LOST EDGEHILL: URBAN RENEWAL, COLLECTIVE AGENCY, AND GENTRIFICATION IN A SOUTH NASHVILLE NEIGHBORHOOD

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2024-05-15

Type of Work

Department

Program

MA in Historic Preservation

Citation of Original Publication

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This work may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.
Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States

Abstract

In 2022, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce announced that the city was growing by 98 individuals per day. This explosive growth has put an unprecedented strain upon the city’s historic resources, predominantly affecting historic neighborhoods occupied by people of color. As historic preservation professionals, it is our mission to tell the fuller American story, and in this case the fuller story of Nashville. The portion of the Edgehill neighborhood that this study focuses on has been the site of erasure, followed by a period of community-based activism to prevent a large-scale housing project, and concluding with hyper-gentrification in the past decade. In the late 1960s, the Nashville Housing Authority documented the area, resulting in a collection of 35-millimeter slides that show the Edgehill neighborhood on the cusp of demolition. The images were captured to justify the buildings impending demolition. This collection exists as the only photographic evidence of the buildings that once existed there. This thesis project explores these themes from 1940 to the present day, using Nashville’s Edgehill neighborhood as a model. To combat erasure and the loss of the memory of a neighborhood, the project utilizes an archival collection to tell the story of a place that no longer exists. Using social media as a medium, the project seeks to keep Edgehill’s memory alive, inspire a new generation of preservationists, create a forum for conversations surrounding Nashville’s growth and gentrification, provide access to a previously unseen photo collection, and tell the fuller Nashville story. This study produced two products: this framework paper and a social media project. From August to December 2023, I posted archival images from Metro Housing and Development Agency’s photo collections housed at Metro Nashville Archives to Facebook and Instagram. The images and stories in those posts went on to inform the content in this paper and vice versa.