Looking out from the Second Avenue building that Jay Turner calls home, he sees a short stretch of Cumberland. Alongside a few hundred feet of changing water is Nissan Stadium and, above the river, a nearly empty plot of land on the river’s east bank where plans for Nashville’s new look are being drawn up by city leaders and developers.
Such a transformative development is no stranger to Turner. He helped demonstrate the possibility of doing this in Nashville.
His father, Steve Turner, had a similar view of Cumberland when he purchased the building now named after their dog, Butler Run, for $650,000 in the late 1990s. Jay Turner’s parents dreamed of coming to Nashville to live in a big city. They were coming from a farming town of less than 4,500, in Scottsville, Kentucky.
A few decades later, Jay Turner inherited more than his father’s Nashville home and real estate and development company, MarketStreet Enterprises. He adopted his father’s vision of what the city could become, particularly the neighborhood known as Gulch.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Gulch was home to an active railroad yard serving Nashville and the area. During World War II, the tracks carried more than 100 trains per day. But after the war, the interlocking plot was hardly put into use, with passenger service discontinued in 1956 and a commuter train in 1979. For five decades, the yard remained mostly unused.
“It was part of the town I went through and it wasn’t there,” Jay Turner said.
That was until the early leaders of MarketStreet, Steve Turner and Joe Parker, had an idea to reinvent a dilapidated railroad yard into a contemporary neighborhood—the land’s convergence of the Industrial Revolution was seen as aesthetic, as opposed to its future.
Gulch’s early plans mirror what exists today, a mixed-use neighborhood with offices, retail, residential and hospitality spaces. Jay Turner said their original master plans did not take into account neighborhood density, as the market over the years has been stronger than expected.
Gulch was the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Neighborhood Development) certified community in the South, focusing on walkability and the use of green designs.
Jay Turner remembers when his father asked him what he thought of his purchase of eight acres from CSX, a rail freight company. Not sure.
“Insight is the way to say it now,” Jay Turner said. “At the time, it seemed very risky.”
The neighborhood set a precedent for other developers, proving that Nashville had the will to make a drastic change.
“It was a few guys who really said, ‘We see something here. This could be a great thing, said Janet Miller, a longtime leader in real estate in Nashville and CEO of Colliers Nashville, “and it’s starting to turn the flywheel.” “She was a pioneer.”
Jay Turner, who acquired MarketStreet in 2007, said Gulch is an example for onlookers across the country that big change is taking place in Nashville.
The success of the neighborhood gave the family a huge return on investment. In November, MarketStreet sold a plot of land for $22 million, which it had purchased in 2005 for $4.3 million. While the deal was one of the biggest sales per acre in the area, Jay Turner said he’s protecting the land he and his company bought in Gulch, not selling much of it.
One of the few monuments still standing before the turn of the century is Arnold’s Country Kitchen. The concrete restaurant on the edge of Gulch has served a lunchtime crowd since 1983. Their plates consist of meat and three meals – customers choose from a rotating menu of protein and side dishes, such as meatloaf, fried catfish, mac n’ cheese and collard greens or chicken and waffles.
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Khalil Arnold, son of the founding owner, has spent time working at the restaurant since he was 10 in the late 1980s. He was washing dishes, taking phone calls, and cooking.
He remembers the time when country music icons like Merle Haggard, Randy Travis, and Dolly Parton were having lunch at his family’s restaurant alongside working-class people and some people who didn’t have enough to cover the tab. “It’s funny how things have changed,” he said.
When he was young and working in the restaurant, Arnold described Nashville as a “Mon-Fri” city. After people did their work, he said they pulled home for the weekend.
As Nashville developed a lively night scene, weathered economic hardship due to the pandemic and underwent a cultural shift over the decades, he was relieved that his family’s restaurant had survived.
“I think there’s still some old Nashville out there,” Arnold said of the city’s institutions in general. “And we’re really lucky that we haven’t had to change and go too far yet.”
Gulch’s future remains largely under Jay Turner’s control. While his company continues to have large parcels in the heart of the neighborhood it has built, it keeps the next steps under wraps.
“We make sure that what we do next makes the goulash more lively than it is now,” Turner said.
Sandy Mazza and Cassandra Stevenson contributed to this report.
Arcelia Martin covers growth and development in Tennessee, and is part of the USA TODAY Network. You can reach Arcelia at amartin1@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @arcelitamartin.
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