Hotel That Was Converted From a Train Station Next to the Frist Art Museum

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Introduction
Nashville Compages
Nashville during the Depression
Stripped Classicism
Icons of the Era
The New Post Office
Recycling the Nashville Post Role
Art Changes Lives: Celebrating Xx Years of the Frist Fine art Museum

Introduction

We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape u.s..

—Winston Churchill

A society projects its views of itself in its public works. Design choices embody many forces—political and economic as well as cultural. Our government buildings, therefore, must be understood in the context of the American experience.

When the U.s. of America was founded, its leaders chose the classical architectural style to symbolize the nation's legitimacy and its government's authority. Weighted with allusions to Greek democracy and the Roman commonwealth, classical architecture's formal properties—symmetry and bureaucracy, clarity and predictability—were idea of as instruments that could impose rational order onto a wilderness.

During the 1930s, federal architects relied on a form of classicism to tame the economic wilderness of the Nifty Low. But while the massive block built to house Nashville's post office is formal and symmetrical, it is "stripped" or "starved" of obvious classical details. In hindsight, its design reflected economically lean times.

The team of federal and local architects who designed the Nashville post office crafted an imposing monument to government stability. A team of public-spirited citizens poured dynamic new meaning into this vessel with the opening of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (now the Frist Art Museum) on April 8, 2001. They created an institution dedicated to serving all of Nashville'southward diverse communities, also as the people who visit our metropolis.

The result of the collective borough will to turn dreams into reality is a landmark repurposed every bit a identify of communal gathering and learning. Today the Frist Art Museum stands firmly on its 1934 foundations, committed to its vision to change how people see and experience their world through fine art.

Nashville Architecture

The cornerstone for what was originally called Nashville's Custom House, Courthouse, and Postal service Office was laid on Broadway by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, ii blocks from where the Frist Art Museum stands today. Hayes had triumphed in the 1876 election by promising to withdraw federal troops from the South and kickoff a federal building program in the financially depressed region. What became the US Community Firm was a realization of his campaign promise.

The Gothic Revival structure, designed by William Appleton Potter (1842–1908), was Nashville's beginning federal office building. Potter's apply of a style not traditionally employed for federal buildings was peradventure intended to make more than palatable the U.Due south. government's presence in a urban center that had and then recently been occupied past Union troops. The elaborate handcarved limestone ornament, the interior cherrywood trim, and the solid brass hardware contributed to the $404,684.44 cost of the project, making it the almost expensive undertaken during Potter's tenure as supervising architect for the Treasury Department.

Two buildings near the Frist Art Museum introduce earlier styles that call up the peachy cathedrals of Europe. The Victorian Gothic Christ Episcopal Church (now Christ Church Cathedral), built past New York architect Francis H. Kimball, opened in 1894. The Richardsonian Romanesque Spousal relationship Station, designed past Louisville architect Richard Montfort, opened in 1900 as Nashville's primary railroad train depot. The importance of Union Station was a critical gene in the decision to build a new post part adjacent door in 1934. In counterpoint to these older buildings, the symmetrical and streamlined post part would exhibit an updated classical style in which decoration is suppressed and linear incisions on the facade lead the middle skyward.

Marr & Holman, Architects

Thomas Marr (1866–1936), a partially deafened bachelor trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was content to remain at the drafting table, live quietly, and travel little. Joseph Holman (1890–1952) brought to the business firm not only an interest in architecture and engineering but the enterprising instinct to pursue projects and the ability to amuse clients into contracts. It was the perfect partnership.

Architectural exercise during the 1920s and 1930s, when the house was in its heyday, placed limited emphasis on uniqueness of pattern—at least outside the major urban centers. For Marr & Holman, design was largely a question of surveying the latest building types and styles and incorporating current developments into the firm'south projects. Architecture was more of a business than a fine fine art.

