What Happened to All the Pretty Houses?

On Victorian architecture and John Maass's "The Gingerbread Age."

The Claremont House in Rome, Georgia. The Claremont House is a real home that was used as a filming location for Season 4 of Stranger Things, in which it was called the Creel House. The home is an excellent example of a Second Empire Victorian. Via Toles, Temple & Wright, Inc.

Nashville, Tennessee is known for many things—the music industry, the rowdy bachelorettes on Broadway, the massive influx of young people over the past decade—but it is not a city renowned for its architecture.

I’ll admit that the boxy high rises in downtown, now overshadowed by one new skyscraper after another, are less than inspiring. But Nashville’s original growth spurt occurred during the late 1800s. Move away from Downtown and into residential neighborhoods, and one will find a wealth of historic homes from the late Victorian period through the 1920s.

These homes increasingly stand beside what locals call “tall-and-skinnies”: cheaply constructed townhomes built within the past decade, two to a lot, whose gl…