The Loneliest Little House in Nashville

This is an extended version of an article that appeared in the Nashville Scene. Read that version here.

Photo credit: Angelina Castillo, The Nashville Scene

Nineteenth Avenue North weaves a crooked, broken path uphill from Charlotte Avenue, flanked by a Zaxby's and a Walgreens. After an offset intersection at Pearl Street and a soft dogleg, a small house at 1816 Jo Johnston Avenue creates a terminated vista, in urban design parlance, as it stands directly in your sightline from the stop sign at 19th Avenue North and Jo Johnston Avenue.  

The term usually describes the intentional placement of landmark structures, like an ornate civic building or a steepled church, but this house has a stoic humility—it stands in stark isolation, defying its surroundings and decades of policy designed to destroy it.

It is the only house remaining on the north side of Jo Johnston Avenue—a street which is itself a living history museum of the myriad ways that Nashville's Black neighborhoods have been erased and redrawn. 

The house stands starkly alone, as if in defiance to its surroundings. Tall power lines frame the foreground, with taller power lines crisscrossing the background as poles and wires swirl around the NES Watkins Park Substation, which looms over the house like a super-sized Erector Set. A vacant lot sits between the house and the substation. Just feet away, the orphaned stone steps of a long-lost house meet the sidewalk, as if murmuring hints of what this neighborhood once was. 

The house is architecturally unremarkable, lacking the features that define contemporaries as Craftsman, Victorian, or anything other than an indistinct interwar vernacular. Its age has long been difficult to discern due to competing materials and elements added on over many different eras and a more recent top-to-bottom renovation and addition. Metro records tag it with a 1925 vintage, while maps from 1908 and 1914 show a similarly shaped house on the lot.

Whenever it was built, the house went up on a foundation of increasingly stark segregation.

Walking the Line Street

Neighborhoods are not unlike people—both are born from intentional acts and change shapes and identities, sometimes suddenly and sometimes slowly, into a tapestry that grows less and less recognizable across a decadeslong horizon. What is notable about the Watkins Park neighborhood, and the street that forms its central artery, is that it has not changed—it has been changed. The intent with which it was created soon gave way to neglect and carelessness as evolution was imposed upon it, again and again over a century, by those outside its bounds. 

Jo Johnston Avenue was originally named Line Street, as it formed the northern line of the original city limits. After the Civil War, Fisk University and Meharry College drew Nashville's Black elite north of the Nashville Chattanooga & St. Louis railroad tracks, while the area south of the tracks to Charlotte Pike was subdivided and populated by working class Blacks—in no small part because Line Street and its streetcar ran through a notorious red-light district later known as Hell's Half Acre.

In 1900, amidst rising racial tensions, Line Street—the central artery of a Black neighborhood—was renamed after a Confederate general. In 1905, streetcars were segregated by state law, prompting a boycott led by Black business leaders who formed the Union Transportation Company to run steam- and battery-powered bus lines down Jo Johnston Avenue and other corridors; the city council responded by levying a punitive privilege tax on electric buses, which successfully broke the boycott.

Watkins Park was dedicated in 1901, as Nashville’s first public park. Initially segregated by social custom, Watkins Park was formally segregated along with the rest of the parks system in 1936—the same year the Public Works Administration-funded, Black-segregated Pearl High School was built next door on the designs of Black-owned McKissack & McKissack. Pearl High would stand as a nexus of Black life in Nashville in the decades that followed, as it produced notable alumni and sat at the vortex of debates over segregation and integration, even after it was relocated in 1983 to new facilities northwest of Watkins Park in the Hadley/Washington neighborhood and merged with the predominately white Cohn High School. The building in Watkins Park was reopened as Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School in 1986, as integration was finally gaining hold.  

Another physical manifestation of the separate-but-equal doctrine lies to the south, where the John Henry Hale Homes were built in the 1950s as a Black-segregated, barracks style complex. Public housing was desegregated in the following decades; middle- and lower-income whites fled the projects and took political capital with them. Federal policies led to deteriorating conditions in projects like Hale, which would be redeveloped in the 2000s with less than half as many homes arranged in a spacious, suburban style under a federal program intended to deconcentrate poverty. The project and its mixed-income model have had mixed results. 

The I-40 underpass marks a dividing line on Jo Johnston Avenue and a midway point between the interstate’s decimation of Jefferson Street and Edgehill, as it encircled the urban core and disunited the Napier-Sudekum projects from downtown in the 1960s. The highway was initially planned to take a larger chunk of the Watkins Park neighborhood as it hugged the L&N Railroad track, but the route was too close to Belle Meade and shifted north to decimate Jefferson Street instead.  

On the other side of the freeway, Jo Johnston Avenue begins to disappear—first figuratively, as the name on the sign was recently changed to Josephine Holloway Avenue to honor the first Black Girl Scout in Tennessee. Then, the street disappears physically—the neighborhood known as Hell's Half Acre was the first federally-funded Urban Renewal project in the nation. The Capitol Hill Redevelopment Plan cleared the Black red-light district—along with several Black churches, reputable businesses, and homes—and replaced it with a grand lawn and swooping suburban street network encircled by surface parking lots and aging mid-century modernist office and condo buildings. Nashville was among the most prolific exponents of Urban Renewal for slum clearance in the nation—and its devastating effects on neighborhood integrity and displacement fell hardest on Black neighborhoods like Edgehill.

