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The Transformation of Will Hoge
TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG
Terminator the SecondIN THE WORDS OF SHAKESPEARE
Idea HatcheryDEBUT OF 5 POINTS COLLABORATIVE
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Boys and Girls Basketball (K-6)Girls Cheerleading (K-6)
Early registration ends October 12Games begin Saturday, January 14
UPWARD BASKETBALL CHEERLEADINGCOMES TO EAST NASHVILLE
REGISTER NOW!615.250.1140, [email protected]
510 Woodland Street, Nashville, TN 37206
N A S H V I L L EFIRST CHURCHNAZARENE
PublisherLisa McCauley
EditorChuck Allen
Associate EditorDaryl Sanders
Art DirectionDaddy D Design
Ad DesignCurt Perkins
Contributing WritersHelen Gaye BrewsterElizabeth ChaunceyCailtin CuppernullFrancie HuntEric JansCarole Anne KingTheresa LaurenceLynn TaylorAndrea Bailey Willits
Contributing PhotographersAerial Innovations of Tennessee, Inc.Chuck AllenPeyton HogeStacie HuckebaMorgan PaigeAlex Smythe
Advertising Contact:Lisa [email protected]
www.theeastnashvillian.com
© 2011 Kitchen Table Media, LLCThe East Nashvillian is published bimonthly by Kitchen Table Me-dia, LLC. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from the Publisher. All rights reserved.
CorrectionThe East Nashvillian regrets the following er-rors which appeared in the July-August issue: On Pages 5 and 39, the name of the author of “Not Your Grandmother’s Container Garden” was misspelled. The correct spelling is Alan Murdock. In addition, photo credits attributed to Wendy Whittemore on Pages 5, 23, 24 and 35 should have been attributed to Aerial Innova-tions of Tennessee, Inc.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Election reduxRunoff races in two East Nashville districtsBy Eric Jans
Viva Victorian!East Nashville’s historic homes, Part IBy Lynn Taylor
Terminator the SecondHusky Jackal mixes Sci-Fi and ShakespeareBy Caitlin Cuppernull
To old, to die youngThe transformation of Will HogeBy Andrea Bailey Willits
Carol NortonKnows her historyBy Helen Gaye Brewster
From Egypt to East NashvilleItalia owner’s journeys led to good food and moreBy Chuck Allen
Holly Street Rocks!Annual fundraiser supports tuition subsidies By Theresa Laurence
Breaking the bonds of isolationMartha O’Bryan Center helps disadvantaged fami-lies engage with the broader communityBy Francie Hunt
Five Points CollaborativeHatches a batch of cool, new businessesBy Carole Anne King
Gone, but not forgottenPhillips-Robinson to offer pet memorial serviceBy Elizabeth Chauncey
Parting ShotWe pity the fool!By Aerial Innovations of Tennessee, Inc.
Cover and Table of Contents photos by Peyton Hoge 5
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Question: What do The Terminator, Will Hoge, and an Egyptian born entrepreneur have in common? You guessed it — East Nashville!
This humble community of ours inspires me. We are blessed with diversity, amazing talent, and a willingness on the part of our neighbors to be involved in making this a better place for everyone. As our story on local community activist Carol Norton shows, this didn’t just happen overnight. Her story is a reminder of the positive influ-ence one dedicated individual can have on their community. It’s also a reminder of how far East Nashville has come, as well as how far it still needs to go. Lisa and I are committed to helping facilitate positive change within our community, and we chal-lenge our readers to join in. Acting locally is a great tonic for taking the edge off the frustration created by watching Congress at loggerheads.
The first and perhaps the easiest step in the right direction is to let your voice be heard by voting in the runoff election. Eric Jans follows up last issue’s election cover-age in “Election Redux.” If you’d like to see the Gallatin Road corridor evolve beyond being a pedestrian-unfriendly eyesore splitting the community in two, then vote.
So what about The Terminator you ask? Well, our newest contributing writer Caitlin Cuppernull explains in “Terminator the Second,” along with some really cool pictures. Just check it out.
This month’s cover story also falls within the arts and entertainment area. Andrea Bailey Willits sat down with Will Hoge at the FooBar for a conversation recently, and discussed … I’ll let you read the article. Check out a video of the interview, shot by Redbone Entertainment, on our website. I’m looking forward to seeing Will live at the first of this year’s Live on the Green concert series. My personal thanks go out to Will for taking the time to share his story with us.
East Nashville has an extraordinary collection of period homes, and if you’re like me, you may have found yourself wondering, “I wonder what the story is behind that place?” Not to worry. Resident expert Lynn Taylor guides us through some of the dif-ferences, and what to look for in “Viva Victorian.” She will continue her walk through East Nashville history in an upcoming issue.
So there you have some of the highlights. I hope you enjoy this issue as much as I have. We’re in this together, so never hesitate to send us comments or suggestions, and may we meet some day at the end of the rainbow.
Chuck [email protected]
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PLUS, receive priority seating for 2011-12 BROADWAY SPECIALS, including Spamalot and the return of Wicked, Nashville’s most popular musical!
2011-12 SEASON September 27 – October 2, 2011
November 15-20, 2011 January 3-8, 2012
February 7-12, 2012
May 1-6, 2012
March 20-25, 2012
See all six season shows for less than $150tpac.org/broadway 615-782-6560
TPAC Box Office (Downtown or inside The Mall at Green Hills)
Groups of 20 or more call 615-782-4060 Some shows may contain adult language and content. Memphis contains mature subject matter. As always, we
encourage you to contact TPAC directly for more specifics. Artists, schedules and show titles are subject to change.
2011-12 HCA/TriStar Broadway at TPAC Season is sponsored in part by:
October 19 – November 6, 2011 January 27-28, 2012
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The predictability of the Metro gen-eral election on Aug. 4 led to low voter turnout overall, but there
were some surprises, especially here in East Nashville.
As expected, Karl Dean and East Nash-ville’s very own Diane Neighbors were reelected as mayor and vice mayor, respec-tively. All five incumbent at-large council members won as well: Megan Barry, Ron-nie Steine, Tim Garrett, Charlie Tygard, and Jerry Maynard. The amendment to preserve the Fairgrounds and make it more difficult for them to be razed for redevelop-ment was approved by 71 percent of Nash-ville voters.
Even with mostly predictable results, there are some major changes. Our new council is younger and more inexperienced than the last council. Almost half of the council is new to the office and many of the newly elected council members are young-er than those they replaced. Ten council
members (and up to 14 depending on run-off elections) are in their 30s. Besides the shift in age, another major shift is increased representation from women and minorities on the new council.
In East Nashville, the District 5 and 6 council races resulted in a runoff which will take place in September. In District 7, local business owner Anthony Davis barely es-caped a runoff by getting just over 50 per-cent of the vote.
“It was such an unforgettable election day, and really such a memorable summer of 2011, for me,” Davis says. “I was com-pletely humbled to come out over 50 per-cent of the electorate with two opponents who were both working their campaigns this summer.
“Right now, I am just so excited to get to work for Inglewood, Madison, and Rose-bank. I would like to publicly thank every-one for supporting me, opening your homes to me, letting all of us candidates send you
mail, all those sorts of things. I learned so much just getting out and meeting with you, hearing concerns and sharing my ideas for our area moving forward.”
Davis says the work isn’t done here in East Nashville. “I would certainly encourage all the District 5 and 6 voters to get back out there,” he says. “Turnout for a runoff will be really, really low. Everyone’s vote will count immensely, and this will matter for the next four years, of course. But as a candidate, I know how hard we’ve all worked this sum-mer, so please mark your calendar, and get out once more for your candidate of choice. I look forward to working with the winners over the next four years on issues we share such as Gallatin Road improvements and the East Nashville education system.”
Other issues sure to be at the forefront are mass transit, whether the city needs a property tax increase, zoning, and econom-ic development. With three districts, East Nashville’s representatives will play a part in the direction for all of Nashville. Spe-cifically in this neighborhood, there will more about the SP Zoning along Gallatin Road, talks about connecting light rail to downtown, and the possible revitalization of Main Street.
The resultsSo how did the Aug. 4 election break down in East Nashville?
