MARATHON VILLAGE, NASHVILLE (Cheri)

First - I don't know when - I saw this massive old warehouse from Interstate Interstate 40, driving through Nashville.

Next, I picked up a book called Cool is Everywhere, by Michel Arnaud.  The book itself, so cool, is about old buildings and spaces around the country that have been adapted to new uses.  I was one of the first LEED-certified attorneys in California, and the aesthetics of old buildings always draws me in, so this is right down my alley.

One of the book's chapters is about Nashville, and there's a two-page spread about Marathon Village, former home of a couple of cotton mills and then the Marathon Motor Works.

All I knew about the Village was what those two pages said, that parts of the complex dated back to as early as 1881 and it had a small on-site museum.  As we were parking, Mark kept asking what was inside, so we'd have an idea of how long the car would be in place.  "I don't know!  I just don't know."

Wow, just wow!  Although the building is multi-use, and contains working artists' studios, not-your-usual shops, and eating and drinking establishments, its core is a massive museum of the Motor Works and related subject matter.  The walls are covered . . . on and on.

We saw people lining up for a concert scheduled for that evening as we took pictures of the exterior, then cut through the Jack Daniels General Store into the building's main corridor. 

This is a tiny portion of the first wall that we saw:

Every now and then you would see an empty spot like the one above, marked with blue tape and noted.  Were these bits of memorabilia being loaned out for exhibits elsewhere?

I didn't read about the Motor Works' financial decline, but apparently its automobiles were originally considered to be very high-quality, and the marketing department was energetic.

Originally the building's current owner developed it for artist studios.

(Did you see the little bit at the top left of the newspaper page from 1991, which led the reader to an introduction of the new television show Seinfeld?

There are still occupants who create and sell their work on site.  I stopped and talked to very nice artists creating work at Poplar Point:

and Lorraine Frances Jewelry:

It's too bad that we didn't get to the Village last year.  Until then, it housed Antique Archeology, the shop at the center of the old show American Pickers.  That would have been a kick to see.

Mark and I spent a long time at It's Now or Never:  Museum of Music Icons.  (If you're interested in old-time country stars, that link is very interesting.  I could never summarize the place/museum experience!

Singer-songwriter Lloyd Gibson, a true raconteur, was manning the museum.  He told us the story that you see on the sign below,

sang us his spot-on, funny, rendition of Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time," - which I had never heard - and a ballad of his own, about the emergency landing of a B-52 Bomber in Sheffield, England, during WWII.  Those links are our audio clips of the moments.

I haven't watched it yet, but here's a YouTube clip about It's Now or Never.

Most of our pictures of Marathon Village are fairly closeup.  If you, too, enjoy old warehouses, you might like this write-up of the Village that someone else did, which includes more long-distance pictures.  It also includes a history of the Marathon Motor Company.