Landmarks stand against fleeting memories, but Jo Johnston Avenue as a cultural space has been reshaped by policies, customs, and events which leave no physical legacy. As the center of the Hell’s Half Acre vice district, the street saw the rise of disparate policing to control Black life—historian Bobby L. Lovett has noted the rise in arrests of Blacks beginning in the 1880s and the unequal treatment of similar offenses between Black and white Nashvillians. Disparate policing has impacted North Nashville for more than a century, in ways both profound and visceral—from the nation’s highest rate of Black male incarceration to the killing of Daniel Hambrick as he ran along Jo Johnston Avenue westward toward 17th Avenue North, just blocks from the Loneliest Little House in Nashville. Flowers mark the memory of a life, while the weight of lived experience hangs heavy in the air.

Zoned Out

Beyond the dramatic, active means to physically reshape the Watkins Park neighborhood, local government also enacted zoning policies to passively aid its deterioration. The protection against commercial and industrial expansion afforded to white neighborhoods by the introduction of zoning in 1933 did not extend to Black neighborhoods like Watkins Park, in a pattern now known as expulsive zoning.  

The 1933 zoning map included expansive commercial and industrial sections—forty eight percent and 421% larger than existing land uses, respectively. As the chief zoning engineer explained, “much residential property has been so blighted and destroyed for residential use as to make its inclusion into the commercial zones necessary... in the hope that chance development may improve the character of such districts.” 

The “blighted and destroyed” residential areas zoned for commercial and industrial expansion were disproportionately occupied by Black residents. Industrial uses were zoned for a block or more off the railroad tracks in Watkins Park—although only a smattering of industrial uses then existed, all tightly hugging the tracks, and most of the land zoned for industrial uses was occupied by residences.

Further east from Watkins Park, the pattern of explusive zoning enveloped blocks around the railroad tracks and much of the Germantown neighborhood with industrial designations—shown here in solid black and polka-dot patterns. Residence D districts, represented by the rectangular crosshatched pattern, covered Black neighborhoods—often separated from white residential neighborhoods by strips of commercial or industrial zones. Source

A mix of commercial and industrial zones lined Charlotte Pike, encircling the residential neighborhood dominated by modest houses and duplexes. The residential center of Watkins Park was designated as a Residence D zone in the 1933 zoning ordinance, which the Nashville Banner noted “cover those areas which are now inhabited by the Negro population. While the ordinance does not set aside this district as race segregation, the provisions are entirely different from those set up in the other residence districts because of the extreme difference in the character of those sections.” 

Proponents of zoning in Nashville were rarely so direct about its intent. In the 1917 decision Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional ordinances which defined explicit racial segregation zones; ordinances were rendered unenforceable in Baltimore, Richmond, St. Louis, Atlanta, and several other Southern cities. But the decision did not defeat the logic of racial zoning—in fact, the central thesis of the majority opinion was that racial zoning ordinances violated the property rights of white owners to freely dispose of their real estate. 

The local movement for zoning gained steam only after the Supreme Court validated zoning as a legitimate use of government police power in the 1926 Euclid v. Ambler decision, and proponents demonstrated acute awareness of the need to work within constitutional limits. While zoning could not prescribe segregation, it could entrench existing patterns of segregation.

The 1933 zoning code preceded the restriction of capital now known as redlining, which originated with a national mapping project that employed local bankers, real estate agents, and other industry professionals under the direction of the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) beginning in 1936. The Watkins Park neighborhood was redlined—assigned the lowest grade of D – Hazardous—as was every Black or racially-mixed neighborhood in Nashville, regardless of the quality of buildings or the class of occupants. HOLC maps directed the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to deny mortgage insurance in D areas, which discouraged lenders from offering loans. The restriction of capital to homeowners contributed to residential deterioration by devaluing homes, while expulsive zoning allowed commercial and industrial interests to buy up property on the cheap for expansion. 

The 1951 edition of the Sanborn Fire Insurance map shows intrusion of a dry cleaner into a residential block, enlargement of industrial uses, and the clearance of much of the 1800 block of Jo Johnston Avenue for the NES Watkins Park Substation. Source

The patterns of expulsive and racially biased zoning established in the 1933 zoning code would have devastating effects on Black neighborhoods like Watkins Park over the following decades. By the 1950s, a dry cleaner had popped up between houses on the 1900 block of Jo Johnston Avenue, while the 1800 block was cleaved by an electrical substation.  The substation continues to mar the aesthetics of the area, expose residents to potential health hazards, and invite birds to roost and leave their waste—which occasionally requires sound cannon blasts for their dispersal. Twelve houses, thirteen duplexes, and four triplexes on the 1800 block were cleared by the substation and its deteriorating influence—only the Loneliest Little House in Nashville now remains. 

After a hundred hard years, the house at 1816 Jo Johnston Ave. has been saved by the newest evolution of erasure in North Nashville. It is freshly flipped—with new Modern Farmhouse board and batten siding, a black-and-white paint job, and trendy address lettering—and sports a second story addition. For $549,000—an estimated $3,241 monthly payment—it can be yours. Its surroundings and its history matter less than the simple fact that, from a newly-added roof deck, one can see the Nashville skyline through the power lines—the tight market for housing near downtown has the power to gentrify even the least scenic locations with a short term rental aesthetic.

And isn’t that how it’s always been? Haven’t the bones of this neighborhood always been reskinned to suit the desires of the present-day?

Every new day, the house greets the sunrise in defiance of decades—standing alone like a stray thread that, if pulled, unravels the logic of the policies that wove Nashville's urban fabric from Watkins Park to Germantown, East Nashville, Belmont, and beyond.