District 5District 5 had the most dramatic fight at the polls.
Councilman Jamie Hollin opted not to run again after serving two years. He previously led a campaign to oust former Councilwoman Pam Murray through a recall election and won against her by two votes. She was on the ballot again this year against two other people involved in that campaign — neighborhood activists Pris-cilla Eaton and Amy Bryson. Shortly after the deadline for getting on the ballot, Bry-son announced that she would be moving out of state. Scott Davis made a formidable grassroots run which netted him a major-ity of the votes, but not enough to avoid a runoff election. He faces Murray again on Sept. 15.
District 5’s boundaries are north of Main Street to just past Trinity lane and west of Gallatin Road to I-65/I-24. Business dis-tricts inside District 5 include Main Street, Gallatin Road, Dickerson Road, Trinity Lane and the area around Holland House.
ELECTION REDUXRunoff races in two East Nashville council districts
District 7’s Anthony Davis was the only East-side candidate to win outright on Aug. 4.
By Eric Jans
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Davis got 39 percent of the vote and Murray got 37 percent, which puts them head to head in the runoff. Eaton received 19 percent and Bryson 5 percent.
District 6In District 6, the outcome was difficult to predict. There were five candidates on the ballot to take over for the well-liked Mike Jameson, who served two terms and was term limited.
Peter Westerholm, Dave Rich, and Hans Schmidt were the frontrunners and all did well at the election forum held at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in June. Longtime neighborhood activist Bob Borzak suffered a brain hemorrhage shortly after announc-ing his council run and Morelia Cuevas pulled out of the race, but not until after her name was already on the ballot. Wester-holm will face Rich in the runoff election on Sept. 15.
District 6’s boundaries are south of Main Street and east of Gallatin Road. The northern boundary is Straightway and Carter. The boundary to the east and south is the Cumberland River. District 6’s busi-ness district includes Five Points, as well as
Shelby Street, Woodland Street and Main Street/Gallatin Road.
Westerholm led all votegetters with 40 percent leading to a runoff against Rich, who had 31 percent of the vote. Schmidt had 23 percent, Borzak had 4 percent and Cuevas got 2 percent.District 7The fight over Erik Cole’s seat in District 7 led to a clear winner. Cole served eight years and was term limited. Business owner Anthony Davis faced retired policeman Randy Reed and Stephen Downs, and re-ceived just enough votes to win.
The boundaries of District 7 are north of Straightway past Briley Parkway, staying east of Gallatin Road and bordered by the Cumberland River. Besides Gallatin Road, the main business district inside District 7 is Riverside Village.
Davis got 51 percent of the vote and will be the next councilman for District 7, tak-ing over for Cole. Reed got 38 percent of the vote and Downs had 11 percent.
What’s next?In the Aug. 4 general election, only 1,475
voters cast a ballot in District 5 and only 2,268 voted in District 6. With the turnout so low, an even lower turnout is anticipated for the runoff election. The candidates who can turn out their votes will be the victors. The East Nashvillian urges all voters in Dis-tricts 5 and 6 to cast their ballot in the run-off election, to ensure the best leadership possible for the neighborhood.
You can watch the election forums for both District 5 and District 6 online on YouTube:
District 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og5KhzEfS4s&feature=youtu.be
District 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1q55UDniXo&feature=youtu.be
Where to vote
For the runoff election on Sept. 15, early voting begins Aug. 26 and runs through Sept. 10. Voters in districts with runoff elections can vote early at the Metro Office Building on Second Avenue. On the day of the election, voters in the districts with runoff elections can vote at their regular polling stations.
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Editor’s note — Lynn Taylor is a nationally recognized residential designer (www.taylor-madeplans.com). This is the first in her three-part series highlighting the historic styles of homes in East Nashville.
East Nashville has a diverse group of residents and historic houses. Its houses are full of history and char-
acter. The historic styles we find in East Nash-
ville evolved over decades. Availability of building materials dictated design. How-ever, industrialization and the advent of the railroads meant materials were more acces-sible and varied. Manufacturers built com-plex components such as decorative detail-ing, doors, windows, and siding expressly for shipping via rail, allowing designers and builders more freedom of expression.
This guide will help identify the styles and period of your home, but it is not in-tended to be absolute. Design has always been organic, reflecting unique elements, trends, and our changing lifestyles. We be-gin with a look at the late 1800s.
Victorian-era houses, 1860-1900This first part of this series will feature dif-fering styles from the Victorian era, includ-ing Victorian Italianate, Queen Anne, and Folk Victorian. Each style has distinctive details, as well as numerous substyles or variations.
Designers and builders from this era bor-rowed stylistic elements from past architec-ture then blended the designs with local styles and materials. In addition, the reign of Queen Victoria in Britain from 1837 to 1901 heavy influenced our lifestyles and our architecture.
VIVAVICTORIAN!A selected guide to historic homes in East Nashville, Part I
By Lynn TaylorPhotos by Chuck Allen
Queen Anne• Irregular shapes, ram-bling floor plans• Hipped pyramid roof with a prominent forward facing gable or cross gable• High pitch roofs• Highly ornamented spindle work• Towers and turrets are common• Wraparound porches
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Queen Anne• Irregular shapes, rambling floor plans• Hipped pyramid roof with a prominent forward facing gable or cross gable• High pitch roofs• Highly ornamented spindle work• Towers and turrets are com-mon• Wraparound porches
Folk Victorian• Emphasis on vertical pro-portions• Moderate-pitched roofs — around 6:12• L-shaped floor plan or gable front and wing• 14’-to-16’-wide gable front• Decorative detailing is less elaborate than other Victorian styles• First floor ceiling height – anywhere from 11’ to 14’ tall
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Victorian Italianate• Emphasis on vertical pro-portions• Low-pitched roofs — around 6:12• Heavy molded windows and doors, especially at the header• Tall narrow (24” to 28” wide) windows with some windows arched, • First floor ceiling height — anywhere from 11’ to 14’ tall
In an upcoming issue of The East Nashvillian, we will explore the American Foursquare, transition-al Victorians, American Crafts-man and American Bungalow.
The ambitious first production from East Nashville’s Husky Jackal Theater promises all the complex
themes of a Shakespearean tragedy: love, war, power struggles, death — and time-traveling killer robots.
Terminator the Second, a stage adaptation of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, tells the sci-ence-fiction story of John and Sarah Con-nor’s struggle to save the human race from a supercomputer, using only the words of
William Shakespeare. For nine months, longtime friends and Husky Jackal co-founders Cody DeVos and Marshall Weber picked their way through Shakespeare’s 37 undisputed works to piece together a line-by-line script for their bizarre brainchild.
“I think even Merry Wives of Windsor has a line in there,” Weber says.
Looking for a way to get back into the-ater after stints in filmmaking, teaching, and ghost tours, DeVos and Weber found-
ed the local collective behind this pairing of James Cameron’s action-packed futuristic flick with “the guy” of playwriting, as De-Vos neatly put it. The two met in Hender-sonville, Tenn., during a high school per-formance of James and the Giant Peach, and after several years outside the theater scene, they rounded up a group of like-minded friends to form Husky Jackal. Not ones for tradition, they originally intended to per-form an entire Shakespeare play, Macbeth, in a dive bar.
The group began looking into perfor-mance space, discussed costume ideas (wrapping themselves in bed sheets) and even held a couple of production meetings, but quickly realized that audiences accus-tomed to professional Shakespeare compa-nies might not be ready for an amateur pro-duction of “Shakespeare at Springwater.” From this revelation, an attachment to the Terminator retained from childhood and one fateful Sunday-night celebration fol-lowing the Saint’s 2010 Super Bowl victory, “William Shakespeare presents Terminator the Second” was born.
“We didn’t quite know what that meant,” DeVos says. “But the concept kind of stuck, and we came up with the rules we would do it by — only lines from Shakespeare, and the only things that could be changed were proper nouns and pronouns, and verb tenses where necessary.”
