Nashville, Between Meetings

Nashville carries more history per block than most cities are willing to show you, and staying behind after a business trip gave the city a chance to reveal some of it. Centennial Park is where you find the Parthenon, a full-scale concrete replica that still manages to surprise you in person. Under a grey October sky the columns are enormous and the detail in the frieze is genuine. Inside, the gilded Athena Parthenos fills the hall in a way that photographs can only approximate. A single visitor on a mobility scooter parked at her base makes the scale undeniable.

Fisk University was the other pull. Friends had studied there, and its history as one of the country's most storied HBCUs was reason enough to walk the grounds with a camera. Cravath Hall's neo-Gothic stone entrance, Jubilee Hall with its Victorian spire rising against a deep blue sky, the freestanding bell on its brick pedestal, the craftsman bungalow at 1601 with its elaborate white woodwork, all of it spoke to an institution that had been quietly shaping American intellectual and cultural life for well over a century.

I had never been to Nashville before, and I did not know what I would find when I stayed. What I found was a city with more to say than its reputation suggested.