A street scene from one of Knoxville's old bungalow neighborhoods. These houses, probably built for the city's lower-middle class residents back in the 1920s, provided working class families a first chance to have a place of their own, complete with indoor plumbing, electricity, heat, and a modest backyard. The homes were probably kept quite tidy at that time, but the entire neighborhood suffered during the postwar move to the suburbs, and by the looks of things has not yet really got back on its feet.
My neighborhood of Edgehill in Nashville, only a block or two from Music Row, once had dozens of blocks of small but dignified bungalows such as these, virtually all of which were bulldozed in the 1960s for public housing, the expansion of Vanderbilt and Belmont universities, and Interstate 65. (The somewhat wealthier streetcar suburbs, just a little further out, were spared the wrecking ball, resulting in a sad situation today where there are very few affordable single-family homes in the area, but plenty of dead-end Section 8 housing).
For some reason, urban renewal was not as prevalent in Knoxville, and many of the poorer bungalow neighborhoods may still be seen, lying in wait for some enterprising individuals to restore them.