This practicality and business savvy may accept contributed to Marr & Holman's survival during the 1930s, when so many other architectural firms closed their doors. The fact that Marr & Holman was able to go on, albeit with a reduced staff, was due in big part to the new Nashville post role. Its $800,000 construction cost was greater than the sum of all other building permits in the city for the unabridged twelvemonth of 1933.

Such a prize was the subject of intense contest among Nashville architects. In March 1931, even earlier the call for architects was officially appear, letters and portfolios began pouring into the Treasury Department. Local firms still operating in the depressed construction industry made every try to impress those with influence in Washington. Holman flew to the capital to pay a personal call on the Treasury'due south acting supervising architect, James Wetmore, and to share his insights as the son of a postman.

On November v, 1931, Treasury Secretary William Woodin named Marr & Holman the architects for the Nashville post function.

Joseph Holman's friendship with theater entrepreneur and businessman Tony Sudekum led to a great deal of piece of work for Marr & Holman, including the Sudekum Edifice on the corner of Church Street and Sixth Avenue North. The principal designer of the Sudekum Building (originally the Warner Building) was Henry Horneman, a recent German immigrant borrowed from a Chicago firm by Holman. The twelve-story steel-and-physical construction was completed in 1932. With streamlined aluminum strips curved over the parapet to catch the sun'south rays, it was the business firm'southward best demonstration of fine art deco manner in Nashville. It was demolished in 1992, and the Cumberland on Church apartments were constructed in 1998 on the same site.

The rising popularity of the motorcar in the 1920s and 1930s reversed the tendency of increased density in the urban core in favor of suburban development. Tony Sudekum approached Marr & Holman with plans for a picture palace and shopping strip on Harding Route, near the recently adult subdivision of Belle Meade. The concept was a large picture house with a prominent neon marquee and pylon to attract bulldoze-by traffic, along with a series of attached setback shops.

The Belle Meade theater gained Marr & Holman national attention. Architectural Tape's fiftieth-anniversary result in 1941 presented the Streamlined Moderne circuitous as one of the nation'southward all-time new shopping centers.

Designed by Marr & Holman in the aforementioned stripped classical way as the Nashville post office, the extremely formal and dignified Tennessee Supreme Courtroom Building is classical in its proportions and symmetry simply simplified in its ornament, except for the richly detailed cornice. The New Deal's Public Works Administration contributed $192,857 to the construction budget, with the remaining $450,000 financed by state bonds. Like the post office, the edifice has an art deco interior.

Marr & Holman, Architects
Due north and South Elevations of the Nashville Post Office, October ane, 1932
Reproduction
Ink on linen
Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, original on deposit with the Frist Art Museum

Marr & Holman, Architects
Outside Wall Section and Main Details, Nashville Post Function, October 1, 1932
Reproduction
Ink on linen
Metropolitan Development and Housing Bureau, original on deposit with the Frist Art Museum

Nashville during the Depression

The immediate reaction of Nashville'southward construction industry to the crash of October 1929 was, "Information technology can't happen here." The Nashville Banner reported two months subsequently that "the flicker of fearfulness that followed the stock marketplace break . . . is beingness replaced past a sturdy optimism among building regime that the 1930 volume will be essentially larger." As late as October 1930, visiting officials from the Publix theater chain proclaimed that "Nashville is one of the few cities we accept seen where there is no apparent evidence of business depression."

That testify turned upward on November fourteen, 1930, when the "Wall Street of the South" went the manner of the residue of the land with the bankruptcy of Caldwell and Company, a local cyberbanking and brokerage business firm. In its wake, 120 banks across the Southward went under.

In response to the news that Caldwell and Company had declared insolvency, the Tennessee Hermitage National Depository financial institution suffered an all-day run. The crowd was orderly, for word had been sent down the line that all depositors would exist paid in full if they so demanded. But the depository financial institution airtight at 2:00 p.thou. with a long line of people still unserved. One mishap was reported: after waiting for two hours, a woman finally withdrew $150 but found when she reached the street that she had lost her money in pushing through the crowd.

