The Ensworth School and the Intentional Neighborhood
How an archway explains the links between neighborhood development and school segregation.
This article originally appeared in the Nashville Scene as part of a series on the evolution of urban planning and development in Nashville and a companion piece to East Hill and the Accidental Neighborhood.
Photo credit: Eric England, Nashville Scene
Students and faculty traversing the Red Gables Campus of the Ensworth School pass through a sandstone segmental archway that hints at a piece of Nashville’s past—and present—that isn’t in their textbooks.
The campus is surrounded by mansions on large lots cut out from the 40-acre Green Hills spread where Claude Waller—a judge and general counsel for the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway—built Red Gables, a historic Tudor Revival house that has grown into today’s sprawling campus. The old house is no longer easily distinguishable from the many similarly styled wings and standalone buildings that have been added to accommodate the growth of the private school over the past 70 years.
The new stone archway hints at the old house hidden behind it. Pass through the portico—but study the arch—and a history of Nashville's neighborhoods, schools and social ties will be unlocked.
The Ancient Arch, Revived.
Ancient Egyptians first discovered the simple, powerful beauty of the segmental arch — a structural element that, by using friction and gravity instead of a binding mortar, can support enormous weights with small stones cut at just the right angle.
Romans mastered the segmental arch. Their techniques for structural engineering followed imperial expansion into Gallia and were taken across the English Channel by the third century. By the Middle Ages, influences from Islamic architecture found expression in Gothic designs for churches and cathedrals, which support window and door openings with a sharply pointed apex that deflects downward pressure.
Strong archways are useful for supporting cathedrals and massive aqueducts, but are not necessary for houses. As the arch trickled down to vernacular architecture, the English economized by flattening the point into a weaker, four-centered span — sometimes with brick, sometimes with wedge-shaped stone voussoirs, but often with just a few longer, sweeping stones — that came to define the Tudor style. But with centuries of distance from the Tudor Period and an ocean away from adherence to English tradition, revivalists of the Tudor style in early 20th century America rediscovered the simple, powerful beauty of the segmental arch.
Small, otherwise independent elements, when cut at just the right angle and set in a mutually reinforced arrangement, can support enormous weights.
The Weight of Segregation.
Plans for the Ensworth School were “in the formative stage” in March 1958. Nashville's stair-step integration plan to satisfy the Kelley v. Board of Education decision had gotten off to a troubled start the year before, and revision of the Parents' Preference plan — which allowed Black students to attend white schools — was imminent. By June a headmaster had been selected, and the private school opened that fall.
The Ensworth School’s swift standup was organized by some of Nashville's most prominent citizens. The chairman of its board of trustees was John S. Bransford, heir to the prolific Bransford Realty Co., which had a hand in the births of several of the surrounding neighborhoods. The company had helped refine the concept of the streetcar suburb by centering subdivisions on a singular community institution. At the Richland addition, where Bransford Realty handled lot sales, Nashville’s first private golf club became the centerpiece in the neighborhood's “special claim as a new enclave of the city's upper class.”
Richland's social enclave of samely citizens was reinforced by restrictive covenants, which set out a homogenous physical aesthetic and barred Black occupancy. Richland Realty Co. executives later became leading advocates for a zoning plan that quietly promised to arrest the expansion of Black neighborhoods.
Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit diagram
The club, the covenants, the containment plan—each individual piece and countless more, like the voussoirs of Red Gables’ segmental arch, reinforced the other. Richland and the neighborhoods that followed were structured to support the broad spans of segregation.
Schools—private and public—would become the keystone.
The style of spatial segregation set out by streetcar suburbanism did not require individual animus. Some of its promoters were simple adherents to the religion of American capitalism—the Bransford Realty Co. built for both white and Black, separately—and its faithful belief that racial mixing created “moral problems” that brought on blight and destroyed property values.
