👋 Say goodbye to Confederate flag eyesore

🍔 Joyland To Open in West Nashville

Chef Sean Brock is bringing his popular burger joint Joyland to West Nashville. The restaurant will take over the space where Hero Doughnuts used to be on Charlotte Ave. No word yet on when it will open. [The Tennessean]

• Hungry? Check out these other new restaurants. [🎧 City Cast Nashville]

🇺🇸 Confederate Flags Removed

The Confederate flags have been removed from the private property along I-65 once home to the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue. The Battle of Nashville trustees who manage the flag park have replaced them with the U.S. flag and the current flags of the Union and Confederate states that participated in the Battle of Nashville. [Nashville Scene]

🪩 Keith Urban To Co-Host New Year’s Eve Bash

Nashville’s big New Year’s Eve bash will be headlined and co-hosted by GRAMMY Award-winning local Keith Urban, who will join Entertainment Tonight’s Rachel Smith as co-host. Kane Brown and Jelly Roll will also be headlining. The free event typically attracts more than 200,000 people. [Visit Music City]

🏠 Wealthy Neighborhoods Prevent Zoning Reforms

Nashville’s outdated zoning code has remained mostly unchanged since 1998, and has prevented the construction of multifamily housing for middle-income residents. Instead, developers build mass apartment blocks along narrow strips of busy roads, with sprawling and expensive single-family homes in between. [Nashville Scene]

Did you know Nashville has a rich soccer history? When Pharmaceutical Soccer co-host Clay Trainum moved here in 2017, he couldn’t find much local history about the sport. He decided to collect physical mementos of Nashville’s soccer history and compile them into the Nashville Soccer Archive, which he has since donated to Vanderbilt University. With Nashville SC missing the playoffs for the first time in their Major League Soccer history, perhaps some hindsight is in order.

The Teams That Came Before

“There's a lot of pre-history to the existence of the Nashville Soccer Club that we now know and love,” says Tranium, a former sports information director who now works at the MTSU library. He traces the club’s lineage from the United Soccer League years backwards to the Nashville Diamonds, a pro team that played only one season, in 1982: “I have access to full newspaper archives of both the Nashville Banner and The Tennessean,” he says. “So I spent a few late nights in our microfilm collection clipping every single story I could find. They were doomed to failure from the start, but their mere existence felt significant. I mean, this was a professional soccer team playing in Nashville, 16 years before the Titans and Predators came to town.”

Why Newspapers Matter

The biggest thing Tranium says he’s learned through his research is the importance of newspapers. “The absolute best thing about digging on the Diamonds and other older teams is that the local newspaper covered every living, breathing sports moment in Nashville,” he explains. “As papers shrunk and stuff moved online, information just disappeared into the ether. I'm afraid that I'm destined to never learn of certain results for games that were played fewer than 15 years ago, but I had no problem finding results from 40 years ago.”