With Weber tackling most of the bard’s histories, DeVos the comedies, and the two sharing the tragedies, they camped out in the back rooms of their homes with a two-column word document and stacks of heav-ily highlighted copies of Shakespeare’s ma-jor works. More sci-fi fans than Shakespeare scholars, they tried to be true to both the themes of the film, which they say fit sur-prisingly well with many of Shakespeare’s, and the film’s technical and futuristic quali-ties. The latter proved to be a challenge when working with 400-year-old texts that don’t mention “a man who’s invincible and shape shifts and is liquid metal.”
“Sarah Connor has to explain that a mili-tary supercomputer has become self aware and has sent a robot back through time, and also that the resistance – which is led by John Connor in the future – has also sent back a terminator,” Weber says. “Luckily Shakespeare used a lot of symbolism.”
DeVos and Weber managed to find the
Terminator the SecondHusky Jackal mixes Sci-Fi and Shakespeare
By Caitlin CuppernullPhotos by Morgan Paige
Jasson Cring (front) stars as the Termi-nator and Marshall Weber as T-1000 in Terminator the Second.
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16th Century equivalents of computers and artificial intelligence in the mystical ten-dencies of Macbeth and pulled descriptions of war and violence from Richard III, Henry V and Hamlet.
Though the idea and script might have been hatched by what Weber calls “two jokers in our nerd hole reading Shake-speare and watching Terminator 2 over and over again,” the pair is dedicated to stag-ing a quality performance and has recruited talented members of the Nashville theater scene to help. Their roughly 20-person team includes a costume designer, sound technicians, actors drafted from Nashville’s Shakespeare Festival, and a prop guy ca-pable of making cardboard look like virtu-ally any object other than cardboard. When Tim Kirkpatrick arrived at a recent Husky Jackal rehearsal, he rifled through a bag of impressive fake guns and computer pieces and held up an exact replica of Sarah Con-nor’s gadget-heavy vest.
“I made this out of garbage, okay?” Kirk-patrick says. “You don’t have to be the best at what you do; you just have to be the only one who does it.” Kirkpatrick might very
well be both. Even a close inspection didn’t reveal the original components: a stroller, belts, and cardboard, all pulled from the trash and spray-painted black.
“We were sort of deeply aware of our novice, entry-level position when we were taking on this thing, so we took pains to try to secure people who really know what they were doing and to grow Husky Jackal that way,” Weber explains.
It’s a safe bet the lead actors know what they’re doing. Jasson Cring (the Termina-tor), has a theater degree from Tennessee State University and Kahle Reardon (Sarah Connor) holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from New York University. Reardon has starred in numerous Shakespeare plays and was actually tipped off to Terminator the Second during an audition for the Nash-ville Shakespeare Festival.
“It’s a great challenge,” Reardon says of the production. “It’s nice to do something different. I usually get stuck playing Juliet. After about ten years, you get really tired of pretending to be in love with everyone.”
Rounding out the lead cast are Jamie Bradley as John Connor and Weber him-
self as the supercomputer, T-1000. DeVos is directing.
Husky Jackal has also been remarkably successful with fundraising, moving well beyond initial plans, the heart of which were a dance-a-thon and a “Chili Truck with Mustaches,” which is exactly what it sounds like — a food truck where workers wear fake mustaches and serve chili. They even attracted international attention.
Much of this success is due to a post We-ber and DeVos put on Kickstarter.com, a website designed to help independent art-ists fund creative endeavors by using a so-cial media platform to increase awareness and find donors. Thanks to a global web of contributors, Weber and DeVos raised more than three times their initial goal of $3,000. In return for donations, supporters will receive “Shakenator” swag correlating to the amount of their contribution, from T-shirts and posters to personalized videos and cast visits.
“We kept pretty high [expectations] of ourselves, but [Kickstarter] definitely was the extra push – once people took hard-earned money out of their pockets,” Weber
Jamie Bradley (left) plays John Connor and Kahle Reardon is Sarah Connor in Husky Jackal’s mashup of Sci-Fi and Shakespeare.
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Continued on Page 32
TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNGOn the eve of his brand-new record, Number 7, Will Hoge talks about how a life-threatening accident forever changed his priorities, his voice and his songwriting
By Andrea Bailey WillitsPhotos by Peyton Hoge
On the inside of Will Hoge’s left forearm is a tattoo of a motor scooter with a red line
through it. “No scooters,” he says, tilting
his arm outward to illustrate his point. He half smiles, but he’s not kidding.
In 2008, in the midst of making his sixth album, The Wreckage, a scooter accident almost claimed the 39-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist’s life. Nashville was abuzz with concern, and a headline in USA TODAY proclaimed, “Rock-er Will Hoge in Critical Condi-tion After Accident.” For the first time in over a decade, the music stopped as Hoge faced a yearlong process of relearning to walk, hold a guitar, and sing.
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Today, in a blue-and-white checkered button-down and jeans, Hoge doesn’t look like he’s been to hell and back. He’s lean, with magnetic dark eyes, unruly hair, and a contagious grin.
On a sweltering July afternoon, he’s sit-ting at a green Formica tabletop in the back room of the FooBar on Gallatin Road, ironically just down the road from where his accident occurred. Hoge seems right at home, maybe because he spent years doing soundchecks in similar clubs.
He left college in the late ’90s to pur-sue music, and hit the Southern bar circuit hard just when bands were getting web-sites and MySpace was taking the music business by storm. Listeners flocked to his raspy vocals and classic rock sound. He sang about love in the heartland rock tradi-tion of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, and his songs were earnest and melancholy and catchy as hell. He played at the Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry House, and toured with artists like Shinedown, Needtobreathe, Marc Broussard, ZZ Top, and Edwin McCain.
Hoge always had the makings of a per-former. His father, uncle and grandfather were all musicians in Nashville, and he was brought up in Franklin listening to his fa-ther’s record collection: Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Ray Charles and other legends of popular music. With a solid musical lineage and inherited musical taste, Hoge never looked back. His home for the better part of a decade was the road.
“That’s the one thing you can control as a musician,” he says of logging some 300 shows a year. “There’s only so much you can control over your relationship with a record company or with radio. But we can go out and put on whatever live show we want. We can get people to come see us. That’s why [touring has] always been so important — it’s the direct link between the band and the fans.”
His fans, or Hoge Heads as they’re af-fectionately called, gave him the energy to maintain his punishing schedule. His first studio record Carousel, his major label release Blackbird on a Lonely Wire, and subsequent independent albums were each followed by relentless touring. But Hoge’s wanderlust wore his bandmates thin, so there was a lot of turnover in personnel, which contributed to the band’s ever-shifting sound.
That was fine with Hoge, whose musical tastes are vast and adventurous—a range that includes rock, country, soul, blues and
folk. He intended every record to sound different, and he immortalized almost ev-ery phase of his band’s life with a live re-cord. Those snapshots piece together years spent in a blacktop blur.
Hoge slowed his frenetic pace when he met his wife and they welcomed their first son. But actually stopping was out of the question until an August day three years ago. Hoge had just left the studio near Bel-mont University where he was recording The Wreckage, and was headed home to his Inglewood house. He’d been riding a motor scooter exclusively for four or five years for the environment and to save money as gas prices climbed.
“I had always been safe,” he says.
But he couldn’t avoid the 15-passenger van at Seventh and Main that didn’t see his scooter, failed to yield and broadsided him on Aug. 20, 2008. EMTs rushed to the scene and lifted his broken, bloodied body into an ambulance. The van driver was fine, but the future looked bleak for Hoge.
When Hoge came out of a coma, he was lying in Vanderbilt Hospital, and he felt like he was choking. Tubes were jammed down his throat to help him breathe, and blinding hemorrhages blocked his vision. His fingers fumbled to find a piece of paper and scribble down, “Wife and kid?” A nurse told him, “You’ve been in an accident on a motorcycle. You’re in the hospital. Your wife is here and your family is fine.”
Relief washed over Hoge. “In a lot of ways, that was my first bit of therapy,” he remembers, “that first moment when I real-ized, the most important things are OK.”
Over the next few days, he realized the extent of his injuries — crushed lungs, nu-merous broken bones, and lacerations re-quiring more than 100 stitches. His unfin-ished record was the last thing on his mind. He was focused on his family and just be-ing able to walk again.
