Lunchtime walk around Nashville's Bicentennial Park 1-12-07

Friday was cloudy an unremarkable in every respect except for the unseasonably warm temperature for mid-January. My previous post about Sulpher Dell was drawn from the same lunchtime walk, but my imagination ran away with me (as is its wont - see my screen name). After much research I ended up devoting an entire post to the historic ballpark that once occupied this site. And so here are the other pictures I took on that 20-minute walk. (Have I mentioned lately that I love working in downtown Nashville?)

I set my camera down on the sidewalk to get an ant's-eye view looking up toward the state Capitol, which you can see on the hilltop in the distance.


Here's a standing-up perspective. This is what a normal person would see - not that I'm at all "normal." I always search for the unexplored perspective.


This little tree has been fooled into thinking it's spring. You can see the Captol building again through the branches.


Its buds are opening,


and we wondered what will happen to it when/if we get a hard freeze.


Then we spied a vine that had wrapped itself around a bush and opened its seed pods to spread its next generation. I love the way it looks windblown, even though the atmosphere was completely calm.


Underneath the bush we saw where a mockingbird appears to have met its demise.


On the way back to the office we passed some new condos for sale where an old vegetable distribution warehouse had stood until a few months ago. Can you imagine paying $300 thousand dollars to live in a two-story townhouse within a block of the railroad tracks?


Here's a perspective looking back at the condos from the other side of the tracks. A train was passing at the time.

Nashville's Sulphur Dell

Yesterday my bud Jerry and I took a walk around Nashville's Bicentennial Mall, which was once home to Sulpher Dell. Union solidiers occupying the city during the Civil War introduced baseball to Nashville in 1862.

I set the camera down on the sidewalk to get this ant's-eye view looking toward the state Capitol, which is visible on top of the hill in the distance.


Supher Dell was the oldest professional baseball field when it closed in 1963.


How did Sulpher Dell get its name?
From The Tennessean 10/30/02:
"The park was in a low-lying area south of Jackson Street along Fifth Avenue, just a bit north of the present-day James Robertson Parkway. The area was subject to flooding when the Cumberland River exceeded its banks. To its credit, this topography also made the spot a natural amphitheater.

"Another asset was the free-flowing sulphur water well on the ballpark's southern boundary. Players between innings could take a few steps to the well house for a cooling, if strange-tasting, refreshment. The first game there between organized teams was in 1866.

"Known early on as Sulphur Spring Bottom and later as Nashville Athletic Park, it got the better-known name of Sulphur Dell thanks to Grantland Rice, a legendary Tennessean sports writer. One day in the 1907-09 period, when Rice may have been struggling to find a topic, he suggested in a ''prankish moment'' renaming the bottom the dell.

"The name stuck with the locals, just as baseball had four decades earlier. (The irony that didn't go unnoticed was that this ''dell'' — the term for a tree-lined valley — was largely a coal-smoke-filled, flooding lowland. Part of it was even used as a city dump, its fires often sending out acrid fumes.)

"Nashville's 'Vols' were among the Southern League's eight teams in the first decade of the 1900s."


Hank Williams in a Nashville Vols cap.


LBJ throws out the first pitch in 1961.




















The area flooded frequently. This photograph was taken after the Cumberland River flooded in 1937.


In its heyday.


For sale.