Hunger and poverty appeared on the streets of Nashville in 1931. Armies of transients camped on the banks of the Cumberland River and wandered through downtown looking for work. The middle grade pawned heirlooms to pay for food and clothing, colleges bartered for tuition, and retailers cut prices to the breaking point. Applications for help to the city's charities and public agencies rose from 2,600 in 1929 to nearly 10,000 in 1936, straining resource beyond capacity. "Relief would have to come from the government," writes historian Don Doyle. "Only the federal government was up to the chore."

In 1935, Ben Shahn (1898–1969) was on a field assignment for the New Bargain'due south Resettlement Administration. The artist'southward chore was to record the socioeconomic geography of the nation's about poverty-stricken regions. Among his hundreds of photographs are a dozen of a Nashville religious meeting. Such meetings were frequently held on Lord's day afternoons, on the corner of Lower Broad beyond from what was then the city wharf on the Cumberland River. Shahn'south black-and-white images transcend mere reporting to explore the features of a community facing hard times.

Building a Manner Out

Rather than adding a new loading dock to the Community House, as originally planned, the Treasury Department decided to provide economical relief for Nashville by erecting a new building whose sole tenant would be the post part. Nashville's postal operations had no compelling need for more space, simply people in the construction industry needed piece of work. By February 1931, Congress had added $330 one thousand thousand to the federal building till. Thanks to the efforts of Tennessee representative Joseph Byrns, an influential member of the House Committee on Appropriations, the allocation for the Nashville mail service function was $1.565 million.

By 1930, more than than ten 1000 trains were used to move the postal service. The Treasury Department logically decided to purchase land for a new post part next to the railroad station. The site was occupied by Anthony de Matteo Fruits, machine and tire stores, a pie railroad vehicle owned by J. M. Coombs, and two small-scale hotels patronized by salesmen who rode the runway.

With the laying of the cornerstone of the Nashville post office on November 4, 1933, the federal authorities conveyed to the people that information technology was upwards to the task of crisis management. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt both recognized that the Mail service Office Department was the almost visible class of the federal government in every customs because the postal service touched the lives of every citizen.

The Nashville post office opened for business on November 26, 1934, eighteen months afterwards the first of bodily construction.

The matrimony-scale wages these workers were seeking ranged from 22 i/2 cents per hour for "laborers" to $1 per hour for skilled tradespeople—stonemasons, bricklayers, steelworkers, and tile setters.

Stripped Classicism

From earlier the Ceremonious War through the 1930s, buildings synthetic by the federal government had an official style, courtesy of the Treasury Department's Office of the Supervising Builder. The supervising builder allowed local architects employed on federal projects trivial elbowroom in design. Though the Nashville and Knoxville mail service offices were produced by unlike architectural firms, they are strikingly similar presentations of the federal classicism of the 1930s. The full-diddled classicism of the by—equally found in the Nashville Parthenon'south pediments, columns, and capitals in the Greek orders—was compromised by the authorities's need for speed of construction and by the influence of the way known generically as modernism.

For the modernist builder, the class of buildings should follow their part, the way the forms of machines practice. At their best, such buildings, with their steel frames and transparent glass mantle walls, symbolize a incomparably twentieth-century kind of clarity—the clarity of Henry Ford's associates-line-produced automobile.

But there was never whatever real question that federal architecture would go wholeheartedly modern. Authorities needed to announced as a stable strength in an unstable gild. Federal architects were called on to express the values of permanence, rationality, and order—values that classicism served so well—but in forms streamlined to suggest forrad progress rather than looking backward. The synthesis of modernistic and traditional produced the style known as "stripped" or even "starved" classicism.

