Nashville's Parthenon

 

After
Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service

IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME.

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 9 September 2014

Nashville

Yes, Nashville is a whole lot of country. And, yes, a whole lot of Greek.

 

Move over Greek frats, Greek coffee cups, and Greek yogurt, Nashville also has its own version of what is indisputably the most important and most widely recognized monument to embody that other Greek culture, the 5th century BCE Parthenon temple.

 

Nashville's Parthenon is a little-known, life-sized replica, and it's the kind of iconic symbol that puts the Western (that is, Western as in Classical Greek) in this otherwise country tunes mecca of 600,000.  Legendary chapeau-wearing songstress Minnie Pearl might still be more widely worshipped in that other 'temple' of culture here, the Grand Ol' Opry. But just minutes from downtown, near the Vanderbilt University campus, another godly figure, Athena, yes, even a more powerful yet than Minnie, is given tribute in her Parthenon temple.

 

Still surprisingly, Nashville's Athena, ancient Greece's goddess of wisdom, hardly gets her due. Just as recently as in last Sunday's New York Times' travel section, a '36 Hour in Nashville's' feature ignored what's surely the second-most important house of worship here. Just after, of course, Dolly's 'Partonon,' as the Opry's original venue at the Ryman Auditorium is referred to by some more classically-trained fans of the country-western megastar Dolly Parton.

 

This, too, in a nation that likes to 'import' Europe to her shores (Randolph Heart's castle in California is Exhibit A) to just recreating it (Venice and Paris venues in Las Vegas).

Before

Frist Center for the Visual Arts

Main Hall, interior
Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service

 Frist First

Nashville

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts embodies one of the best examples of architectural repurposing that I've ever witnessed. Thankfully, Americans in the last decade or so have come realize, after the annum horribli debacles of the '60s, '70s, and the even into the '80s, that architectural preservation is preferable to the wholesale destruction of the urban vernacular that was rampant in those decades. Witness the destruction of Centre City Philadelphia by Edward Bacon as Exhibit A.  I suspect, given the boom in recent highrises monsters in downtown Nashville, that this city also has undergone its share of urban gutting.

Fortunately that urban 'renewal,' as it may have occurred, did not extend to several city jewels, including Nashville's old downtown high school (now the city's main branch library), its main Victorian-styled railroad station (now a fancy hotel), and adjacent on Broadway, the old main U.S. Post Office (now the Frist).

The conversion of the post office, constructed in 1934 as an Art Deco gem, was completed in 2001, when the Frist occupied the premises. (The building is similar to Philadelphia's Art Deco post office branch on Market East. But more decorative and pristine). The conversion was undertaken with loving detail. It's a marvel.