HISTORY

Neighborhood Assoc.

G’town Map -1908

Historic Zoning

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THE BEGINNING
The area of North Nashville where Germantown is located was first home to the wild animals that were drawn to the sulfur spring and salt lick located close to where the neighborhood now stands, and later to the Native Americans that hunted them. The first map of Nashville, drawn by land surveyor David McGavock in 1796, shows this section of North Nashville as originally part of 960 acres granted to McGavock’s brother James. During the first half of the ninetieth century the McGavocks began to sell parcels of property and the area began its transformation from agricultural to residential. Parcels were subdivided and developed by the buyers. Many of the families moving into the neighborhood around this time were German (thus the name Germantown). Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nashville’s second oldest catholic church, was dedicated in 1859. In 1864, while the Union Army held Nashville, Assumption Church was occupied and pillaged by the soldiers.

Germantown was incorporated into the Nashville city limits in 1865 as the Ninth Ward and experienced its greatest period of growth at that time. A large number of German immigrants joined an already booming population of German residents and began moving into the grand houses, worker's cottages, and shotgun homes, shopping at the corner stores and attending services at neighborhood churches.

Several prominent German families, such as publisher E.B. Stahlman, brewer William Gerst, distiller George Dickel and meat packer Henry Neuhoff, all who achieved great wealth and high social standing by the latter part of the 19th century, became prominent Nashville citizens who strongly influenced the history of the city while living in the beautiful neighborhood. Other prominent German families include: Petre, Ratterman, Wessel, Roth, Buddeke, Geist, Baltz, Schweiss, Strobel, Meiers, Brackman, Langdon, Dury, Seigenthaler, Stumb, Seifried, Jacobs and many others.

George Ratterman owned land which now makes up a portion of the 1200 block of 5th Avenue North. Mr. Ratterman constructed the large home located at 1215 5th Avenue North in 1850. He later remodeled the home in the 1870’s in the fashionable Italianate Style. He also constructed the Carriage House at the rear of the property and a now missing conservatory on the south side. He built the home at 1217 5th Avenue North for his daughter and the Ratterman Rowhouses located at 1223 to 1231 5th Avenue for his immigrant workers. Mr. Ratterman was also a patron of Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and paid the cost of carving the elaborate alterpiece. Jacob Geiger, a master mason and Germantown resident who lived at 1315 5th Avenue North, is said to have designed the church.

Butchery emerged as an important cottage industry in the area, ultimately leading to the formation of packing houses in the early twentieth century. This also gave rise to another nickname for the area, Butchertown. One famous early butcher was Henry Neuhoff. His butcher shop was located at the corner of 6th Avenue North and Monroe Street, the current home of The Mad Platter. Mr. Neuhoff invented the spiral cut ham for the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition of 1897.

At the turn of the century, merchants and political figures used the backyard of one of the city’s first plantations, located on the current Werthan Bag Building site, as a playground. Burns Island Race Track preceded Morgan Park as the area’s gathering place and played host to the richest horse race in the world, at that time. Morgan Park’s history dates to 1909, when the Nashville Park Board purchased Frederick Laitenberger’s German beer garden, which occupied the site. When the gates closed and the jockeys made their way out of the neighborhood, the area was turned into the city’s first horticultural garden. The garden included an elaborate gardener’s cottage built in the gothic revival style and a diverse collection of plants, but even the magic of the garden couldn’t prevent the neighborhood from slipping into decline At the beginning of the 20th century Germantown was remarkably diverse, ethnically, economically and architecturally and what many would consider an picturesque residential setting, but that was about to change.