Fine art Deco

The antechamber was the consumer affairs section of the Nashville mail service office. This was the public space where citizens could encounter and greet one another while conducting postal commerce. Its deluxe handling in the way of contemporary hotels and corporate offices—much more luxurious and less historicist in way than the severe classicism of the post office'southward outside—was a visual reminder that the business of government was a going business organization even during the years when the American economy was staggering.

The manner of the lobby is what we now call fine art deco. The term comes from the title of an influential exhibition of decorative and industrial arts held in Paris in 1925: L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Art deco designers rejected historicism as inappropriate to twentieth-century structures. In place of the Ionic scrolls and acanthus leaves of classicism (as seen in the Tennessee State Capitol) and the Gothic quatrefoil and crocket (as seen in the Usa Community Business firm), up-to-the-infinitesimal geometric and floral abstractions were introduced, such as chevrons, arcs, and sunbursts. Art deco buildings bankrupt no new ground in planning or structure; their modernity was strictly a thing of surface handling.

Icons of an Era

The frieze of icons represents the speed and power of transportation harnessed to evangelize the mail. These icons symbolize a proud history as well as current technology, as celebrated in a 1993 U.S. Post publication:

The Postal Service has helped develop and subsidize every new way of transportation in the United States. The postal role was a natural one: apart from postal employees themselves, transportation was the single almost important chemical element in mail delivery, literally, the legs of communication. Even when the general public was skeptical or fearful of a new means of transportation, postal officials experimented with inventions that offered potential for moving the mail faster. . . .

As mail delivery evolved from foot to horseback, stagecoach, steamboat, railroad, automobile, and airplane, with intermediate and overlapping apply of balloons, helicopters, and pneumatic tubes, mail contracts ensured the income necessary to build the great highways, rail lines, and airways that eventually spanned the continent.

The visual imagery embedded in the walls of the K Lobby confirms the self-confidence of the building's architecture. During the dark days of the Depression, federal builders spared no rhetoric to reinforce Americans' belief in their public institutions and in themselves.

The icons correspond the tools used to craft the economic and cultural prosperity of the nation. The mass-produced motifs symbolize the upward spiral of humankind courtesy of automobile production. Taken collectively, these democratically comprehensible images form an apologue of forrad move, industrial progress, and hope for economic revival.

The New Post Function

Ain't this swell!

—young boy at the post office open up house, 1934

On Sunday, Nov 18, 1934, before the postal employees or equipment had moved from the Customs Firm to 919 Broadway, postmaster William Gupton introduced the new mail service function to the public during an open up house instead of a formal dedication. Gupton said, "Now everybody is taking a paw in it, and they take a chance to feel that it really belongs to them." An estimated 40,000–50,000 Nashvillians toured the new building and its luxurious lobby.

Countless pieces of post have been sent through Nashville'due south post office, which has helped tie the city to the residual of the nation. Just, meaningful bonds are ultimately forged by people. In the example of the U.S. postal system, those people include the postal workers who operate it and the customers who use it.

Juanita Threalkill: Striving for Equal Rights

Nashville's postal operations have non escaped controversy. In the 1960s, the post role could be a hostile place for clerks who had the education and skills to do the work but were considered the wrong race or gender. Juanita Prewitt Threalkill Johnson (1937–2020)—female parent of local artist James Threalkill, a founding trustee of the Frist Art Museum—was a Black woman who faced gender-based obstacles and racial politics in the course of getting and keeping a postal job.

Equally Juanita Threalkill, she passed the civil service examination for postal clerks in 1959, upon learning that information technology was open to women. Three years elapsed before she received a phone phone call asking her to report for the 2:00 a.m. shift during the Christmas blitz. After working for two nights, she was told she was no longer needed. Threalkill was subsequently approached by Robert Everett, president of the local chapter of the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees—the "NAACP of the mail service," in Threalkill's words. He asked if she would exist willing to file a lawsuit against the mail service office based on gender bigotry.

"I agreed to the lawsuit, just I did not realize the implications—that I was suing the U.s. government," Threalkill explains. "I just wanted a task to back up my family unit."

