I moved to Nashville from Hanoi, Vietnam. Kind of an odd move, right? Well, I came here to try my hand at music, and that’s what I did. It was an extremely rewarding, formative experience, but it was also really difficult. Like… really difficult. I had some hard times here. Now, after ~8 years in Nashville, I’m moving on.
To be totally honest, I do not expect that I’m going to miss Nashville. Or, for that matter, even the South, as a region. It was clear from day one that Nashville, as a place, wasn’t a great fit for me. It was never really going to be my home. In fact, in my first weeks here, I actually did a fair bit of research into abandoning ship and moving instead to the one other true “music city”: Los Angeles.
In the end, I chose to stay. I knew that I was here for one reason, and one reason alone: for its utility value to my musical journey. So, as long as the logic of this choice held up, my personal feelings toward Nashville were immaterial; I was on a mission! And once I submerged myself completely in that world, life got very exciting and my geographic location felt like a mere detail. I’ve heard a lot of other music transplants share similar sentiments. Many of us would rather be someplace else and that becomes truer with every backward, bigoted, BS law the state of Tennessee puts on its books. But, unfortunately, if you want to cook up something delicious, it really helps to be in the kitchen. From a personal standpoint, I’d much rather be writing this blog post from a sunny porch in Silverlake right now… *looks off into distance wistfully*… but Nashville was my kitchen. And it did serve its musical purpose extremely well. So, I wouldn’t change these past 8 years… but I am ready to get TF OUT OF HERE. 😂
That said, there is one piece of Nashville that is (mostly) exempt from the above: East Nashville.
East Nashville is the neighborhood that served as home base for me throughout the duration of my time in Nashville, and there was never a moment when I didn’t love this slice of the city. Even at the height of my dissatisfaction with Nashville, I remember saying how much I still loved East Nashville itself. I’d be happy to live in a neighborhood like this one again someday. I just hope it’s not in Tennessee. The casual passerby might not see much past the monstrosity known as Gallatin Pike (which is the main “stroad” of this neighborhood), but once you get off this excruciating wasteland, there is a beautiful neighborhood waiting to be discovered.
It was during the height of the COVID pandemic that I felt like I got to know East Nashville the best. Or, Lockeland Springs more specifically (which is a beautiful sub-neighborhood of East Nashville). What a strange time that was. There was literally nothing to do but go on very long walks, so that’s what we did. Like, 4-5x per week. That first COVID spring and summer is what I remember best. We (my partner and I) would walk from East Park to Shelby Park Community Center to Little Hollywood in a loop over and over again.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about Little Hollywood on here before. What a hidden gem. There’s a little corner of Lockeland Springs that is clustered with stucco, Spanish-style homes, styled after the American Southwest. Its origins back in the 1930s are subject to some debate, but I can tell you that there is a range of sub-genres represented, from mission-style haciendas to small Pueblo-style bungalows, all of which are decidedly out of place in this leafy corner of Tennessee. Except for the humidity, overflowing greenery, and the thick wall of white noise from Tennessee’s vocal insect population, it feels a lot like Los Angeles, which is why it’s be dubbed “Little Hollywood.”
During COVID, there was a house on the corner of Ordway and Lakehurst (right next to Little Hollywood) that set up a giant home garden that I very much enjoyed seeing on my walks. I watched it evolve over the course of a couple of years. It went from homegrown tomatoes and towering sunflowers in the summer to DIY greenhouses in the winter. It’s gone now (I think those people might have been renters that moved out), but these are the details I remember. Maybe I am combining a few different home gardens in my head at this point (there were more than one), but East Nashville will forever be associated with tomatoes and sunflowers in my mind. The tomato is actually the official emblem of Lockeland Springs. In the summer they even have a “Tomato Fest,” which even includes a parade! Why tomatoes? No clue. But it’s endearing.
Anyway, just up the road from Little Hollywood sat a little bakery called Sweet 16th. It was run by couple Ellen and Dan Einstein and it was local in the way small businesses aspire to be, but few truly are. Its customer base represented a perfect cross-section of the East Nashvillian population; people that would never frequent the same sort of establishments in any other situation all had this little bakery in common. It was at the center of a giant Nashvillian Venn diagram, where musicians, tech bros, school teachers, police officers, grandparents, teenagers, and parents with their little kids, all stood in line together every morning. And Ellen knew at least 65% of these people by name, including me. She was one of the most consistent faces I saw throughout my time in Nashville, to the point of feeling almost familial. My partner and I LOVED this place. We’d go all the time for their famous breakfast sandwiches or a big gooey brownie, but what I loved most were their vegetarian breakfast burritos… my mouth is watering just thinking about them. And in a world of trendy, over-priced coffee shops, this place was always extremely, idealistically affordable.
