Nineteenth Avenue North winds uphill from Charlotte Avenue, flanked by a Zaxby’s and a Walgreens. After a skewed intersection at Pearl Street and a gentle curve, a small house at 1816 Jo Johnston Ave. stands directly in your sightline, the focal point of what���s known as a “terminated vista” in urban design parlance. The term typically describes the bold emergence of a landmark from the urban fabric, but this house has a stoic humility — it stands in stark isolation, defying its surroundings and decades of policy designed to destroy it.
Harsh power lines frame the foreground, while even taller lines crisscross beyond, as poles and wires swirl around the Nashville Electric Service’s Watkins Park Substation, which looms in the background like a supersized Erector Set. Just feet away, the orphaned stone steps of a long-lost house meet the sidewalk, as if murmuring hints of what this neighborhood once was.
1816 Jo Johnston Ave. is the only old house left on this historic street — a humble landmark that whispers the story of how Nashville’s Black neighborhoods have been erased and redrawn.
Gallatin Avenue site was once owned by Earl Scruggs
Walking the Line Street
Originally named Line Street, Jo Johnston Avenue formed the northern boundary of Nashville’s original city limits. In 1900, amid rising racial tensions, Line Street was renamed Jo Johnston Avenue after a Confederate general. The next year, Watkins Park became the first public park in the city. Initially segregated by social custom, it was formally segregated along with the rest of the parks system in 1936 — the same year Black-segregated Pearl High School was built adjacent.
A dozen dense blocks of homes, shops and churches were cleared in the 1950s for the Black-segregated, barracks-style J. Henry Hale Homes complex. Public housing desegregation and federal policies led to dire conditions — the project was cleared in the 2000s and replaced with fewer than half as many homes, a sparse suburban style and a mixed-income model with mixed results.
The I-40 underpass marks a dividing line on Jo Johnston Avenue and a midway point between the interstate’s decimation of Jefferson Street and Edgehill. To the east, Jo Johnston Avenue fades away — first figuratively, then literally — as a recent name change traded out Confederate hagiography to honor Josephine Holloway, Tennessee’s first Black Girl Scout. Dozens of homes, tenements, Black churches and the red-light district then known as Hell’s Half Acre were the first targets of urban renewal in the nation, cleared to make way for Capitol Hill’s grand lawn. Jo Johnston Avenue, like the rest of the street grid, was replaced by swooping streets, surface parking lots and midcentury modernist buildings.
Zoned Out
Local government also contributed to the deterioration of Black neighborhoods like Watkins Park with land use policy, whether by intent or indifference.
The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated explicit racial segregation zones in 1917, but the majority opinion and following decisions bolstered the use of facially neutral zoning to entrench existing patterns of segregation. When Nashville implemented zoning in 1933, its planners mapped the characteristics of buildings, residential densities, property values and “the location of the negro population” across every block to “[arrive] at a determination of the character of the various sections of the city.”
The residential center of Watkins Park was designated a Residence D zone — the least restrictive residential classification, which in 1933 the Nashville Banner noted covers “those areas now inhabited by the Negro population” with “entirely different” provisions from other residential districts. The edges of the neighborhood were zoned commercial and industrial, even though homes dominated most blocks.
Suburban real estate interests and homeowners had pushed for zoning to protect exclusive white neighborhoods from disfavored uses like dry cleaners and filling stations — along with the lower classes of residents, who followed commercial and industrial expansion. But that protection was not extended to Black neighborhoods. The zoning map laid out industrial zones four times larger than existing uses dictated, intentionally overlapping Black neighborhoods, even where most land was residential — a pattern now known as expulsive zoning.
Expulsive zoning allowed commercial and industrial interests to cheaply acquire property for expansion, as residential uses were soon devalued by redlining. Beginning in 1936, federal policies restricted mortgage insurance from neighborhoods with Black populations, which discouraged bankers from offering loans.
The patterns of expulsive and racially biased zoning established in the 1933 zoning code dovetailed with redlining to devastate Black neighborhoods like Watkins Park. By the 1950s, a dry cleaner had popped up between houses on the 1900 block of Jo Johnston Avenue, while the 1800 block was cleaved by the substation. Thirty-four homes on the block were cleared by the substation and its deteriorating influence — only the Loneliest Little House in Nashville now remains.
After a hundred hard years, the house at 1816 Jo Johnston Ave. has been saved by the newest evolution of erasure in North Nashville — it is freshly flipped and for sale, with new modern farmhouse board and batten siding, a black-and-white paint job, and trendy address lettering — as a tight market for housing near downtown gentrifies even the least scenic locations.
Every new day, the house greets the sunrise in defiance of decades — standing alone like a stray thread that, if pulled, unravels the logic of the policies that wove Nashville’s urban fabric from Watkins Park to Germantown, East Nashville, Belmont and beyond.