Represented by Nashville attorney and ceremonious rights leader Avon Williams, Threalkill appealed to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Senator Albert Gore Sr. Afterwards many messages and legal maneuverings, Threalkill was finally placed at the top of the federal register. On June 22, 1966, she received a letter telling her to report to piece of work. Subsequently 4 years at her first assignment, followed past vii years at a North Nashville station, Threalkill beat other candidates for a coveted full general clerk position at the downtown post office in 1977.

Juanita Threalkill retired from the Usa Postal Service in 1996.

Recycling the Nashville Post Office

In December 1986, the Nashville post office prepared for its last Christmas rush. Postal workers braced for the cherry-red-and-green onslaught of an estimated 57 million cards and letters—enough to brand a stack twenty.6 miles high. In the spring of 1987, Nashville's central postal distribution operations moved to an industrial park about the airport. Airplanes had replaced trains as the means for moving mail from city to urban center. The site side by side to Matrimony Station was no longer an attraction just a hindrance.

The question was, what to do with the old shrine to federalism? In 1989, programmer Pat Emery proposed a 19-story office tower for the site. Schematic drawings show the tower looming over the 1934 building like the proverbial viii-hundred-pound gorilla, dwarfing the tower of Wedlock Station. The retention of the original building's style for the much more than massive "addition"—theoretically beauteous as a gesture of historical respect—illustrated how stripped classicism, when diddled out of proportion, could result in an effect reminiscent of fascist architecture of the 1930s. Fortunately for Nashville's architectural history, the bottom fell out of the office market before the scheme could be realized. Today, the one-time post part—now art museum—is dwarfed by surrounding hotels and other skyscrapers as Nashville moves into the twenty-first century with speed.

In 1996, when The Frist Foundation proposed installing a visual arts center in the downtown post office, Nashvillians recognized a compatible tenant. The building's architecture recalled the classically inspired temples to the fine arts that other cities had congenital long agone.

The postal service office was also practically as well as symbolically appropriate. Art museums typically require large rooms with tall ceilings, a large loading dock, and plenty of subsidiary spaces for events, administration, archives, and storage.

The post part had all these, on a site at the edge of the city middle, with excellent admission to artery roads and interstates. The chore for the renovation designers was to carve out galleries and open up upwards sight lines and predictable avenues through areas of the building that had in one case been off-limits to the public.

Designed as a civic monument, the Nashville post office has adapted to its new civic purpose with the nonchalance all fine quondam buildings are adept at—absorbing the present moment into the larger context of history.

As with whatsoever historical structure, the intendance and preservation of the edifice is a constant responsibility, which is supported in office by the Frist Fine art Museum's Art Deco Society. A major projection initiated in 2019 was the restoration of the building'due south distinctive windows, an integral element of the building's art deco way and some of its almost identifiable and admired attributes. Intrinsic exposure to the elements over the decades had significantly corroded every steel window frame and weakened the attachment points of the heavy panels, rendering them increasingly vulnerable. Conserving the windows had become more urgent in 2016, when ane of the affected panels detached from the building and vicious to the ground. The edifice'south eighty-three window frames were immediately inspected and stabilized where possible, and routine rubber inspections were conducted during the course of the restoration projection.

Michael Lewis
Post Role Interior, MainLevel, 1998
Archival paint print
Frist Fine art Museum

The Gallery Floors at the Frist Fine art Museum

When possible, throughout the conversion of the downtown post office into an art museum, great care was taken to preserve original features such as the wood flooring. The pine floors in the galleries, formed with the ends of two-past-four-inch pieces of lumber, are incredibly durable because the tough end grain provides superior hardness and resistance to vesture. The sections are each three and a half inches broad, two and a half inches thick, and approximately forty-six inches long, jump together with wire.

During the renovation, the original floors were taken upwards, refinished, and reinstalled. As you walk through the galleries, you can see staples, screws, and gouges that remain as historical signs of the original warehouse employ.