As the streetcar suburbs sprouted, so grew a sweeping pseudoscience to plan for their permanence. Prophets of “scientific planning” pioneered methods to map the racial makeup of urban residents and engineer solutions for their separation. Sociological scriptures were translated into diagrams of orderly “neighborhood units” with “only neighborhood institutions at [the] community center” and federal policies to show preference to “only those neighborhoods which have qualities making for continuity and stability of use over a period of years.” Underpinning the neighborhood unit was a “market imperative” doctrine of segregation that elided the foundations of the market—intentional choices and actions by government, industry and individuals.
The Invisible Hand of the Market Imperative.
Irving Hand was Nashville's disciple of the neighborhood unit planning model and set it into public policy as the director of the Advance Planning and Research Division of the planning department. As documented by Ansley Erickson in Making the Unequal Metropolis, Hand's bureaucratic tenacity had led Nashville planners to divide the city into 81 planning units defined by “similar ethnic groups” and “a centrally located elementary school within easy walking distance of every home” by the late 1950s.
According to Erickson, Hand's evangelism of the neighborhood unit waved away its "casual and unconscionable acceptance of segregation” as the inevitable result of market forces. The model was sound, Hand thought, if it enabled “more effective planning.” By clustering groups of people along lines of class and race, planners could more effectively—and selectively—target public policies, from urban renewal and highway construction to new schools and sewers.
As Erickson details, postwar subdivision developers were eager to benefit from segregated school zones and selective siting. Builders lobbied superintendents to redraw school zones to direct their new neighborhoods into schools deemed desirable by parents. Some even donated land at the heart of communities like Hillwood to entice the school district to center the zone of a shiny new school on their subdivision. The school districts rarely gave a second glance to such enticing gift horses and set out school site standards that favored white suburbia.
Irving Hand soon expanded his scope from the neighborhood to the metropolitan. Hand was a key architect of consolidation, and his profile in the planning world grew, earning him an offer to direct the Pennsylvania State Planning Board, where his work on regionalism garnered national acclaim. Hand left Nashville for Pennsylvania in 1964—well before the 1971 federal busing order broke the model of homogenous neighborhood units he helped design.
He was not around to watch white parents jam the phone lines of Ensworth and other private schools with enrollment inquiries, or see new segregation academies sprout up, or witness Metro schools shrink, shutter and struggle for the rewards of integration. He played no part in the plans to combat white flight and inner city blight—plans that remade the modern Nashville.
If Irving Hand had not moved before post-integration demand pushed the Ensworth School to expand, with addition after addition of new classrooms and amenities at Red Gables, it might have moved him.
His last Nashville address was 203 Ridgefield Court—one-half of a duplex that was torn down in 2007 for an overflow parking lot at Red Gables, consumed by the campus his planning concepts helped create.
The New Suburbanism.
As Irving Hand's last Nashville home was being demolished, one aspect of his local legacy was being rebuilt. In 1998, federal oversight of school desegregation ended in Nashville, and the district eschewed busing for neighborhood schools. Critics decried a 2008 school rezoning plan as a “resegregation plan” driven by business interests’ desires to accelerate gentrification of near-downtown neighborhoods.
New Urbanists revived and rehabilitated the neighborhood unit. The Westhaven “traditional neighborhood development” broke ground in 2002 on farmland outside Franklin. Townsend Boulevard is the central artery of a carefully choreographed site plan that connects a private residents’ club with Pearre Creek Elementary School—a school site donated by the developer to the school district.
In Lockeland Springs, a public elementary school reopened and "built a community” around a common bond. Residents boasted that the school “made everybody's house values double”—a powerful selling point for white parents, who have flooded into the geographic priority zone and turned the school nearly all-white.
Lockeland parents walk their students through a neighborhood of million-dollar listings advertising “LOCKELAND GPZ” to a portico framed by a pair of stone arches of elegant Gothic proportions, capable of supporting enormous weights.
Lockeland School | Source
This article and others in the series are based on hundreds of hours of archival research.
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