The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Unlike some other providers, the Party Barge has a firm rule: no standing up. They don’t go through residential neighborhoods. They discourage their riders from shouting obscenities. They play “clean” music. They keep the penises “down.” The city hasn’t figured out how to regulate these transportainment companies, so they try to regulate themselves.

  The owners of the Pedal Tavern, which now operates a total of 10 group bikes out of their airy, exposed brick Midtown offices, told me the same. “We begged the city council to regulate us. Because if we’re not regulated, then it means that others can come in here and give us a bad name,” said Angie Gleason, who moved from Minneapolis to run the Pedal Tavern. “Others” meaning operators like the Nashville Party Wagon (a hay wagon, filled with up to two dozen passengers, towed behind a John Deere tractor), which has faced off with the city over its right to drive a farm vehicle on city streets.

  “We want to protect our business,” Gleason said. That means no musical chairs, and instructions to yell “Predator danger!” whenever someone on the street tries to hop aboard. On a weekend night on Broadway, the sheer number of drink-while-someone-else-drives mobiles make the street feel like a Disneyland ride. But most operate in respectful, inebriated harmony, united by the rest of Nashville’s dislike for them.

  Back at the Losers parking lot, one of the Party Barges sets off onto the street, Kenny Chesney blaring. “The girls come here, and they’re not necessarily thinking of the effect on the community,” Smitherman told me. “There’s some stuff they’d just never do in their hometown.”

  Smitherman’s not judgmental; none of the drivers seem to be. One, retired from the Air Force, told me he gets a lot of joy from just driving people around while they have fun. They recognize that the locals are annoyed, but argue that bachelorettes are just the most visible manifestations of what residents, the majority of them recent transplants themselves, are mad about.

  The idea of Nashville as the cradle of country music might not be changing—in fact, the endurance of that idea is what brings so many tourists here. But the actual makeup of the city—the sort of people who can afford to live here, and what they have to do to be able to afford it—is.

  Tourism has been a central tenet of the American economy since World War II: our parents and grandparents drove the expanding web of interstates to destinations like Disneyland, the Catskills, the Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls. In this old model, there was an infrastructure specifically built for the tourist experience: hotels, tour guides, package deals, all cordoned off from where residents conducted their day-to-day lives. But the bachelorettes in Nashville represent a different type of tourist: ravenous for an “experience,” especially if there are photos to prove it, and far more willing to spend money on a trip with friends than, say, a couch or a down payment.

  That experience can involve something wild and out of the way (say, skydiving) but its most common iteration is deceptively destructive, and usually involves “living like the locals” (staying in neighborhoods, eating in neighborhood spots) without any of the constrictions (not wanting to disturb neighbors, not inconveniencing others, not taking up more space than necessary) that accompany actual residency.

  Nashville—or whatever city they’re visiting—becomes their playground. And in the case of the bachelorette parties, they get away with it (and have entire industries cater to them) in large part because they are white, and because they have money. Restaurants create rooms and reservation systems to accommodate them. The New York Times writes “36 Hours” itineraries for them. New businesses paint murals to attract them. New companies figure out new ways to get crazy while being contained in a kind of organized chaos.

  At the same time, the people who make those experiences possible—the Uber drivers, the Airbnb cleaners, the dance teachers, the barbacks, the backup musicians—get pushed farther and farther away from the city, unable to “experience” it themselves in a context that doesn’t involve serving others.

  Nashville’s history is one of settlement, of segregation, of forced relocation, of white flight, of rebranding and regeneration. You can see a palimpsest of that history in the area of Nashville recently rebranded as 12 South, which is less of a neighborhood and more of a long street lined with shops catering to young people with money. There’s a vintage shop selling old taxidermied animals and overpriced, worn tees, a high-end denim retailer housed in an old car repair shop, a Sprinkles bakery with a cupcake ATM, and an old VW flatbed truck repurposed as a mobile “flower truck.” The entire neighborhood is, as one bachelorette advice blog post put it, “really cute.”

