The Only Apartment Building in Belle Meade
A nearly 100-year-old complex demonstrates how the affluent suburb has maintained its exclusivity.
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 and The Last Single-Family House in the Murphy Addition.
Photo credit: Eric England, The Nashville Scene
Black sheep usually stand out more than this. The Helena Court apartment building at 527 Belle Meade Blvd. stands barely taller than the mansions that sit snugly at its sides — one a historic Tudor, the other an opulent new-build. It is a basic early-20th-century courtyard apartment building that would look just as much at home in Edgefield, in Hillsboro Village or on West End Avenue. Boulevard House — which opened to residents in the 1930s as Helena Court — is as nondescript as it gets in Belle Meade, with its three stories of bricks and bay windows lacking a broad facade or pretentious ornamentation. It is not style that sets Boulevard House apart, but substance.
Boulevard House is the only remaining rental apartment building in Belle Meade. How it earned this title strikes at the very heart of why Belle Meade became its own city.
From Plantation House to Apartment Houses.
The 12-unit Boulevard House sits in the first subdivision cut out from the Belle Meade Plantation. Like other turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs, the subdivision once included deed restrictions to establish exclusivity — such as large lots with 100-foot front-yard setbacks and mandatory minimum construction costs — and forbade ownership or tenancy by “persons of African blood or descent.”
When those restrictions expired on Dec. 31, 1926, the lot was subdivided again. One new parcel was sold with a different set of deed restrictions — apartments were now allowed, though Black people were still barred from owning or occupying them — and the construction of Helena Court soon commenced.
When the building opened to residents in 1930, it commanded among the highest rents in the region. A two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment went for $110 per month — a little north of $2,000 in today’s dollars. But four years later, as the Great Depression reached its depths, those apartments went for just $70 to $75 per month. Helena Court was the last gasp of the Roaring ’20s in Belle Meade.
A Zoning Code With a City.
As economic conditions improved, a proposal for the first new apartment project in a decade alerted Belle Meade residents to the fact that the deed restrictions covering most of the enclave were to expire at the end of 1938. The apartment proposal caused a crisis — renewal of private deed restrictions was at the discretion of individual property owners, but many were intent to sell for top dollar to an apartment builder or commercial enterprise.
Though exclusive streetcar suburbs within Nashville city limits had established zoning restrictions a few years earlier, the elites of Belle Meade distrusted inner-city machine politics and disfavored the higher tax rates associated with annexation. With no county zoning ordinance, there was no easy option for a majority of property owners to impose restrictions on the rest.
Radical action was required. On Oct. 25, 1938, 397 poll-tax-paying residents of Belle Meade voted to establish a city “for the purpose of protecting property values by zoning and planning, and for no other purpose.” The first item of business: a zoning ordinance that banned apartments and all commercial uses. The only other duty of the Belle Meade city government was basic street maintenance.
To adapt the famous quip about the Prussian Army: Where most cities have a zoning code, the Belle Meade zoning code has a city.
Splinters and Satellites.
The withdrawal of its richest enclave set off alarm bells in Davidson County and bolstered the push for county zoning — an ordinance was passed in July 1940 that covered the booming automobile suburbs extending up Gallatin Pike and across Green Hills.
But county zoning did not appease the forces that drove suburban balkanization. Against appeals to civic pride and metropolitan unity, more small areas sought to defect. Tiny working-class Berry Hill incorporated with a rush vote in February 1950, driven in large part by a desire for liquor stores, which were then allowed only in incorporated cities. Critics of the 138-135 vote for the “hazardous experiment” of a “sham city” warned that the town was too small and poor to financially sustain itself or provide adequate services.
Other “splinter cities” incorporated in the image of Belle Meade. As the push for city-county consolidation accelerated, residents of Oak Hill and Forest Hills organized to preempt annexation or absorption into the city and its land-use regime. Like Belle Meade, both prohibited new commercial uses, banned apartments, and imposed large minimum lot sizes while offering limited urban services. (Nashville residents would ultimately vote to incorporate in 1962, with the Metro Government of Nashville and Davidson County being implemented the following year.)
What Is a City? What Is a Sham?
The divergent forms and fortunes of each splinter city — officially “satellite cities” under the Metro government — are the outcomes of a natural experiment in urban governance.
The critics of Berry Hill were right: It could not sustain itself on residential property taxes alone. In 1968, just 18 years after incorporation, it rezoned its entire area to allow commercial uses — which generate taxes at 1.6 times the rate of residential property per dollar of value. Today old-timers in midcentury ranch houses and newcomers in tall-and-skinnies peacefully coexist side by side with small businesses of all stripes. With a loose, pro-growth zoning code enabling large apartment complexes, Berry Hill grew its residential population nearly fourfold in the 2010s. When scant wealth is not extracted from elsewhere, it must be built up from within.
Belle Meade, Forest Hills and Oak Hill have maintained their physical and cultural landscapes; each remains more than 90 percent white, and social change has come slowly. Of course, there has never been a suburb of nothing — the wealth that sustains these privileged enclaves is not generated by their mansions, but in the office buildings, stores and factories of the city its residents rejected. Perpetuation of the past is a privilege of wealth; all others must adapt to changing times.
So there Boulevard House, formerly Helena Court, stands, a tie to the past and a vision of an alternate future — a hint of how exclusivity might present, if it were not so dependent upon exclusion.