THE EFFECTS OF WWI
Several different factors began to emerge that would play a significant role in the neighborhood’s downturn. World War I would prove to be the first, as anti-German sentiments swept the country, a hostile environment was created for people of German ancestry. As a result, residents began to disperse throughout the city in an attempt to assimilate into the larger population. Neighborhood churches no longer performed mass in German. With the exodus of people, empty homes of the once well-maintained and stately neighborhood were subdivided and rented, or became boarding homes. Furthermore, the successes of Neuhoff Meat Packing and Werthan Bag Company as employment centers (and their resulting exponential growth) in an area without a resident population began to set a precedent for the industrial nature of the area that would follow in later decades. By the 1940’s Germantown had yet another nickname, Cab Hollow, because of the large number of Dekalb County residents working in the meat packing plants.

URBAN RENEWAL
By the 1950s the area had lost much of its former glory and a new series of setbacks were looming. The first was a mass rezoning of the area to industrial use. It was during this time that a large number of the historic homes were lost as they were cleared for warehouses, machine shops and other heavy-commercial and industrial uses. The 1960s brought the Federal Government’s misguided policy of Urban Renewal and the Interstates. Urban Renewal cleared depressed housing around Capitol Hill, pushing it further northward, while the interstates sliced through North Nashville, cutting off the connectivity between Germantown and its surrounding neighborhoods. By this time it was hard to imagine that the area was ever a thriving residential neighborhood.

REBIRTH
It wasn’t until the 1970’s, when interest in historic preservation and inner-city living began to flourish across the country, that the promise of neighborhood revitalization would start to emerge for Germantown. In the late 1970’s a small group of socially charged individuals moved to the area and began to purchase property and renovate homes throughout Germantown despite its reputation as a notorious red light district. These early urban residents played a critical role in stabilizing the neighborhood, but people thought they had lost their minds. Paul Harvey even did a report on prostitutes soliciting from the steps of Assumption Church.

Dee Ann Walker and Michael Emrick were some of the first to move into the neighborhood. Walker's former husband, Joe Herndon, owned a company named Building Conservation Technologies. The company, of which Emrick was a part, was doing work in historic Rugby, Tennessee. In 1978, they discovered Germantown and two years later Herndon officially moved his firm from Washington D.C. to Nashville. Walker and Herndon bought an entire block on Fifth Avenue North that included the Ratterman Row Houses and moved into George Ratterman’s house. At the time the neighborhood was zoned industrial and there was a proposal to level the entire area and build public housing. Emrick, who has worked on at least 30 houses in the neighborhood, said the property Walker and Herndon purchased was the front line of the defense for what was left of old Germantown. Walker said from the start there was a sense of community. "When your house was torn up and you were renovating you just slept somewhere else," adding "When we moved in we didn't even have electricity. We ran an extension cord from our house to the house next door for a week." The lack of electricity was the least of their worries. Ridding the area of prostitution was a major obstacle that took years to overcome.

Crime was rampant to say the least, but the dedication of the early residents proved to be the driving force behind the neighborhood’s slow climb back from the brink. Another positive event for the neighborhood occurred in 1979 when Germantown was listed as a district on The National Register of Historic Places. Despite its devastation, the neighborhood still contained buildings dating to 1830 and in a wide variety of architectural styles showcasing its history. The opening of The Mad Platter restaurant in the heart of the neighborhood also brought attention to the area. The Mad Platter developed a reputation as one of Nashville’s best restaurants. That brought patrons to the neighborhood that would not have known it existed otherwise and, resultingly, interest in the progress made in bringing the neighborhood back to life.

In the 1980’s the City’s community development program, administered by the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA), began a series of public infrastructure improvements designed to make the neighborhood more attractive to investment. These included brick sidewalks, and low interest historic home rehab loans. MDHA also awarded the newly formed neighborhood association with a community development block grant of $60,000. The neighborhood association used the money to establish a revolving fund from which it could borrow to purchase and restore historic homes. Funding to invest in improvements to homes in the neighborhood simply was not available from traditional sources. The restored home would be sold, the loan repaid and the money was available for future use. The Ratterman Row Houses are just one success story of this program.

