207 31st Ave. N.

Over the years, urban landscapes churn. In Nashville recently, I duly noted that a lot of places, mostly retail establishments, had vanished in the years since I last lived there. But the fact that the Pizza Hut (or Inn?) that I visited a number of times during my freshman year in college has become a Qdoba Mexican Grill is of very little consequence, except maybe to the former franchiser of the pizza joint (Obie's Pizza was much better, anyway, and it's still there).

Some changes amused me. My first full-time job was in an ugly, early '60s office building on West End Ave. Now it's an Indigo Hotel and looks pretty good. Next time I'm in town, I might stay there, if I can get a room on the same floor as my office used to be. (Provided I can remember which floor it was, which I can't right now.)

Then there's the case of the house at 207 31st Ave. N. From the fall of 1982 to the spring of 1983, I lived there with two friends and a divinity graduate student, while the year before that, the house had been a duplex, part occupied by my friends, part occupied by a guy who made his living as a session drummer in Nashville's many studios.

For younger readers (if any), imagine this: no one living there in 1982-83 had a still camera that I remember, or if so, didn't use it much. We could have had cameras, but it would have involved developing film at some remote location, and I don't think any of us could be bothered with it. Likewise, no one had a 8mm camera. None of us had any video cameras, digital cameras or cellphone cameras either, because those weren't on the market yet. All that is a long-winded way of saying that I have no images of 207 31st Ave. N. that I know of, except for fuzzy scenes I shot for film class movies that used the house as a set.

In my mind's eye, though, I see a one-story brick house with brown trim, probably dating from the 1920s, when it would have been a nice middle-class property. By the time my friends and I lived there, it had that rundown student housing feel, complete with creaking floors, a fireplace that leaned a little, and other defects. "Firetrap," my mother called it when she saw it just before our graduation.

I prefer "dump," since there were plenty of loose windows from which to escape an inferno. The sort of dump that's perfect for young men. Just thinking about it floods me with nostalgia, but it's the kind of detail that bores people who didn't share the time and place -- except maybe for certain events, such as the time about 10 people crammed into the one of the house's small bathrooms, and accidentally brought down the shower curtains (or was it the medicine cabinet? I remember a crash and drunken laughter, but can't visualize anything). Or the game of Monopoly four of us played in the living room without saying anything. (Try it sometime. There's a lot of gesturing and grunting and pointing to deed cards.) Or the isolation tank we built in the garage and put in one of the rooms, which apparently worried the landlord. Considering the condition of the beams in the damp, moldy basement supporting the house, he might have been on to something. But the weight of the salt water and the wooden superstructure of the tank never broke through the floor, thank God.

Now the house at 207 31st Ave. N., Nashville, Tennessee, is gone. Late last month I drove by en route to the Parthenon, and in its place -- and in the place of the old apartment structure on one side of it, and another old house on the other, was a condo development. Local sources tell me the condos were developed about three years ago, so our old house had an 80-year run or so. A lot of other people must have passed through it, families in its early days, transient students later on. Now it exists only when any of us who can remember it, care to remember it.