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Walka Lebanon Pike

Milewith J.R. Lind In the 16th installment of his column, J.R. Lind ventures east — among the bowling alleys, Baptist churches and train tracks

BY J.R. LIND | PHOTOS BY ERIC ENGLAND

Old Lebanon Road

Lebanon Pike

Donelson Station Donelson Pike

Once a month, reporter and resident historian J.R. Lind will pick an area in the city to examine while accompanied by a photographer. With his column Walk a Mile, he’ll walk a one-mile stretch of that area, exploring the neighborhood’s history and character, its developments, its current homes and businesses, and what makes it a unique part of Nashville. If you have a suggestion for a future Walk a Mile, email editor@nashvillescene.com. THE ROUTE: From

Donelson Station east to Donelson Pike, then north to Lebanon Pike. Left on Lebanon Pike to J.B. Estille Drive, taking that north to Old Lebanon Road, turning right and continuing until Old Lebanon Road reconnects with Lebanon Pike, then heading west to McGavock Pike. CRANES: 0 ABANDONED SCOOTERS: 0

The parking lot at Donelson Station is an asphalt monument to unrealized ambition.

A multi-acre surface lot adjacent to the Music City Star stop, it was clearly planned for hundreds of cars left by commuters opting to take the train from the woody neighborhood east of downtown Nashville. Under a cloudless April morning sky, there are maybe a dozen vehicles in the lot.

When planning began for the Music City Star in 2004, transportation officials predicted an average daily ridership of 1,900 in its first year. In 2019, its peak year, the train averaged around 1,300. Still, in a region without many public transit options, the train — which operates on Nashville & Eastern Railroad’s line from Lebanon to the downtown riverfront — chugs along with two trips each way every weekday morning and afternoon.

It’s a pleasant place, insofar as parking lots go. The siding for the train is lit with fixtures similar to those made famous by the Paris Metro, with their swooping curves and ornate Art Nouveau lanterns.

A one-way road connects Donelson Pike to the station, running by what is now the Donelson Hermitage Senior Center. For decades, starting in the 1920s, the building served as the elementary school for the area, which is obvious — it’s simple enough to pick out, say, the former cafeteria or the gym, or to look behind the building and see where the playground once was. These days — or at least in times when the world isn’t gripped by a once-a-century pandemic — the building still bustles. The center has a robust set of activities and even includes a barber shop.

Across Donelson Pike is one of the finest business signs in all of Metrodom: Donelson Bowl. Property records will tell you the bowling alley was built in 1960, but anyone with eyes and even a passing interest in American vernacular architecture could tell you the same thing. These days, we’d call the sign retro-futurist — it looks like something from The Jetsons. Form mostly follows function for the building itself, though one side features slightly offset bricks, their exposed ends painted in bright primary colors.

A train’s whistle activates the lights and bells on the crossbuck and sends the arms down to block traffic. It’s not the Star, but rather local freight traffic (two N&E locomotives hauling a container), so the wait isn’t long.

The intersection of Lebanon and Donelson pikes feels like it should be a bigger deal. There’s a gas station, a Lowe’s, a bank, an auto parts store. In essence, this is the center of Donelson in 2021. Some of that “Hip Donelson” we hear so much about should be here. In fact, though Donelson is in its way embracing its new desirability (in 2016, Realtor.com declared 37214 the 15th-mostdesirable ZIP code in the country), there’s still a stubbornness for the old ways. While Lebanon Pike and Donelson Pike might be the sensible center of town, it’s a stretch of Old Lebanon Road to the northeast that’s still the heart of the area.

Intentional or not, planners seem dead-set on, in fact, making pedestrians walk on Old Lebanon Road rather than its adjective-free kin. The sidewalk on Lebanon Pike extends only as far as the bridge that carries the road over the tracks, and in fact, it only recently went that far. The construction of a new small strip mall, currently home to a jeweler and a loan provider, required the construction of a new stretch of sidewalk — obviously of a much more recent vintage than the others along Lebanon Pike.

The shoulder on the bridge is far too narrow to use for perambulation, except perhaps for the most harum-scarum of walkers. And so the footborne must cross at J.B. Estille Drive — the Bluefields subdivision,