ACTIVISM
At the same time threats were looming to the prospering neighborhood. A potentially devastating plan to build an auto-emissions testing facility on a 1/2 square block area in the heart of Germantown was thwarted by neighborhood activists who led a well-organized public protest of the facility’s construction. The protest. in true Germantown fashion, was catered by The Mad Platter. Residents laid in front of bulldozers and 7 people were arrested. The city eventually relented and stepped in to acquire the property. However, the land sat for many years as a chain link enclosed vacant lot and as a symbol of the residents policy that no development was better than bad development.

In 1989 plans announced by Governor McWherter of the construction of the 19-acre Bicentennial Mall (opened in 1996), to be located on industrial blocks immediately adjacent to the south, was a coup for the neighborhood. As a part of the plan, MDHA created the Phillips-Jackson Redevelopment District in 1993 (encompassing all of Germantown). The creation of Phillips-Jackson was a critical step in the next level of redevelopment for the neighborhood. As a part of the redevelopment district, design guidelines were created and each project proposed had to undergo a design review and abide by a more stringent set of land use requirements. However, burdensome zoning applied to the small inner city lots and development was virtually impossible.

REDEVELOPMENT
In 1997, the property acquired by the city following the auto-emissions facility protest, was sold to Andree Lequire, a Germantown resident, along with her business partner Scott Chambers. Metro had previously published a Request for Proposals to develop the property. Not a single developer submitted a proposal. Lequire and Chambers established Germantown Partners (GTP) in 1996 and approached MDHA with a proposal for the property that included single-family homes on 16 lots. The lots sizes that GTP proposed for the site were from 32 to 36 feet wide and were all 175 feet deep, much smaller lots than allowed under existing zoning. GTP worked closely with various Nashville agencies to make this unique project work. The first three homes were completed in November of 1997. The last of the 16 homes was completed in 2001. The homes sold quickly and the project was seen as a success in reviving urban housing. GTP also constructed a mixed use commercial-esidential structure at one corner. The importance of the redevelopment of this block for Germantown cannot be overstated. The homes were the first new single-family construction built in Germantown in decades. They were built at a time when urban infill was still a new concept for Nashville, and they were able to prove that there was a strong demand for city living. They also proved to be a test case for the Metro Planning Department, which used the success of GTP’s homes as a model in rewriting the zoning code for Nashville’s urban neighborhoods. In 1998 Metro officially rezoned Germantown from an industrial to the new mixed-use neighborhood designation (MUN).

Beginning in the early 2000’s, several urban infill projects, consisting primarily of single-family homes on vacant infill lots, and condominiums on larger vacant parcels, were constructed throughout the neighborhood. Adaptive reuse of the old Werthan Bag Co. building’s conversion into loft condos also began around this time. Since the application of MUN zoning in 2000 more than 300 residential dwellings have been constructed in Germantown while preserving the character of the neighborhood. Service businesses have also moved in. Germantown now calls several well respected restaurants, professionals, shops and other businesses its residents.

HISTORIC ZONING
In 2008 Germantown was designated a local historic zoning district honoring the neighborhood’s historical significance. With that recognition, historic zoning protects the neighborhood's unique character by requiring review of exterior work on existing buildings and new construction based on approved designs. Generally, the design guidelines apply to all exterior construction work on existing structures, as well as, all new construction including outbuildings, fencing, retaining walls, garages, carports, driveways and sidewalks. Design guidelines for historic zoning districts protect the neighborhood from alterations to historic structures that would lessen their architectural significance, new construction or additions not in character with the neighborhood, and from the loss of architecturally or historically important buildings. The Metropolitan Historic Zoning Commission, a citizen commission, is the architectural review board which reviews applications for work on properties within the Germantown Historic Preservation Overlay District based on the Germantown Historic Overlay Design Guidelines.

Sources: The Nashville Civic Design Center Public Policy Publication: The Neighborhood of Germantown in North Nashville; John Connely, A History of North Nashville, The City Paper