Climbing the Charts (eBook)

Chapter 1

Nashville Now

In a relatively short amount of time, Nashville has transformed from the country’s “biggest small town” into the “Now City.” Metro Nashville is currently home to about 1.9 million people, with projections of 2.5 million people living in the Nashville area by 2040.20 In 2016, Nashville gained a net 69 new people each day on average, and just a year later, in 2017, the city gained an average of 100 new residents every day, primarily due to people moving to the city.21 Per Forbes’ 2018 list, Nashville is the seventh-fastest growing American city, just behind Las Vegas and just ahead of Austin.22 (For context in just how much these changes have been accelerating, in 2017, Nashville was only number 20 on Forbes’ list of fastest-growing cities.23)

With such rapid growth, Nashville has needed to learn how to handle the growing pains that come along with a city’s development. Our recent hosting of the NFL draft is a great example of how we’ve managed to navigate these challenges.

The Cherry Tree Crisis: A “Both/And” Mentality

Here in Nashville, we love football. (Go Titans!) Naturally, people were excited for Nashville to host the NFL Draft.

With the draft, not only would we get a front-row seat to one of the biggest football events of the year, but the draft would also bring in a nice chunk of change, with an estimated 100,000 visitors and $125 million economic impact.24 What more could you want? Well, if you were a Nashvillian, you wanted all of the above without anyone laying a finger on your beloved cherry trees.

A few weeks before the draft, it was announced that 21 cherry trees in downtown Nashville would be removed to make room for a temporary stage for the event. Some of the trees would be transplanted, but some would be cut down and turned into mulch. The announcement could not have been more poorly timed. The cherry trees were just beginning to bloom, and the annual Cherry Blossom Festival was two weeks away.

Nashvillians weren’t having it. The Loraxes of Nashville jumped to the trees’ defense, with 66,000 people signing an online petition to stop the trees’ removal.25

At this point, there’s nothing special about this story. This happens all the time: sacrifices are made in the name of economic improvement. Trees might make a city beautiful, but money is what keeps it alive. Twenty-one trees in exchange for $125 million is a fair price—that’s about $6 million per tree. But here’s where Nashville is different: when the people protested cutting down the trees, the city listened. People first found out about the trees on a Friday evening, and by that following Monday, the day the trees were originally slated to be cut down, the city had revised its plans. Instead of removing 21 trees, they would remove just 10 trees, all of which would be transplanted elsewhere, not turned to mulch. Plus, the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation and the NFL would donate 100 cherry trees each—200 total—to Metro Parks.26

According to some, the uproar over the trees highlighted a growing rift between “old” and “new” Nashville: the “it” city versus “our” city.27 But part of Nashville’s secret sauce is that we aren’t one or the other; we are both. This isn’t a story about old fighting new; it’s a story about compromise, about Nashvillians standing up for their city so that we can continue to grow while retaining what made us special in the first place. In a time when red tape and government bureaucracy make the wheels of change grind slowly, it’s also a story about how Nashville gets things done. A lot can happen here in just a single weekend.

In this battle between cherry trees and the NFL, the clear winner was Nashville itself. The draft ended up attracting not 100,000 but 600,000 visitors and brought in $133 million in direct spending, with total economic impact estimated at $224 million.28 It was such a success that the city hopes to leverage it to secure a 2026 World Cup hosting spot as well as a future Super Bowl. The city undoubtedly came out ahead, with a cherry on top in the form of 200 additional cherry trees for the city.

A big part of Nashville’s secret sauce—what makes Nashville Nashville—is the “both/and” mentality epitomized by the cherry trees controversy. We aren’t willing to take one or the other—NFL draft or cherry trees, economic growth or cultural development, big city or small town. We want it all, and we fight for it.

The result is that the city is transforming not into a metropolis, but a cosmopolis. Being cosmopolitan means that we are “citizens of the world.” We aren’t just a city with a large population and economic opportunity. We are a worldly city—a city founded on culture. Since Nashville’s beginnings, the city has been defined by its huge creative class. We’re a city of makers. That creative spirit is woven into the fabric of the city and has been a major contributor to the city’s recent growth.

Cultural Factors Contributing to Nashville’s Growth

A city without culture is a city without identity. People are naturally drawn to cities with strong cultures because culture is what transforms a city from a network of buildings to a home. Nashville has a unique culture founded on music, art, and sports.

Anyone who knows anything about Nashville knows it’s a city of music. Nashville’s soul and edge is music. It’s the undertone that flows through the entire city.

Nashville is known specifically for country music, but our live and recorded music scene extends beyond country, as evidenced by Kings of Leon, Nashville’s alternative rock pioneers, and Jack White’s Third Man Records, which is a nexus for indie rock and Americana artists. We also have a highly regarded $123.5 million symphony hall that opened in 2006.

Nashville’s music scene is a blend of established heavy hitters and up-and-coming artists. In the 1990s, Lower Broadway’s honky-tonk strip underwent a revival, and there’s now a synergy between the big performance venues like Bridgestone Arena and the honky-tonks. Many artists will perform an arena show and then hop across the street to a place like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge to give a more intimate performance. As a result, you never know who you will see performing in Nashville. You can go to a tiny hole-in-the-wall to see an unknown band, and then Pink or Metallica will come out on stage. It’s an incredible experience and far more common than you’d expect. Just about every Nashville native has at least one story like this. (Brandon and Angie, for instance, were both fortunate enough to catch a surprise REM performance at Mercy Lounge, a small venue with a standing room capacity of 500.)

Music is Nashville’s soul, but the culture extends beyond music to include festivals, galleries, and museums. Taking advantage of nearly year-round beautiful weather, Nashville is host to outdoor festivals celebrating everything from tomatoes and wine to, of course, music. We have been ranked as having the fifth most vibrant arts community among large cities in the United States.29 The city has numerous monthly neighborhood art crawls as well as the Frist Museum, a contemporary art museum that opened in 2001, and OZ Arts Nashville, a contemporary art performance center. (For more on Nashville’s art scene, see Chapter 12.)

Our most iconic piece of art is the world’s only full-scale reproduction of the Parthenon, with a 42-foot-tall golden statue of Athena—the tallest indoor sculpture in the Western world.30 Another artwork favored by locals and tourists alike is the bronze Musica statue on Music Row. The statue’s dancing figures are typically nude, but on game days, you will find them adorned with local sports jerseys. In response to COVID-19, they were even bedecked with their own face masks.

Accolades and Awards31

• Nashville ranked number 15 on U.S. News & World Report’s 125 Best Places to Live in the USA (as of April 2019).
• Nashville appeared on Forbes Travel Guide’s list of the Top 20 Destinations for 2020.
• Nashville was named Sports Business Journal’s Best Sports City in 2019.
• Bridgestone Arena was named Arena of the Year, and Ryman Auditorium was named Theatre of the Year by Pollstar in February 2018.
• Southern Living named Nashville one of the South’s Best Food Cities 2019.
• In June 2018, TripAdvisor named Nashville as one of America’s Best Cities for Beer and Brewery Tours and one of the 10 Best Foodie Vacations in America.
• In July 2019, Nashville hit number 6 on Cvent’s Top 50 Meeting Destinations in the U.S.

As demonstrated by the way we festoon the Musica statue, the city has a vibrant sports culture. We have a trifecta of professional sports teams with the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, the NHL’s Nashville Predators, and the MLS’s Nashville Soccer Club. There’s also been talk of MLB expansion, with Nashville...