Centennial Park

Nashville

Centennial Park is a large urban park located approximately two miles west of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, across West End Avenue from the campus of Vanderbilt University. The 21st-century headquarters campus of the Hospital Corporation of America was developed adjacent to the park. Cultivated as farmland by some of the earliest families in Nashville, the territory became controlled by the state and used as a park after the American Civil War. In the last decade, it was used as a racetrack. It was redeveloped as the site of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897. Afterward most of the temporary exhibit structures were removed, but the replica of the Parthenon remained. Centennial Park was opened in 1903. Due to the popularity of the Parthenon, it was rebuilt in the 1920s in steel and concrete. Under Jim Crow laws, African Americans were excluded from this public park and its swimming pool until after passage of federal civil rights legislation in 1964. Wikipedia