Buildings, like last time with the Greyhound Station, are the expression of ideas that find a place in the imagination or consciousness of a culture. American and European culture in the early decades of the twentieth century were fascinated by the concept of speed. In the lifespan of the of a single person men went from moving at the speed of a horse to being able to leap over oceans in the space of hours.
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Buildings matter. This is a concept that is foreign to us now. As anyone who spends more than a few minutes driving around our city can easily attest to, the vast majority of the buildings (houses, stores, banks, even—I cringe as I write this last one—churches) look like they have come out of some factory where they are mass produced on an assembly line. Buildings used to mean something. There was some idea, value, universal concept that held the building together and directed its growth and form.
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Communities need focal points to survive and to grow: locally run and owned businesses that are unique to the community and that provide an individual flavor and feel to a city. These local points are necessary for the community to continue to provide the multitude of functions that we expect from them and need from them to feel connected and to live full and healthy lives inside that community.
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The connection between agriculture and West Tennessee is as old as the last ice age. When the glaciers retreated and the sea whose northern reaches brushed the southern edge of our state dried, what remained in the land between two of the great rivers of our nation was a fertile alluvial plain that stretches from the line of hills bordering the Tennessee River all the way to the Mississippi River.
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