Michael Lewis. Interior view of the Nashville mail service office, 1998. Photograph © Tuck-Hinton Compages & Blueprint

Seab A. Tuck 3, with Tuck-Hinton Everton Architects
Redevelopment Scheme for the Nashville Post Office, 1989
Reproduction
Colored pencil and pastel on newspaper
Collection of Tuck-Hinton Architecture & Blueprint

Seab A. Constrict Three, with Tuck-Hinton Architects
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2000
Based on a photograph of the Marr & Holman
presentation drawing, The Tennessean athenaeum
Reproduction
Graphite on newspaper
Collection of Tuck-Hinton Architecture & Blueprint

Art Changes Lives: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Frist Art Museum

Approximately 7 thousand guests celebrated the opening of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts on Lord's day, Apr viii, 2001. Information technology was the culmination of almost a decade-long civic dialogue and planning process led by The Frist Foundation. Originally inspired by Nashville'due south Agenda, a 1993 customs-wide visioning projection, the institution relied on the community'southward input again when its name was changed to the Frist Fine art Museum in 2018. Working together for the by xx years, trustees, staff, and volunteers have endeavored to fulfill the founders' vision of bringing the art of the world to the Mid-S, providing opportunities for learning, connecting and engaging with the customs, and being welcoming to all.

Founder Dr. Thomas F. Frist Jr. stated that the museum would be "a place that will bring the ability of great visual arts to the center of our metropolis and the center of our lives." Kenneth L. Roberts, president of The Frist Foundation, envisioned the museum to become "a key element in our civilisation and in the revival of downtown," and to set Nashville apart. Their vision and that of the Frist family, the Board of Trustees, and many supporters and donors was for the museum to be a place for the unabridged customs, regardless of individuals' backgrounds or abilities. This was concretely demonstrated with a commitment that admission for visitors ages 18 and younger would ever be free.

The Frist Art Museum greeted its four-millionth invitee in November 2019. Since 2001, we have presented exhibitions from all the continents except Antarctica, in partnership with premier institutions from around the world. We've showcased the piece of work of people from a variety of eras, cultures, and disciplines, from local simple schoolhouse students to highly acclaimed established artists, in a dazzling assortment of genres and mediums, ranging from assemblages, cars, and mode to paintings, sculptures, and videos.

The other central tenets of the Frist Fine art Museum are education and customs engagement. As a 20-outset-century museum, we accept been dedicated to developing and coordinating interactive learning opportunities for our guests throughout our existence: instead of gathering in our no-longer-existent estimator classroom, participants tin can now admission a multitude of guided activities and lessons with their ain smartphones and laptops. The Martin ArtQuest Gallery, a honey and innovative intergenerational learning and fine art-making infinite, attracts thousands of guests yearly. Other educational offerings include trip the light fantastic toe presentations, films, gallery guides, lectures, tours, music and spoken discussion performances, and workshops. Families, teens, college students, seniors, military personnel, and people with disabilities can observe programs and opportunities that address their interests throughout the year.

Community engagement activities began a year before the museum opened, with staff connecting to organizations such as Head Start and public libraries throughout Davidson County. These enduring Customs Partnerships remain central to the Frist and today accomplish more sixty organizations and institutions annually. These connections as well include ongoing commitments to support Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) and Middle Tennessee school systems with professional development programs for educators, exhibition tours, school art shows, and art resources.

With intentionality, The Frist Foundation led the attempt in collaboration with Metro government to secure the former main post office as a site that would exist inclusive. It would be a place to requite all Nashvillians a "window on the globe of art" and to transform how people see their earth through fine art.

We gloat all that has been accomplished over the past 2 decades and, as Nashville continues to dramatically change around our building, we remain steadfast in our delivery to working collaboratively with the diverse customs of artistic voices in our region.

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Source: https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition-labels-and-panels/

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