AA-2026-B6EBFA
On the image
Somewhere in Nashville in the 1950s, a steel broadcast tower was installed close enough to a neoclassical civic building that a single street-corner glance took in both the ancient Roman ideal of public architecture and a latticed steel mast bristling with guy-wires — the twentieth century's preferred form of civic authority. The building, with its colonnaded facade and dressed limestone, was designed to project permanence. The tower was designed to project a signal, and in the 1950s nobody thought those two ambitions were in tension.
Parked at the base of the tower is a mid-1950s American sedan, the kind of car whose proportions suggested the owner had given serious thought to comfort without quite reaching luxury. A bus-zone no-parking sign sits in the foreground with the flat confidence of a sign that has never once deterred a bus. The whole scene is the American postwar city doing what it did best: stacking eras on top of each other and calling the result progress.
The building in the background appears to be the War Memorial Auditorium on Sixth Avenue North, its Beaux-Arts colonnade recognizable against the treeline. The broadcast tower planted beside it made perfect sense at the time, which is the kind of detail that takes a few decades to become funny.
Visually related — by likeness
Radio Broadcast Tower and Neoclassical Civic Building, Nashville, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-B6EBFA. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/radio-broadcast-tower-and-neoclassical-civic-building-nashville-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026B6EBFA,
title = {Radio Broadcast Tower and Neoclassical Civic Building, Nashville, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-B6EBFA},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/radio-broadcast-tower-and-neoclassical-civic-building-nashville-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Radio Broadcast Tower and Neoclassical Civic Building, Nashville, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-B6EBFA UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/radio-broadcast-tower-and-neoclassical-civic-building-nashville-1950s ER -
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