  At its heart is the flagship store for Draper James, Reese Witherspoon’s lifestyle brand named for her maternal grandparents, both of whom grew up in Tennessee. The Draper James building is whitewashed, with baby-blue-and-white awnings and eight-foot photos of Witherspoon hugging her look-alike daughter, Ava Phillippe, positioned like adorable sentries on either side of the entrance. When you walk in, employees—slender, in heels—inquire if you’d like some sweet tea, which is smartly served in petite plastic cups with lids and straws.

  The store, like so much of 12 South, is at a price point that makes it aspirational for most of the bachelorettes who come to browse, shop, and grab photos with the various murals that dot the neighborhood. A package of pencils embossed with HELLO SUGAR and THANK YOU MA’AM runs $16; a conservatively cut ponte dress in “Bermuda blue” stripes, which, according to designer notes, is “instantly timeless, polished, but super easy,” costs $125. But shopping on a girls trip is less about purchasing and more about browsing and imagining: Is this the dining room table I’d buy when I have my own townhouse?

  Many of the women who buy clothes at Draper James embrace an old-fashioned understanding of southern femininity, the sort that finds nothing wrong with a T-shirt printed with the imperative KEEP IT PRETTY, PLEASE ($38). As one woman in her mid-20s from South Carolina told me, “My mom’s crazy about that store. It’s the sort of thing rich moms from the suburbs love.”

  Those rich moms from the suburbs are the sort of people who are moving back into the area now called 12 South, which, until 20 years ago, was considered “the bad side of Belmont”—which is to say, the black side of Belmont: for decades, it served as a community for black residents who stayed in Nashville as their white counterparts began to decamp to the suburbs. Over the ’70s and ’80s, the neighborhood was primarily known for its numbers joints, drug deals, and prostitution. Sevier Park—now a sprawling, verdant, family-filled neighborhood hub—was dubbed “Needle Park.”

  In the late ’90s, the first tendrils of gentrification began to spread. The “12 South Master Plan,” initiated in 1996, improved streetlights and added bike lanes. Vanderbilt and Belmont University art students competed to design public art for the area; the eventual plan involved a bunch of sculpted benches. An upscale restaurant moved in, as did a bike shop, an anarchist bookstore, and a thrift shop named Katy K Designs and Ranch Dressing. In other words, Stuff White People Liked. The neighborhood’s Victorians and bungalows were bought up, flipped, and/or transformed—often by artists, musicians, and new families.

  Two decades later, that first wave of gentrifiers has been gentrified out of the neighborhood they helped transform. Katy K’s shut its doors in 2015 due to rent increases; the anarchists and their bookstore are long gone. The median house price in the most desirable swath of the neighborhood is $633,000. The houses that don’t look like they’ve been through a rinse cycle of HGTV stick out; their residents eye the hordes of weekend visitors, parking on their streets, with a sort of bewilderment.

  And the wave of gentrification just keeps expanding. On the northern border of 12 South, the black population of Edgehill, long home to middle-class black professionals, has fallen from 67 percent to 50 percent over the last four years. It’s a familiar cycle for so many cities: The people who stuck with the city during the ’70s and ’80s, often people of color and/or the working class, are pushed out
by incoming artists and creatives whose incomes necessitate finding cheaper housing. Then the artists get pushed out by the yuppies, who will pay skyrocketing prices to live in a neighborhood that’s “cool” and “historical” and “safe.”

  When a Lyft driver picked me up in 12 South, driving up through Edgehill into downtown, she shook her head at what she saw. “Every time I drive through here, I can’t believe it,” she told me, unprompted. “I grew up here, and I don’t even recognize a thing.” Like so many black Nashvillians, she’s moved to the northern suburbs, making the 40-to-60-minute commute into the city where, especially on weekends, her primary customers are tourists. She doesn’t mind the bachelorette parties, in part because she only drives them during the day, when “they haven’t gotten wild yet.”