“I never let myself think I wouldn’t get back to some sense of normalcy,” Hoge
says. “Certain things were going to be dif-ferent, like in the way that I walk. There was gonna be pain and arthritis as I continued to grow, as I got out of the hospital and had to transition from being in a bed constantly to a wheelchair for months, then a walker and a cane.”
After 10 grueling months of physical therapy and surgeries, the day finally ar-rived when Hoge’s wife was able to leave him on his own at the house. His shoul-ders had healed enough that he could hold a guitar, and he recalls sitting alone in his living room in a wheelchair trying to play and sing again.
“That day, I could hear glimpses of what my voice sounded like before, and I could feel things within my hands playing-wise,” he says. “That was a pretty cathartic mo-ment of realizing that it wasn’t okay, but it would eventually be okay.”
Physically, he says, it changed his voice. Post-accident, Hoge’s guitar playing was, as he puts it, “slightly above average as it always was,” but his voice was considerably drier and raspier.
“You get into habits as a singer, what comes natural—and for 12 years, you rely on that,” he explains. “When that changed, I had to reapproach everything as a vo-calist. I had to sing quieter because it was all I could do, but that in turn has led to me being able to do different things now, widened the material I’m able to write and perform.
“For example there’s a song on The Wreck-age, a very quiet, personal, upfront song that I wouldn’t have been able to sing that way before. And there’s a song on the new re-cord called ‘Tryin’ to Be a Man,’ and it’s even more conversational in its delivery. That’s just something I wouldn’t have done before, but those are two of my favorite songs I’ve done, ever.”
His songwriting changed as well. It was always honest in that “love sucks and some-times I’m an asshole” kind of way, but after the accident, Hoge realized he was capable of more.
“It’s not like Jan and Dean, and I came back writing ‘Dead Man’s Curve,’” Hoge quips. “But [the accident] changes every-thing so much. My appreciation for even things that are nonmusical — being alive, my family — all of those sort of things par-lay themselves into how I write.
“I feel like I’ve developed a bit more pa-tience as a writer and as a performer. I no-ticed that before the accident I would sort
“It’s not like Jan and Dean,
and I came back writing ‘Dead Man’s
Curve.’”
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of hit my limit in the studio or even as a writer as I was working on something. If the song didn’t get finished in an hour, I would sort of cast it aside and then never go back.
“Since then, I’ve learned to have patience and explore things that are a little more personal to me in the material. Sometimes I worry that it’s too personal and people aren’t going to understand it. But I think [the accident] opened up something in me where I’ve got more of an ability to do that. If I make things even more personal, some-times it becomes more universal in some ways. I don’t think I had much of that be-fore the accident.”
The changes are all over his new, self-produced album, Number 7, on shelves September 27. Like previous records, it’s a melting pot of sounds. The download-able single “When I Get My Wings” floats on R&B influences, a horn section and a Memphis Stax soul vibe.
“The rest of the record runs the gamut of everything that I love in music,” Hoge says proudly. “There’s some very straight-ahead rock & roll stuff in it. There’s some country-tinged songs; there’s some political material; and stuff that’s just relationship
fodder. It’s the most representative of who I am and the things I love about music. If someone asked me how to sum up who I am as an artist, I would feel confident giv-ing them this record.”
Even before the accident, Hoge had searched for a way for music and family to properly coexist, and a near-death experi-
ence made his priorities that much clearer. He says it’s “that pesky maturity that every-one in the business is trying to avoid.”
“My desire to be gone all the time — I just don’t have that desire anymore. There’s a very finite amount of time you have to dedicate to your family and be on the road.
You can’t create more time with either one. The thing I’ve learned over the years is try-ing to up the quality of both of those things. When I’m home, I’m trying to make sure I spend as much quality time as I can with my family. And in turn, when we tour, may-be it’s less shows, but the quality of those shows is way more important to us.”
Hoge loves to talk about his wife, Julia, a Belmont student when they met now completing her master’s to become a school counselor, and his two children, Liam, 4, and George, 1. They live on the East Side in a quiet, green neighborhood. On the av-erage day, you might run into them at Wa-tanabe, Mitchell’s Deli or Jeni’s Ice Cream.
It’s clear from spending an hour with Hoge that he is a changed man. The wis-dom behind those dark eyes isn’t that of a carefree, single rocker. It’s that of a devoted artist, husband and father who almost lost it all.
“I was so fortunate to be surrounded by great family, friends and fans,” he says. “It was tough, and it was a tough two years after that trying to get everything back to normal. In some ways it’s still getting back to normal. But it’s a process that I’ll keep putting up with.”
Live On The Green
Will Hoge will perform music from his new album, Number 7, at the season’s first Live On The Green concert at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 8 at the Nashville Public Square. For more information, got to www.liveonthegreen.net.
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Carol Norton moved a lot when she was growing up as an Army brat. And she learned a lesson from her
daddy that she’s never forgotten. “Every-where you are is home,” he said. “Learn the history of where you are and always give back to the community.”
Norton came to Nashville in the mid-1970s with her husband and daughter. The young family lived in Donelson and she started a job as an educator with the Planned Parenthood teen clinic on Maxwell Av-enue. And, that’s how she discovered East Nashville. As she went to and from work, she would drive through the neighborhood and look at the historic homes.
Norton fell in love with Edgefield and knew she wanted to have a home there. But her husband was much less certain that he wanted to live in the area. Many of the lovely historic homes had been divided into apartments owned by “slum lords.” There was crime, drugs and prostitution. And a
chain-link fence topped with barbed wire lined the interstate like a barrier that warned people to stay out of the neighborhood. So instead of a home in Edgefield, Norton and her husband put a contract on a house in Inglewood. Then fate stepped in.
The contract on the house in Inglewood fell through — the seller couldn’t get fi-nancing for the house he planned to pur-chase. Norton and her husband drove to Inglewood to pick up their escrow deposit, and on the way back, they decided to take a ride through Edgefield. As they drove through the neighborhood looking at the homes, Norton’s husband saw a house and said to Norton, “For that house, I’ll live in Edgefield.” So in 1977, they bought ”that house” and moved to East Nashville.
Norton and her husband met another young family who were restoring a home in Edgefield. Maydean Eberling with the Historic Commission had introduced them to Carol and Charlie Williams. The Nor-tons, Williams and others began to work together to change the neighborhood for
the better. As members of the Historic Edgefield Neighborhood Association, they began working to solve the problems in their community.
One of the problems was vacant lots in Edgefield. Those lots could have be-come victims of urban renewal with more apartments being built by slum lords. But, MDHA allowed the Edgefield Neighbor-hood Association to buy the vacant lots. Those lots were used to build the first qual-ity infill homes in an inner city neighbor-hood.
Norton continued to work to solve prob-lems in her neighborhood and she learned how to take action. The chain-link fence topped with barbed wire along the inter-state was a barrier between East Nashville and the rest of the city. Norton thought, “Who would want to come here with that fence standing in the way?”
So she opened the phone book and called the Federal Highway Department to find out what the rules were. She then contacted Rob Briley, who was her state representative at that time. Briley was in-strumental in getting a meeting with the Tennessee Department of Ttansportation about the fence. Norton took the bull by the horns in those meetings with TDOT because she had already learned what the federal law was. And the fence with its
CAROL NORTON KNOWS HER HISTORY
By Helen Gaye Brewster
Carol Norton (left), shown standing with her shovel at Main Street and McFerrin Avenue, envisons a unified look for a more pedestrian-friendly Main Street and is doing something about it. (Photo by Stacie Huckeba.) In the early 1960s, the United Curb Market (inset) was located at the corner of 10th and Main — today, a parking lot sits on that spot, across from Marché. (Photo courtesy of Metro Nashville Archives.)
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barbed-wire top came down. Just as her daddy had taught her, Norton
was learning the history of her neighbor-hood. “So many things happened in East Nashville first,” she says. “When the set-tlers came to Nashville, they first came to the East bank of the river then crossed over to the West bank when the river froze.
“Some of them came back,” she adds with a smile.
As she learned more history, she discov-ered that 150 years ago, Edgefield was the fifth largest city in Tennessee and was gov-erned by its own rules. It wasn’t an elitist community, but had freed men and women working and living in the area. Edgefield provided education for children of both races, and the first black fire department was on Woodland Street across from St. Ann’s Church.
