Drive By Review: Nashville, Tennessee

The next major city we drove through on our trip was Nashville, Tennessee. I actually lived outside of Nasvhille for a brief period, but I was only 3 years old, so I don’t remember a whole lot. Otherwise, I’ve never spent much time in this city, despite driving past it over 100 times over the past 20 years.

We got off Interstate 65 onto 440 and exited onto Nolensville Pike, south of the city. The area looked a bit downtrodden, but as we approached downtown things seemed to get nicer very quickly. We entered downtown on Second Avenue and couldn’t help but notice quite a few large developments downtown under construction. Most looked to be either new office buildings or condos. I recall reading about Signature Tower, which will be the tallest building in the US outside of NYC and Chicago, but at the time I wasn’t sure if it was under construction yet, or where it was going to be located. Will drastically change the skyline when it’s done though.

One thing you don’t really notice from looking at photos of the Nashville Skyline is that their downtown area is actually quite hilly. Most streets slope toward the riverfront, which was a very vibrant area, even on a Sunday afternoon. Lots of bars and restaurants. Many neon guitars and places where you can buy boots and cowboy hats. Nashville is the country music capital, so I’m not sure how much of these places would be of my interest, but I have to imagine that they probably have some diversity to the music/nightlife scene.

Just like Columbus, Nashville doesn’t have Amtrak service, but they do have a single 32-mile 6-stop light rail line called the Music City Star that runs from their riverfront downtown out to the suburbs. Service just began in 2006, and impressively it only cost $41 million to get up and running. The system operates on existing CSX rail lines, and used railcars from Amtrak to keep startup costs low. Several additional routes are being planned to reach out to other surrounding suburbs, similar to the COTA FastTrax Light Rail plan that Columbus voters shot down a few years ago. The only downside I see to the system is that it only operates on a Monday-Friday Rush Hour schedule. I imagine they would expand service hours in due time when demand increases. Either way, it’s a great start.

Anyway, we circled around downtown a few times, but didn’t really explore the west side of 65 (looked like more construction going on over there) or the other side of the riverfront (where the football stadium is located). Plenty to check out on our return visit.

The good:

• Very dense and mixed-use downtown.
• Impressive amount of ongoing downtown development.
• Nice looking riverfront and entertainment districts.
• Light Rail service up and running.

The bad:

• Possibly too much country music for me to handle.
• Not really anything else “bad” that I could see from the car.

Verdict:

We were both impressed by what we saw in Nashville. We looped up and down quite a few streets to see what all was there. We will definitely be back to spend some more time in this city.