The River North Greenway is 0.2 miles long. You can walk it in about four minutes without hurrying. It opened this month at 2200 Bowline Avenue, on the East Bank, and city leaders gathered to mark it on Friday, Sept. 4, at the mayor’s weekly roundtable.
Two-tenths of a mile is not much of a headline. It is, however, a very particular kind of civic object: a piece of ground that anybody can walk on, for free, forever, on land that is otherwise in the middle of the most expensive redevelopment in the city’s history.
What Is Actually Happening Over There
For most of the last century the East Bank was where Nashville put the things it did not want to look at. Scrapyards. Surface parking. Industrial ground across the water from a skyline that kept getting taller. The Cumberland was less a front door than a moat.
That is being undone at speed. A domed stadium costing more than $2 billion is rising there, on schedule for completion in February 2027. The NFL has already awarded Nashville Super Bowl LXIV, to be played Feb. 10, 2030 — the first Super Bowl in Tennessee history. Sphere Entertainment has been in preliminary conversations about a venue on East Bank land. Around all of it, a new street grid and thousands of housing units are being planned…