“The diversity has continued to this day,” Norton says. “Edgefield has continued to lead the pack with firsts. We were the first Residential National Historic Register District and the first local Historic Zoning District.”
When the tornado swept through East Nashville in 1998, Norton was the presi-dent of the Historic Edgefield Neighbor-hood Association. The Regional Urban
Design Assistance Team (RUDAT), a vol-unteer program of the American Institute of Architects, worked with the neighbor-hoods of East Nashville as part of the tor-nado recovery. They learned that the neigh-borhoods — Edgefield, Lockeland Springs, and East End — had similar concerns, but were working on them separately. One of
the recommendations of RUDAT was to create a comprehensive approach for all the neighborhoods to work collectively to prevent duplication of effort. And because of this recommendation, Rediscover East! began.
Created by and for East Nashville resi-dents, businesses, and institutions, Re-discover East! is a nonprofit organization committed to preserving the authentic character of East Nashville and enhancing the quality of life for all of its citizens. Nor-ton was involved from the beginning and continues as the chairperson of the Trans-portation and Public Spaces committee.
Norton is currently working to find funding for a Main Street program that would create a unified look and presence, slow down traffic and be more pedestrian friendly. She will be helping with a public cleanup of the median/planting strips near the intersection of Main Street and Mc-Ferrin Avenue on Saturday, Sept. 10. The cleanup, beginning at 8 a.m. and lasting un-til completion, is sponsored by Rediscover East! and Councilman Mike Jameson.
“The arms of the neighborhoods are not around Main Street,” Norton says. “The merchants need someone to be their voice. She would also like to see the new transit system that’s being planned for Nashville come down Main Street.
Her motivation to continue her work goes back to what her daddy taught her — always give back to your community. She enjoys getting people together to solve problems. “We can figure out solutions to our problems,” she insists. “Together we have the energy, ideas, and manpower to do it. And, you meet a lot of cool people along the way.”
When people tell her they can’t believe she’s still here after all these years, Norton replies, “Where else would I go and why would I want to go there?”
“So many things happened in East Nashville first.”
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I know all my customers and they know me.” As simple as that statement may seem, the message it conveys is pro-
found, and at its heart is the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit that helps breathe life into our community. Those words were spoken with more than a hint of pride by Salem Elkhatib, proprietor extraordinaire of Italia.
Salem’s neighborhood eatery at the corner of 16th & Woodland Streets has become a gathering place where Little League Teams and passersby, police from the East Nash-ville precinct and business groups alike can enjoy a diverse selection of menu items in a low-key atmosphere.
Salem began his roundabout journey to East Nashville by way of Sweden, Brit-ain, France and The Netherlands from his hometown of Cairo, Egypt. Upon arriving in the United States, his work as a telecom engineer had him traveling from coast to coast. He decided to make Nashville his home while visiting his brother, who at the time was studying at Vanderbilt University.
Meeting new people is a passion for Sa-lem, and he enjoys bringing all of his influ-ences and experiences, as he puts it, “to the table.”
“He knows a lot about the world, not just pizza,” says longtime patron Thomas Svetek. “He’s lived all over. You ask him how the pyramids were made and he knows — and two or three hours later you know, too!”
In business since 2003, Italia first opened in the former dairy bar behind Top O’Woodland Historic Inn & Wedding Chapel. The menu has a wide variety of offerings, all made from scratch with top-quality ingredients. “What we make today we sell today,” says Salem.
Extra virgin olive oil, fresh local produce, 100-percent real Mozzarella cheese, kosher breads, and the “top flour on the market” are standard. Unlike some artisan foods, however, prices remain extremely reason-able and competitive, with a large, two-top-ping pie coming in at a mere $8.99. Their gluten-free crust is made from rice flour, and they will soon be offering gluten-free pasta. In addition, Italia will soon be going
100-percent green with their packaging by using fully biodegradable products.
Allergy-sufferer Merry Beth Myrick is a fan of Italia’s gluten- and egg-free crust. She and her boyfriend Sean Gerster live just a block away beside the fire station. Having Italia so close by allows them to in-dulge in their individual favorites — he’s a meat lover — while maintaining harmony in the household.
While their delivery service tops the list for many customers, others, like Pastor Jay Hartley, appreciate having a dining room where groups can gather together for cama-raderie. “When Italia moved into its current building, our church softball teams enjoyed
having a place to go after the games,” Hart-ley says. “I brought my little league baseball teams, as have many other coaches from Jess Neely Athletics at Shelby Park.”
Svetek prides himself on bringing folks from across the river to Italia. Speaking of two young women who made the trek, he says, “They were so cute — like they were the brave ones!”
Salem has a vision for Italia. “We’re not even halfway there,” he says. “We always want to make it better.”
The good news for Salem is he already has what very well might be the most im-portant ingredient of all: “I know my cus-tomers and they know me”
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By Chuck AllenPhotographs by Stacie Huckeba
FROM EGYPT TO EAST NASHVILLESalem Elkhatib’s journeys led to good food and more
Italia owner Salem Elkhatib works his mag-ic with pizza dough for yummy results.
says. “We couldn’t believe that someone would actually give us a hundred dollars based on five paragraphs they’d read online and a 30-second video, and believe in it that much having never met us. It was kind of surreal.”
Able to bolster a bigger production, Husky Jackal bumped opening night from its original July date to October, and has used the extra time to secure more people and expertise and to continue rehearsing, which the team does three times a week at a friend’s local moped garage, The Zombie Shop.
“Now it’s more than just ‘Well, we’ll look like idiots if we don’t do this because we’ve been telling all of our friends what we’re going to do,’” Weber says. “Now we have 45 different donors that have given a hun-dred dollars each. They’re all holding little, hundred-dollar guns to our heads: ‘You’re gonna do this, right?’”
They are “gonna do this,” for a minimum of three nights in October at the Nashville School of Arts. Much like the rest of the production, the location of these perfor-mances was determined by the team’s rela-tionship with community members. Weber
and DeVos reached out to John Newsom, a family friend of DeVos and the theater director at NSA. Terminator the Second hits
the stage there in the fall and will include a few upper-level theater students as cast members. Hosting the play at a school slightly altered DeVos and Weber’s initial goal for the project, which was purely en-tertainment.
“We certainly didn’t set out to do this as a moral mission, but we’re doing it at the Nashville School of Arts and we do have the potential to reach some young people,”
DeVos says. “It’d be nice if some came away from this and said, ‘You know? Shake-speare’s actually not that hard, he’s not that unapproachable.’ Those themes kind of carry through to anything you might be reading or watching on TV.”
But above all, they want to stage a qual-ity production for the community that has helped make the play a reality.
“The level of enthusiasm from people in this community that have been doing this their whole lives [is surprising],” DeVos says. “They’re willing to put in work for us and support us in whatever way they can because they think this thing has legs.”
To see if the play does in fact have legs and to hear the Shakespearean equivalent of “Hasta la vista, baby,” head to NSA Oc-tober 14-16. Tickets will be on sale, but prices are not yet determined. For more in-formation, visit www.terminatorthesecond.com.
And keep Husky Jackal on the radar for future performances, although old-school fan DeVos doesn’t anticipate a Termina-tor the Third or Shakespeare Does the Sarah Connor Chronicles. “Our recognition of the Terminator universe stops at 2.”
“We couldn’t be-lieve that someone would actually give us a hundred dol-lars based on five paragraphs they’d read online and a 30-second video.”
Terminator the Second continued
For many working parents in East Nashville, Holly Street Daycare is the only game in town. In fact, the
daycare is so popular that some parents add their names to the waiting list before their child is even born.
The list is “so ridiculously long, it’s hard to have spots available” for families who can’t pay the full tuition price, executive di-rector Karen Stump says.
But Holly Street Daycare remains com-mitted to offering slots to families who qualify for state-subsidized, daycare-tuition assistance. They also set aside some money for parents who need a little extra help due to job loss, illness or other circumstances.
