East Hill and the Accidental Neighborhood
The East Nashville neighborhood serves as a bridge between two eras of suburban growth.
This article originally appeared in the Nashville Scene as part of a series on the evolution of urban planning and development in Nashville. Previous articles in the series include: The Loneliest Little House in Nashville, The Last Single-Family House in the Murphy Addition, and The Only Apartment Building in Belle Meade.
Photo credit: Eric England, the Nashville Scene
East Hill is an odd neighborhood.
Each street in this small pocket of East Nashville extends from Gallatin Pike in a straight line, like ribs from the spine, for nearly half a mile westward. There is little connective tissue—Delmas Avenue does not link to any other street in the neighborhood, despite sitting at its geographic center, and residents of the north half must exit the neighborhood to visit its south half.
Each street is characterized by different styles. Fairwin Avenue is a largely intact ensemble of old Tudors and Craftsmen. Spain Avenue has been transformed with tall-and-skinnies. Carolyn Avenue boasts an eclectic collection of cottages. Delmas and Burchwood avenues are each a muddled mix of it all.
But as disparate as these streets may seem, they come together to build a bridge between two eras of suburban growth—instantly obsolete products of a past, and accidental visions of the future.
Sketches by Spain
East Hill was never intended to be a neighborhood. Each street was created independently of the others by separate owners. Spain Avenue was first, in 1904, with a strip of 100-foot-wide lots carved out of a sliver of land owned by Bush Spain. Delmas Avenue was recorded the following year, while the other streets in East Hill were subdivided late in the 1920s boom but not built upon until after the Great Depression.
Bush Spain was among the last of a dying breed of subdivider—not a professional real estate man, but a bookkeeper and elected justice of the peace. Throughout the 19th century, most expansions of the city had been made by men like Spain—owners of small, disjointed pieces of land who sketched out plats and sold off lots as the market and their personal situation dictated.
By the turn of the 20th century, sophisticated streetcar suburb syndicates formed to plat hundreds of lots on cohesive street networks across large acreages—even then, the modern idea of a neighborhood was just beginning to take shape, and most carried names that referenced physical rather than social connection, like the Richland Addition or the Murphy Addition.
But wildcat developers like Spain persisted. Their ad hoc, unplanned and unnamed urban expansions compounded into a collision of self-contained street grids that followed the outlines of ownership rather than a compass or coordinated plan. This pattern wasn’t problematic for a walking city, but the mangled webs of streets did not adapt well to the automobile, as the offset intersections along Gallatin and the other pikes caused traffic snarls that cried out for a regulatory solution.
Fortuitous Accidents
Bush Spain and the single-street subdividers of East Hill might not have known it, but their primitive plats foretold trends that defined automotive suburbanization for the rest of the century. A 1938 Federal Housing Administration technical bulletin “Planning Profitable Neighborhoods” set forth subdivision design standards upon which approval for federal loan insurance would be based.
Many of the features of “profitable neighborhoods” were already present—albeit by accident—in East Hill. The bulletin annotated diagrams of “bad” and “good” neighborhood designs with a series of dicta: Subdivisions should discourage through traffic, direct cars to major thoroughfares, provide wide lots and reduce cross streets in favor of economical long blocks.
The FHA was concerned also with the expansion of “incompatible” neighborhoods and residents, which could be halted with subdivisions that were less a web of interconnected streets and more an archipelago of partitioned neighborhood islands. The isolation of East Hill—disconnected from the street grid that facilitated expansion of mixed-race North Edgefield up to Douglas Avenue—was perhaps why it formed the boundary of a “still desirable” area when FHA/HOLC redlining maps were drawn in the late 1930s.
Blocked Off and Boxed Out
In March 1940, just as the first houses on Burchwood, Fairwin and Carolyn avenues had finally begun to sprout up, Davidson County adopted rules and regulations for land subdivision. Streets like those in East Hill would no longer be allowed. Blocks had to be interconnected, no more than 1,600 feet long—400 feet shorter than Spain Avenue. The rules set forth further standards for lot sizes, building setbacks, utility easements, roadway design and construction, and more.
Rather than a set of rules responding to local conditions, Davidson County’s regulations borrowed heavily from American Society of Civil Engineers publications and reflected the dogma of the age for subdivision design and management, as developed by influential subdividers like J.C. Nichols of Kansas City.
The ordinance even included a set of model deed restrictions developed by the FHA with counsel from Nichols. The restrictions aligned with decades of practice by sophisticated streetcar subdividers in Nashville: “Restrictive covenants in deeds specifying the exact use of the property, the side, rear and front yards, the cost of the house, the architecture, and even the race of the inhabitants, are extremely useful in carrying out the design.”
While the prior decade of planning and zoning policy had been imbued with softly spoken segregationist intent, it was in the 1940 subdivision regulations and its model deed restrictions that local government explicitly endorsed residential segregation by race. Racial restrictions were included with later East Hill subdivisions like Dozier Place and added to individual deeds on lots that were originally unrestricted. These government-sanctioned instruments of private discrimination helped entrench most of Davidson County’s early automotive suburbs as all-white enclaves.
From Prototype to Mass Production
The design features prototyped in East Hill were refined and intensified in the following decades. Later iterations of FHA subdivision design requirements pushed suburban developers toward even longer blocks, curvilinear streets and dead-end culs-de-sac, while methods of exclusion were expanded and sharpened.
As subdividers became community builders, and suburban extensions pioneered by plats like East Hill were refined, the very concept of a subdivision would be redefined—not merely a collection of streets and lots and buildings, but a collection of people; of neighbors with a shared identity based on homogeneity.
Policy cannot always change the spatial structure of a city once its streets have been laid. But policy structures society—the social norms and notions that we lay atop our places.
That’s what made East Hill a neighborhood.