  Outside Draper James, a cluster of women has surrounded a temporarily installed sculpture of the Rolling Stones’ “tongue and lips” logo, set up just feet away from the Draper James mural: a promotion for an exhibit opening soon at the Nashville Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum. One of the women, holding out her phone for a selfie, attempts to hoist herself onto the sculpture, only to slide, ungracefully, down the tongue. She laughs at herself but makes sure to keep the phone steady: it’s prime Instagram Stories material. Across the alleyway, six women stand a foot apart from one another in front of a mural that says I BELIEVE IN NASHVILLE painted on the side of a dental “studio.”

  When asked why they chose Nashville as their bachelorette destination, most groups defer to a single member of the group (sometimes the bride, often not) who’d heard about, or seen pictures of, another group’s trip. “Oh my God, this is a great location for a bachelorette party. My brother came down here for his bachelor party, and had so much fun,” one bride-to-be from Bergen County, New Jersey, told me in the line for the angel wings mural. “And my own fiancé is coming down for his own party later this month.”

  They say Nashville feels safer than New Orleans, even though statistics indicate otherwise; it’s less of a scene than Las Vegas. “I didn’t want some club experience where we wore tiny dresses and stood in line,” one attendee from Los Angeles told me. “This is so much more chill.” As for what makes it chill, what makes it fun, what made them feel the necessity of a destination bachelorette, answers were vague. The possibility that what makes Nashville so appealing is the culture developed and maintained over decades by people now being priced out to make room for them to brunch and get drunk, and that that culture might be gradually, steadily eroded by their presence, didn’t seem to occur—at least in terms they could articulate—to any of them.

  Robbie Goldsmith is the founder of Bach Weekend, one of a half dozen companies that plans bachelor and bachelorette parties in the area. He saw just how many visitors there were—and their spending potential—during his years at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, where he helped launch its music “accelerator.” In person, Goldsmith, who grew up in the Chicago area, presents like a business major, casually mentioning that the sushi bar where we met, on the second floor of Acme Feed & Seed, “was where I closed my last big deal, so that’s awesome.” In his online avatar, he’s wearing reflective Ray-Bans, sticking his tongue out, and pointing at the camera: a human bachelor party.

  But Goldsmith didn’t start Bach Weekend to live a debauched lifestyle on repeat. After moving to the area in 2010, he started fielding requests from friends and family for recommendations on what to do in the city, especially for “girls’ weekends.” He calculated what the average bachelorette party attendee was paying (around $850) and figured he could provide the same services, bundled, for less—and take out the stress of planning.

  Over the last five years, Goldsmith’s side job has morphed into a company with four employees, and two complementary businesses: Rocket Experiences, which plans pub crawls and scavenger hunts for visiting corporate groups, and Hustle Media, a social media marketing firm “built on badass customer service, innovative strategy, and winning the attention game.”

  “Sixty to seventy percent of our groups are funneling in from the Midwest, within a day’s drive,” Goldsmith told me. “We’ve got a ton from Chicago. Others coming from the Twin Cities, Michigan, Missouri. It’s not such a thing with people from the South—everyone who grew up in the South knows country, knows Nashville, has been here at some point in their childhoods for something. It’s just not as special for them.”

  Or as Elizabeth Allison, who helps run the Pontoon Saloon—which, unlike the Party Barge, actually operates on the river—told me, “My South Carolina friends and I would never come to Nashville on a bachelorette. It’s way too cliché.”

  To reach potential clients, Goldsmith funnels a few hundred dollars into Facebook ads that surface for women, between the ages of 22 and 31, who’ve recently switched their status to “engaged.” A post from their account will often accumulate hundreds of comments, the vast majority of them just women tagging their friends. “The hard part is conversion,” he says. “We get thousands of people who go to our website and fill out our forms, but just hundreds who decide to do it.”

  Still, those hundreds are paying anywhere between $199 (a base package) to $479 (the Platinum VIP Package, which includes lodging) per person. Bach Weekend customizes the weekend according to the party’s desires, planning pedal pub tours, line dancing classes, and open-bar nights at the honky-tonks. (Also included: hangover kits, bachelorette sashes, and room decoration.)