An estimated 25 percent of Holly Street’s 100 families receive some form of tuition assistance, and according to Stump, it’s be-coming harder and harder to help families bridge the gap between what they can af-ford and what Holly Street charges.
“You can’t put a child out who’s been here since they were a baby and say ‘too bad,’” if the family falls on hard times, Stump says.
Holly Street’s coffers are replenished pri-marily through the daycare’s annual fund-raiser, Holly Street Rocks, a silent auction and wine-tasting event to be held Oct. 1.
Now in its ninth year, the event will re-turn to the heart of the neighborhood this year. “We’re excited to bring it back to Five Points,” event organizer and Holly Street parent Amanda Phillips says. “The best part is how the community comes together to support this. There’s hardly a vendor in East Nashville who doesn’t support us.”
Local restaurants, salons, artists, musi-cians and shops generously donate to the auction, as well as individuals who have
vacation properties. There’s also a raffle for cash prizes during the event. “There’s a little bit of everything,” Phillips says.
While Phillips calls the event “very fun, very East Nashville,” it is all about support-ing the cause and ensuring Holly Street can maintain its commitment to enabling fam-ilies from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds to attend.
Holly Street Daycare, a nonprofit, three-star childcare facility, has a management structure as unique as the neighborhood. “There’s no owner of Holly Street,” Stump explains. As executive director, Stump manages day-to-day operations, and over-sight is provided by a volunteer advisory board made up of current and former Holly Street parents and community members.
Stump came to Holly Street in 1986, three years after it was founded in response to a growing need for quality childcare in the neighborhood. “East Nashville in 1986 was a lot different than now,” Stump says, in a bit of an understatement. What is to-day a thriving and eclectic urban commu-nity was at that time considered a “blighted slum area” by the federal government. Holly Street has been active for nearly three de-cades, working with area churches and oth-er organizations to improve and serve the neighborhood surrounding the center.
The daycare was incorporated as a non-profit in 1990, when the board was look-ing for the most sustainable way to move forward. “They were creative enough to get
it to self-exist,” Stump says. With nonprof-it status, Holly Street can meet its bottom line and maintain its commitment to low caregiver-to-child ratios. For example, the state only requires that daycare facilities have two caregivers per eight infants, but Holly Street employs three.
“For for-profit centers, it’s hard to have that ratio and make a profit,” Stump says.
Holly Street also has a very low turnover rate among its staff, and several of them are former attendees. Stump often hears of adults now in their 20s who went to Holly Street together when they were six-weeks old, and who are “friends for life.”
Phillips can attest to the strong bonds that form at Holly Street. “The kids have so much fun together.” Her five-year-old daughter, who is just starting kindergarten, is going to miss her Holly Street friends, she says.
“This place is such a godsend for work-ing parents,” Phillips says. And the tuition subsidy program, funded primarily through the Holly Street Rocks fundraiser, is a blessing for working parents who can’t af-ford the full tuition, but still want the high quality childcare that Holly Street Daycare provides.
Holly Street Rocks, a fundraiser for Hol-ly Street Daycare’s tuition subsidy program, will be held Saturday, Oct. 1, at The Build-ing. Tickets are $50/person in advance and $60 at the door. More information can be found at www.hollystreetrocks.org.
Haircuts and hope
To honor the memory of her 9-year-old nephew Teddy, who passed away last summer from a rare and aggres-
sive form of cancer, East Nashville resident Mimi Gerber launched Nashville’s first ever St. Baldrick’s event last fall.
Gerber is organizing the event again this year and hopes to raise $21,000 for pediatric cancer research. “It’s a great way to honor Teddy and support my brother,” she says.
The fundraiser works like this: Volunteers commit to get-ting sponsored to have their heads shaved in public, and all the money goes to The St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a volunteer-driven charity that makes grants to research institutions working on the most promising cures for childhood cancers. (In the above photo, District 5 councilman Jamie Hollin gets sheared at last year’s event.)
This year’s event will be held at Woodland Presbyterian Church, in conjunction with the church’s Fall Festival on Oct. 29. The head-shavings are at 11 a.m., with festivities, which will include live music and children’s activities, lasting until 4 p.m. The Nashville event has been named Team Teddy in memory of Gerber’s nephew, but participants can honor a child of their choice who has been affected by cancer.
Woodland Presbyterian Church is located at 211 N. 11th Street . For more informa-tion about the event, check out the St. Baldrick’s Team Teddy web page at www.stbal-dricks.org and search for Team Teddy-Nashville. You can also contact Mimi Gerber directly at 419-1288 or [email protected]. — Theresa Laurence
Holly street rocks!
Annual fundraiser supports daycare tuition
subsidy program
By Theresa Laurence
Photo by Alex Smythe
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1108-A Woodland St.Nashville, TN 37206
(615) 591.1557 • www.5pdi.com
Got Prints
(across from the 37206 Post Office)
It’s 9 a.m. and Marsha Edwards strides into her office at the Martha O’Bryan Center, which serves impoverished
families in East Nashville. She has just come from riding the bus with the new kindergartners arriving at East End Prepa-ratory, the new charter school her nonprofit started.
Edwards, CEO of Martha O’Bryan, tells a story about the reaction of two young boys on the bus as they drove past a police car. They started playfighting, and one kid, acting like a cop, pointed a finger gun and said, “I’m gonna take you to jail.” The other boy responded, “Aw, no. I’m not going to jail. I’m going to college.” The mini-police-officer wannabe put down his finger, paused as if he had just remembered something, then said, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to college, too.”
That’s what it’s all about. Setting high expectations and providing the support needed to help every child lead a happy life. Edwards’ vision for the families of East Nashville is bigger than Martha O’Bryan. There is a lioness quality to her as she de-scribes her passion.
“We see families who have very high as-pirations for their kids, but they don’t have
the resources to get there,” she says. “De-feating poverty for families is crucial. Pro-viding work and education are ways to do that. They get the importance of education, but some are so discouraged. We have to reinspire.”
In CWA Plaza Apartments and James Cayce Homes, the largest public hous-ing development in the city, there are over 2,300 school-aged children. 85 percent of students in the Stratford Cluster are eco-nomically disadvantaged. East Nashvillians know that their low-income neighbors are not all aggregated in public housing. Their neighborhood casts a wide belt of those just above the poverty line. A flourishing neighborhood must have excellent educa-tional opportunities, meaningful work and a healthy environment.
The Martha O’Bryan Center is the cata-lyst behind creating a Nashville Prom-ise Neighborhood, a concept similar to the well-known Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), which operates a neighborhood-based system of education and social ser-vices for families in a 100 block area in Harlem. President Barack Obama commit-ted to replicating the HCZ with the Prom-ise Neighborhood program as the first part of his plan to combat urban poverty.
“The philosophy behind the project is simple — if poverty is a disease that infects
an entire community in the form of unem-ployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation,” the president ex-plained. “We have to heal that entire com-munity. And we have to focus on what ac-tually works. And it is working. And if we know it works, there’s no reason this pro-gram should stop at the end of those blocks in Harlem.”
Thus, Martha O’Bryan is the lead orga-nization in planning a Nashville Promise Neighborhood defined by the borders of the Stratford High School Cluster. They have applied for one of the Promise Neigh-borhood grants, which will be awarded in September. According to Robin Veenstra-VanderWeele, the Promise Neighborhood director, what happens in East Nashville will be a blueprint for other community in-vestments in our city.
Fueled by the collective commitment of all the stakeholders to the success of all children and families, the Nashville Promise Neighborhood will achieve three outcomes: families are healthy, students are academically successful, and graduates succeed in college and careers. Through a collaboration of East Nashville schools, community groups, local businesses, resi-dent associations, and other nonprofits, as well as federal, state and city resources, this
Breaking the bonds of isolationMartha O’Bryan Center helps disadvantaged families engage with the broader East Nashville community
By Francie HuntPhotograph by Stacie Huckeba
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At East End Preparatory School, each class has two teachers and only 22 students.
network encourages a year-round learning zone, academic success for all children, ex-cellent public schools, healthy children and parents, and vibrant neighborhoods.
