No doubt you remember where you were, five years ago this weekend, when the water started to rise.
Maybe you were moving into your first apartment, and noticed the rain would just not let up as it soaked your belongings. Maybe you were in a house overlooking Murfreesboro’s Stones River, watching as the river slowly began to creep across its banks. Maybe your HVAC system blinked off in a home near Belmont, and you opened the basement door only to find tools and boxes floating in muddy water.
Maybe you and dozens of others stood watching with sickening fascination as the torrent inched implacably toward one local institution after another: the Dairy King in Woodbine, the Great Escape on Charlotte, even Lower Broad itself. Maybe you sat in a restaurant on Highway 100 in Bellevue, and noticed with unease that suddenly everyone in the room was watching the TV … which was showing live shots of a neighborhood you’d passed a few hours before.
If you’re a newcomer to the city — and given our dramatic reversal of fortune over the past five years, there’s a pretty good chance you are — you don’t remember the way initial disbelief yielded to amazement, then to terror as the full extent of the catastrophe became evident. You also don’t remember the surge of neighborly spirit, civic pride and eventual optimism as community after community, from Bordeaux to Bellevue to The Nations, rallied to the side of those hardest hit. Arguably, it took a disaster of devastating proportions to boost a burgeoning city into overdrive.
On the anniversary of that weekend, we look back in photos and stories and offer glimpses of how some of the areas most affected have fared since, and how storage and rehearsal facility Soundcheck has made its recovery. We also examine how icons of the Old Nashville and the New Nashville — the Grand Ole Opry and the Schermerhorn — weathered the storm, while Pith contributor Betsy Phillips scans the horizon for high water to come. (continue reading)