  “When they buy, everyone’s really tentative about being at the same open bar as other bachelorette groups,” Goldsmith told me. “What they don’t realize is that whether they go with us or not, they’re going to be going to a bar with dozens of other bachelorette parties. Why not go with one with an open-bar package, where everyone’s there to celebrate the same thing?” There’s less risk, too, of annoying everyone around you: at the heart of the bachelorette ethos, after all, is the notion that every space, every restaurant, every service should accommodate you. During your visit, you bend the city to your needs.

  “I understand the objections to the bachelorettes,” Goldsmith said. “But I’m not the reason they’re here. They’re coming no matter what. We’re just trying to make it a little less crazy.”

  Bach Weekend recently expanded to New Orleans and has tentative plans to set up in Austin. But Goldsmith’s plans expand much wider: “For one trip, we’d take over an entire condo building, with ten units, ten different groups, and there’s a bonfire on the beach at night with drinks—it’d be a real true experience they’re never gonna forget.” He’s also thought about setting up groups who’ve aged out of bachelorette parties for trips in fully stocked RVs, “exploring the coolest places in America: Glacier, Yosemite, the Rockies.”

  Bach Weekend attracts repeat customers—Goldsmith told me one woman has now been on four different weekends with four different friend groups. Once they’ve done the Nashville scene, they need something new. “Two years ago, everyone wanted to do Pedal Tavern,” Goldsmith said. “Now a lot of groups are like, ‘Well, we did that when we came last summer.’ So now we’re thinking of putting them on country music tour buses, the super-nice kind the artists ride in—and we’ll bring a songwriter on, have them play and hang out. We’re talking super-high-end, highly customizable experiences.”

  It’s about novelty, but it’s also about the ability to capture and post that novelty. On Sips and Sequins, one of dozens of personal blogs offering detailed Nashville bachelorette itineraries, the author suggests the first thing to do is download the Glimpse app, which “allows you to record 1 to 3 second video clips the entire weekend and add that perfect song!” She also advises setting up a photo booth (“Everyone loves a good photo op!”) and creating a custom Snapchat filter (which, if you open the app in the vicinity of The Gulch, you can see in abundance).

  Photo ops have long provided the unspoken structure of tourism: Thorstein Veblen, one of the first scholars to theorize the performance of leisure, argued that travel is always, at least
in part, about being seen traveling. But this feels like something different. “The girls will wait in line for an hour, just for these mural pictures,” said Goldsmith. “Next year, we’re gonna be prepared with the locations, videographers, the photographers, they’re always on call. We’re going to build in the experiences—and make sure they get those photos.”

  You might think that the labor of documenting all these experiences could threaten to overshadow the experience itself. But that’s not how Goldsmith sees it.

  “Earlier this year, we filmed all the girls pouring champagne into a girl’s mouth, and it was just amazing,” he continued. “What we really need to focus on now is creating that for every group. We’re gonna create great images those girls are going to remember forever.

  “And then they Instagram them,” he said, nodding, “which, you know, is huge.”

  It used to be easy to avoid tourists in Nashville: just don’t go downtown on a weekend. But over the last five years, locals have ceded other neighborhoods and spaces to the bachelorette parties. Pinewood Social functions as a casual workspace during the week, but transitions into a hipster country club during the weekends, with brunch, bowling, drinks, a pool, and a rooftop patio, which make it one of the “Best Spots in Nashville to Take a Picture.”

  At 7 p.m. on a Saturday, a woozy bachelorette group had set up shop in the corner of the bowling alley. They ate fancy mac ’n’ cheese and tried to stay awake; their bowling game never made it past the fourth frame. It was the point in the night when the friends start to get protective of the bride, who was just a bit further gone than the rest, and very eager to talk about her queer fantasies involving Rashida Jones.

  “Most of the people who go to a place like Pinewood Social are the type that would never belong to a country club, even if their parents did,” historian Rachel Louise Martin told me. “But how else are you going to demonstrate you’re the sort of person that could belong to one?” That’s one function of a place like Pinewood Social: its image, once Instagrammed, is the new signification of a certain type of leisure and, by extension, a kind of class.