from modest 1950s houses. But I definitely didn’t check on Delaware Avenue enough, because the apartment complex stands on Google Earth. 

That’s one of the reasons I turned away from Nashville. Too busy trying to become a big city, running away from what gave the city character. They can tear down a house built in the 1910s, they can stock it with fresh faces thinking they have found Nashville authenticity. 

In my memories, I have views they can never own. The tree-shaded porch can never be torn down. Percy can still romp in the yard and sprint inside the second a semi-truck turns the corner. Only I can know the modest apartment that served me well as a Nashville neophyte. 

But that is how progress works.