I remember joking that if Sweet 16th ever closed, I would leave Nashville. Like “THAT’S IT! THERE’S NOTHING KEEPING ME HERE ANYMORE!” This turned out to be slightly prophetic because not long ago, Dan Einstein tragically passed away. You can read about it and get to know him and his wife Ellen here. I felt so sad for Ellen. The whole community rallied around her with messages of support and a GoFundMe campaign for Dan’s expenses, but I’m sure it didn’t serve as much consolation. Understandably, Sweet 16th was closed for a while after that. It came back briefly but ultimately shut down for good. And that was right around the time I started planning my move away from Nashville. ☹️
Since then, what has really started to fill that emotional void in East Nashville, for me, has been Shelby Park: a giant forested plot of land crisscrossed with walking trails, sitting at the bottom of East Nashville, on the banks of the Cumberland River. I’ve had some hard times over the past few years, but when I walk at Shelby, things feel possible. It’s truly been an oasis for me, and I think that park is what I will miss most from this neighborhood.
Here’s a gallery of random photos I took around East Nashville over the past 8 years. To you, this might feel like a random collection of pixels, but these pictures give me warm fuzzies. They remind me of the neighborhood where I spent almost a decade living. I remember house shows, long walks on summer nights, mornings at Sweet 16th, de-stressing with walks through the Shelby Park forests… and some growing pains along the way. This is the neighborhood where I spent most of my 20s, after all.
Oh yeah, and I also remember freak weather events!
Just a couple of weeks before COVID hit, a fucking tornado tore straight through East Nashville in the middle of the night. I had no clue it was even going to rain that night, I just woke up in the middle of the night to the most intense storm I’d ever experienced. The storm was so intense that I could actually see our wall and windows flexing in and out with each gust of wind, lightning flashing through our windows like a strobe light all the while. We were afraid the windows might blow in, so we high-tailed it to the basement, where I started getting cryptic 2:30am text messages saying things like…
“Where is it?” “Is it close to you?” “Did it pass you already?” “Are y’all ok?”
I still had no idea what “it” was, but I would soon learn (like in the next 60 seconds) that a tornado had blown right past my house! When the roar of the storm had sufficiently died down, we walked out our back door to discover the WRECKAGE of what had been Woodland Street and Main Street. In fact, there was a brick building right behind our house that took a direct hit and been partially destroyed.
It was less than 200 feet away from our house. That’s how close I came to just not waking up the next morning.
The 5 Points area of Nashville looked like it had had bombs dropped on it. In the dimly-lit, uneasy aftermath, I saw a man laying unconscious in the street. There were already people attending to him and the ambulance arrived like 30 seconds later to take him away, but I later found out that he passed away. And there was apparently a 2nd body buried in the rubble somewhere nearby. It was intense.
However, it was not lost on us at the time that East Nashville had actually fared miraculously well given the circumstances. This tornado had entered an unsuspecting, densely-populated, residential area in the middle of the night, and somehow managed to stick to the roads with businesses that had all closed for the night, and were therefore mostly empty. If it had gone just a bit to the left or right, it would have gone straight down residential streets, and the death toll would have been in the 100s.
It just so happened that the next day I had a trip booked out to L.A., so I got to escape from this war zone almost immediately. (I have mentioned L.A. a lot in this post.) While I was gone I was actually feeling pretty guilty, because this was a big coming-together moment for my East Nashville community as the general public embarked on mass clean-up efforts, and I was missing it. When I got back a week later, the power was still out. And the COVID lockdowns began like a week later. What a time. You can read about this incident here. Some pictures we took that night are below.
I later learned that there had apparently been another tornado that had hit this exact same area in 2001. In fact, there is still a big music studio in the 5 Points area that had been in a state of partial disrepair ever since. Soooo, this is maybe not the best place to purchase real estate.
This incident is definitely burned into the minds of East Nashvillians who lived here at the time. About a month ago I was at a nearby garage sale and saw a sign advertising a novel that had been written by a local, which was set with the 2020 East Nashville tornado as the backdrop. That made me smile. I would 100% read that book. As terrifying as it was, this shared trauma gave me a weird sense of belonging in this community. It also opened a special place in all of our hearts for a Twitter account called Nashville Severe Weather, which we checked compulsively every time dark clouds appeared in the sky.
ANYWAY, there’s more I could say, but this article is getting long, so I’ll wrap this up and give you an organic, locally-sourced Track of the Day that feels relevant to my experience with this neighborhood.
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Goodbye East Nashville. I hope you don’t change too much after I’m gone. ❤️
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P.S., A couple of weeks ago I discovered that Ellen (formerly of Sweet 16th Bakery) is still making the brownies that I loved so much—at home, I guess—and selling them to a local sandwich shop called Mitchell’s Deli. I was SO excited to learn this. I bought a few of them to make a little stockpile and immediately texted people about it. That was an unexpected treat to end my time in Nashville.