This approach to improve the East Nash-ville community is more than a program — it’s a radical strategy. It is about creating the demand for better schools and building the community. While much of the effort this year has been starting a new public charter school in the Inglewood neighborhood, in the past, the investment has been in tra-ditional public schools within East Nash-ville, such as Litton Middle, Bailey Middle and Hattie Cotton Elementary. The Mar-tha O’Bryan Center invested $300,000 at Stratford High School to create what students dubbed as “The Top Floor.” They revitalized a 4,000-square-foot space to provide a safe, after-school area for home-work, ACT prep, enrichment, tutoring and college/career counseling.
When asked how Martha O’Bryan sees its role in East Nashville, Edwards says, “Our center serves to create authentic expe-riences for families so that they can interact and engage with the broader East Nashville community. East End Preparatory is a great example of how refugees, African-Ameri-
can, and Latino families are establishing a culture of learning. That is when we are really progressive — when we can work to-gether and break the bonds of isolation.”
As Jim Leckrone, the principal of East End Preparatory, describes his school, they are a “high-performing, no-excuses, all-college-ready” K-5 public charter school. As stated by the Tennessee Department of Education, “Charter schools are public schools operated by independent, nonprofit governing bodies that must include par-ents. In Tennessee, public charter school students are measured against the same academic standards as students in other public schools.”
At East End Prep, there is an academic dean for every three grades in order to con-centrate on curriculum, standards and stu-dent performance. Unlike most elementary schools, teachers at East End Prep are se-lected through a national search to special-ize in content areas. Teachers are instruct-ing one subject all day long. Every class has two teachers. Children move from class to class in two-hour blocks with 22 students in each class. This allows the environment to become part of deeper instruction be-cause science labs, related arts, technology
and math rooms can be arranged to foster learning.
All new instruction is taught by teach-ers and reinforced in the computer learn-ing lab, where lessons are individualized for each student. Teachers are videotaped so they can learn how to improve their craft. Friday afternoons offer additional enrich-ment such as symphony or sports. Students get a full hour to eat and play each day. The school offers monthly workshops for par-ents and volunteer opportunities.
East End Prep is currently housed in the Dalewood Middle School building at the corner of McGavock and Stratford. They share this location with Litton Middle School students while the Litton building is being renovated. They plan to have 550 students when the school is entirely built.
Edwards insists that the Martha O’Bryan Center is not interested in “doing good”. They are interested in strategic solutions. They are a central reason why East Nash-ville holds such promise.
For more information or for volunteer opportunities, visit: www.eastendprep.org or www.marthaobryan.org.Francie Hunt is the Nashville Director of Stand for Children.
It’s an outside-the-box business idea that’s been incubating for six or more years. Now there’s a full brood of small,
local businesses taking roost in the eight modular buildings perched on the hill at 1108 Woodland Street. The Five Points Collaborative, aka An Idea Hatchery, is open for business.
The project is the vision of Bret and Meg MacFadyen, owners of Art & Invention Gal-lery, and contractor Cary Frazier, a key col-laborator. The eight, free-standing buildings, in varying sizes of 12’ x 14’, 16’ x 16’ and 16’ x 20’, are unified by the exterior color scheme. The small rental spaces are designed to en-courage small, entrepreneurial businesses by offering short-term leases at a price lower than larger properties in the area.
“East Nashville has long been known for its creative and entrepreneurial spirit,” Meg says. “With the sheer volume of artists, musicians and ‘mom-and-pop’ businesses in the area, there is always something new and exciting being born — and this is no exception.”
The team began addressing the un-usual building concept with Metro in spring of 2010. “They were intrigued by the idea of it, and even though it wasn’t something standard, they were willing to consider and find solutions,” Bret says. “They worked with us —building codes, the fire marshall, MDHA, the historical commission, the mayor’s office, everyone — to make our vision feasible, to cover all the parameters. Everyone was thoughtful
and generous with their time.”For years, the MacFadyens watched va-
cant lots all over town sit dormant, lots that could have benefitted from such a venture. Their motivation for the Woodland Street project was to create an environment that can host businesses born of neighborhood residents and other locals.
“In so many cases in up-and-coming neighborhoods, all too quickly, chains come in or other elements diminish the unique-ness. Our goal is for these businesses to de-velop and become stronger,” Bret says. He envisions some will grow enough to “gradu-ate” to more spacious locations while others will continue to thrive amidst the energy
and camaraderie of the Collaborative.“The Five Points Collaborative has
worked to bring more retail density to this business community,” he says.
Woodland Street beckonsThe idea of an instant business community was so appealing that Bil Breyer moved his eight-year-old business, Alegria, from its original East Nashville location on 16th Street to the Woodland Street venture.
“It’s a parallel move in terms of overhead, but miles ahead in terms of foot traffic and sales,” says Breyer, who had been discuss-ing this kind of opportunity with Bret and Meg for years.
A founding member of the Historic East Nashville Merchants Association (HEN-MA), Breyer felt that current 5 Points rents, which were mostly based on the draw of area restaurants, made it impossible for re-tail businesses to succeed at the same level.
“East Nashville is not yet a destination for retail, but we aim to change that,” he says.
Alegria, which means happiness in Portu-guese, lives up to its name. One step inside and shoppers are met with the distinctive smell of fine leather goods — boots, belts, wallets and purses. Natural and organic-in-spired jewelry — some of it locally designed — dangles from birdcages and mini-chan-deliers. Richly textured Moroccan hand-bags and totes beg to be touched. Candles and soaps, pottery and picture frames, cute tops and cloth flower rings, global gifts, and the occasional vintage lamp round out the offerings.
“There’s a little bit of everything here, something for every budget, from $5 to $500,” says the Brazillian-born leather de-signer who is now a U.S. citizen. “Happi-ness for everyone.”
“Someday” ideas become realityMelita Snider is taking up the opportunity presented by “an idea hatchery” and launch-ing a new business called Moss in the col-orful cluster of studio spaces. Melita and her husband, musician and recording artist Todd Snider, have lived in East Nashville for 13 years.
“We were here when Radio Café and other early businesses began, and it’s been amazing to watch it all change and grow,” says Snider, who is also an accomplished artist known by her maiden name, Melita Osheowitz.
Opening a clothing store was for years simply a “fantasy discussed over drinks,” she
Five Points Collaborative hatches a variety of cool, new businesses
By Carole Anne KingPhotos by Stacie Huckeba
Owner Bil Breyer assists some happy customers at Alegria’s new location.
Todd and Melita Snider chill in front of Melita’s new clothing store, Moss.
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recalls. “I am blown away by what Bret and Meg are giving to the community with this collaborative. It’s such a beautiful venture,” she says.
Moss will feature a unique mixture of women’s clothing. Look for contemporary jeans, tops, dresses and skirts exuding what she terms “a bit of bohemian chic.” The shop debuts in late September.
The perfect locationThe retail space may be physically small, but 5 Points Digital Imaging makes a mighty impact with its new showroom. The rustic
interior of warm woods and galvanized tin belies a state-of-the-art endeavor.
“This is the perfect location to show-case our products and services,” says Kevin Anthuis, owner of the print service pro-vider that specializes in wide-format digital printing. “We have over 25 years of print-ing experience, from yesterday’s analog pro-cesses to cutting-edge digital technology.”
Product offerings range from business cards to outdoor banners and everything in between. 5PDI has expertise in print-ing fine-art canvas, high-definition, alumi-num fine-art prints, digital wall coverings,
trade-show graphics (including green so-lutions such as bamboo hardware), point-of-purchase backlit signage, promotional products and more.
“We’ve adopted digital printing technol-ogies that satisfy the requirements of to-day’s marketplace and customer demands. Our investments in the latest equipment and processes enable us to offer products that are eco-friendly, durable and cost ef-fective,” Anthuis says.
Other businesses at the Five Points CollaborativeBizen provides business intelligence tools that integrate with point-of-sale systems of franchises and independent restaurants. Founded in 2010 by longtime East Nash-ville resident Jackson Miller, Bizen received seed funding from Jumpstart Foundry and found its footing with Michael Burcham at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.
Glen Miller is a partner and General Manager of L2M LLC which operates two Plato’s Closet stores and a new one to open soon in Green Hills. Glen nurtures other small businesses and teaches business and marketing classes as an adjunct faculty at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin.
