About Sylvan Park

Sylvan Park is wedged between Charlotte Avenue and West End and sits just outside the western portion of the 440 loop that skirts the south side of Nashville. It's charming older homes and proximity to downtown and Vanderbilt have made it a perennial hot spot since the mid-90s. Streets named after states like Utah and Wyoming are bisected by numbered avenues forming the traditional gridlike pattern found in older neighborhoods. Before Sylvan Park became Sylvan Park, it was part of New Town (quite the original name) which eventually became West Nashville. Back then the east west roads were numbered avenues and the north south ones were numbered streets.

Sylvan Park was also a much larger neighborhood than it is today. In the 50s when the interstate system gouged its way through Nashville, it severed many of the inner ring neighborhoods including Sylvan Park. Historic homes that once sat along Alabama and Delaware Avenues, are now replaced by eight lanes of traffic and mostly blighted commercial store fronts.

But the loss of the homes along those two streets pales in comparison to socio-economic chasom that was created when I-40 came through and tore Sylvan Park in two. Today, gentrified Sylvan Park sits to the south of I-40 and has been steadily shaking its recent roots of a mostly low-income rental neighborhood. Young married couples (like ourselves) are moving in and renovating and expanding the charming old bungalows and cottages that make up Sylvan Park.

But just across the wall of exhaust and the cacophany of roaring vehicles on I-40 sits a lost piece of Sylvan Park that hasn't enjoyed near the amount nor the speed of revitalization that Sylvan Park has. The Nations - as it is now referred to - has been crippled with high crime and neglected properties for decades. Now I-40 acts as a socio-economic buffer that is rarely crossed by residents of either neighborhood.