Getting It Right: Downtown Nashville's Lower Broadway

[thelakelander]

Nashville's 2019 NFL Draft scene is what happens when you mix local history, culture, historic preservation, economic development, sports and sound planning principles together.

Read More: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/getting-it-right-downtown-nashvilles-lower-broadway/

[bl8jaxnative]

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The development of this type of authentic and compact urban scene since the late 1990s is what has catapulted Downtown Nashville past comparable peers such as Downtown Jacksonville by rising the city's national profile and placing it in winning position to host this year's NFL Draft.
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There are some things to learn from Nashville but it should only be compared to tourist-centric cities like Orlando.  If it wasn't for the tourism, all the plans in the world wouldn't have lead to Lower Broadway being the busy, tactlless success peppered with disneyfied "honky tonks".   And it wasn't just the tourists even.  The city's poured over a billion into that area between building parking ramps, Bridgestone, the pedestrian bridge to connect Nissan Stadium to lower broadway, etc.    Having the country music hall of fame move down there at the turn of the century did it wonder too.  And having the mother church of country, the Ryman already there didn't hurt either.

It's been worth it but unless a city has the kind of pure tourist numbers that Nashville has, they ain't gonna be able to emulate Lower Broadway.   

One thing to note is how the city has been able to take advantage the growth of Nashville as a whole to revitalize the edge areas of the greater downtown.  It wasn't that long ago that south of Lower Broadway was a see of surface lots. To the West between Music Row and downtown, The Gulch was a wastescape, centered around a lot of unused railroad land.

In the last decade The Gulch has been booming and infill projects from there to the river have seen lots of surface lots  removed for new construction.   It's wonderful.  Well, except for what it may mean for the future of the Village Station, probably the best place for bluegrass in Middle Tennessee.

There's a lot to look for.  But we should be mindful that Nashville has a lot of things that JAX and most every other city does not.    Just keep in mind that it's not exactly what people would consider authentic.    It's more like bro-country.

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/bro-country-sucks

[thelakelander]

The things to learn are applicable to every vibrant pedestrian scale setting. Doesn't matter whether its Nashville, Mount Dora and the inside of Aventura Mall.  When you cluster, complementing uses within a compact, pedestrian scale setting, good things tend to happen. With this in mind, Nashville has simply found away to successfully apply these things around its culture. If Jax did the same, it would find success in its own Jax sort of way.