Goodbuy Girls specializes in new con-temporary and vintage apparel pieces for all occasions, as well as a large selection of used cowboy boots. Owners Tanya Montana Coe (also an artist) and Kimberly Davison (a strategic marketer for Skyville Records) cheekily describe their wares as particularly suited for “honky-tonkin’, hanging at Red Door, 5 Spot or Foo Bar, and shotgun wed-dings.”
The East Garden started as a cottage in-dustry providing fresh flowers and decora-tions for weddings in the Nashville area in 2004. Steady growth in business and repu-tation brings the shop to Woodland Street where it continues to offer fresh flowers for weddings and special events, as well as gifts and vintage home items.
The Oktipus Printing Co. takes small offset-printing jobs, and sells posters, post-cards, stationary and greeting cards created in this old-school, manual process. “It’s the same vibe you get with vinyl records, a cer-tain quality and feel like no other,” print-master and designer Brandon Morgan says. He and his wife Crystal invite shoppers to get creative at the antique typewriter “letter station” or carve one-of-a-kind hand-press stamps, too.
New Five Points businesses to cater to pets, runners
The Five Points nexus of East Nashville continues to diversify with a new build-ing and tenants at 1105 Woodland Street.
Expected to open in early October, 5 Points Animal Hospital is a full-service, small-animal hospital providing compre-hensive preventative, medical and surgical care. The hospital is intended to serve not just East Nashville residents, but surround-ing areas as well, according to Janet Lewis-Grace, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. The facility will offer an in-house diagnostic lab including digital X-rays, comprehensive blood panels, and ultrasounds, with results available within 30 minutes to an hour.
“We are the place to go to for all the medical needs of your dogs and cats,” says Lewis-Grace, who has practiced for 15 years in Nashville. A graduate of the University of Tennessee, she trained at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine. “We provide complete animal wellness care with an emphasis on preventative medicine and client education.”
“We are just here to serve the community by providing care to pets and their peo-ple,” adds Lewis-Grace, a neighborhood resident who saw a need for more services.
The Dog Spot, Nashville’s newest, upscale doggie daycare, boarding and groom-ing facility, will be partnering with the 5 Points Animal Hospital by providing an exam room onsite at its 1004 Gallatin Avenue location. Plans call for Dr. Grace to examine animals at the daycare on an as-needed basis. As an added convenience, customers will also be able to drop their pets at The Dog Spot to be transferred to the hospital for treatment when necessary.
“Nashville is such a dog-friendly town, especially East Nashville, that we felt this kind of full-service facility was really needed,” owner and operator Chad Baker says. More information about The Dog Spot can be found at www.thedogspot.com.
Nashville Running Company will be occupying 1,540 square feet at 1105 Wood-land, next door to the animal hospital. The retail store is the passion of Lee Wilson, a former University of Oregon runner, and his wife Angela. Originally from Port-land, Ore., Lee sold software and medical equipment in New York City before mov-ing to East Nashville and heeding the pull of his running roots. The store will offer nationally-known, name-brand shoes, apparel and accessories for men and women.
“We’re looking forward to becoming a part of the Nashville community and providing some top-notch running products,” Wilson says. “We plan to offer other running-related services to our clientele down the road, perhaps some training op-portunities as well as races.”
The store is slated to open in October 2011. In the meantime, you can visit them on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/NashvilleRunningCompany.
— Carole Anne King38
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custom silver locket around her neck, a gift from her dad. And to this day, Knott still lights a candle for him every Monday night.
That practice inspired Knott to suggest a pet memorial service — “a way for people to receive a public acknowledgment of the loss of a family member,” a pet, who if not specifically chosen to be, was ultimately ac-cepted as a member of the family.
“Last year, I thought I would have liked to have had a service to hear my boy’s name called,” she says.
She did some research and found it wasn’t already being done, so when she made the suggestion, the other funeral directors and the owner all agreed they should offer such a service.
The first pet memorial service will be held on Sunday, Oct. 2 at 2 p.m. at Hadley Cha-pel in Old Hickory. The service will include registration of each pet’s name and when their name is called during the service, the owner will light a candle in their memory. Background music, a few words from Faith Methodist Church pastor Dr. Charles Wor-rell, Sr., the candles, and the intimate atmo-sphere offered by Hadley Chapel will serve to create a respectful memorial service for people’s pets, their best friends, their furry family members. The service, which begins at 2 p.m., will be followed by some light re-freshments. Treat bags for pets still at home will also be given to the participants.
“The date was picked because it is close to the St. Frances Blessing of the Animals services, always very popular all over the country, and National Pet Memorial Day, which this year falls on Sept. 11,” Knott explains. “The location was picked be-cause that is where Robinson-Phillips was started in 1929, and the chapel is large, yet still feels very personal.” In addition to the chapel in Old Hickory, Phillips-Robinson, which remains family owned, has a location in East Nashville at 2707 Gallatin Rd.
“I hope it goes over well and we can turn it into an annual service,” she adds.
You can register to participate ahead of time by contacting Faithful Friends Pet Cremation Services, PetResq911.org, Hermitage Animal Hospital, or Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home. Once registered, you’ll receive an invitation to the Memo-rial Service. But you don’t have to register ahead of time, you can register when you arrive at the chapel to be called up to light a candle in memory of your beloved pet(s).
The loss of a pet is something that some people take lightly — because it’s never happened to them.
There is no condolence leave from work to grieve the loss of a pet. Neighbors gener-ally don’t rally and bring food. They have no idea how hard it is to be in the kitchen and look at that extra bag of cat food that was sadly never needed. The local church prob-ably doesn’t offer to come clean out closets to alleviate the further pain of handling toys, beds, bowls, collars, and leashes that are no longer appreciated in a house that now seems too empty, too suddenly. And there is no funeral service that allows the loss to be publicly recognized and appreci-ated, to offer closure in a way that’s respect-ful and honoring.
Until now. According to funeral director Rachel
Knott, the time has come. Her office at Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home does not suggest she is a pet owner who has suffered
the extraordinary loss of more than one pet, most recently in 2004 when she lost her dog Atticus, a Labrador Retriever mix.
“When Atticus passed away, Dr. Chip Richards (Hillsboro Animal Hospital) sug-gested I light a candle every Monday night for him,” she says of the loss of her beloved companion. “The story goes, after passing over the proverbial ‘Rainbow Bridge,’ the animals can look back and see your flame and know their loved ones are remember-ing them, still.”
Knott still has two dogs — Sugar Bear, a 16-year-old Springer Spaniel-Standard Poodle mix, and Harper, a 9-year-old pit bull mix. She helped deliver Harper with her litter mates, but the pup wasn’t breath-ing, so she performed CPR on her and saved her precious, little life. Six weeks later, the owners wrapped her in a bow and gave her to Knott for her birthday!
But Atticus is not forgotten — some of his ashes are kept safe in an engraved,
GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTENPhillips-Robinson to offer pet memorial service
By Elizabeth ChaunceyPhoto by Stacie Huckeba
Funeral director Rachel Knott shares a moment with her dog Sugar Bear inside Phillips-Robinson’s Hadley Chapel, where Nashville’s first pet memorial service will take place.
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We pity the fool!This pooch did his best Mr. T impression during the Faux Paw Fashion Show at the recent Tomato Art Festival. Photograph by Aerial Innovations of Tennessee, Inc.
Parting Shot
SMARTGROWTH STARTSHERE
p e t e rwesterholm
metro council
district 6
VOTE SEPT. 15www.peterwesterholm.com
Tennessee Equality ProjectGenC Nature Conservancy of TennesseeNashville Civic Design CenterNashville Emerging Leaders Nashville Symphony Orchestra League
Lipscomb University 1999
Nashville Adult Literacy CouncilAmerican Society for Public Admin.
Friends of Shelby ParkStreet Theatre Company
East Nashville/Riverfront Relay for Life
Pepperdine School of Public Policy 2002
-Peter State of Tennessee Strategic Planning/Budget Analyst
Westerholm for Council 1502 Long Ave, Nashville, TN 37206paid for by westerholm for council - treasurer wes aull
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