The House Stood 173 Years. What Replaced It Has Been Waiting Since April.

In 1849, an architect named Sterling B. Jones bought a tract on North Spring Street, a short walk from what is now the Public Square. The following year he put up a two-story brick I-house on it — solid masonry, a plain rectangle, the kind of vernacular building that borrowed a little Federal restraint, a little Greek proportion and a little Georgian symmetry without committing fully to any of them.

Four Murfreesboro mayors eventually lived in it: Ingram Collier, Newton B. Collier, James H. Crichlow Jr. and N. Collier Crichlow. That is how the Collier-Lane-Crichlow House came to be known around town as the House of Mayors. It went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and it came down in January 2023, after decades in which no one had spent what it would have taken to keep it standing.

A hundred and seventy-three years, and then a demolition permit.

What is there now

The ground has been given over to luxury townhomes, priced from the $500,000s, with Canaan Builders LLC listed as the developer and contractor. Some of the units are framed and bricked. None of them appear to be close to finished.

That is what the neighbors noticed, and it is the part the city can speak to precisely. Building permits for the project remain active. But there is an open code enforcement violation on the property — tall grass — and the city's Building and Codes department has placed an inspection hold on the work until that is cleared. The last documented inspections on the site were insulation inspections completed on April 28. That is now nearly five months ago.

An inspection hold over uncut grass sounds almost comic until you follow the logic of it. Inspections are the metronome of a construction project: framing, then insulation, then drywall, each one gating the next. Stop the inspections and you have stopped the building, whatever the crew intends. The grass is not the problem. The grass is the lever.

The builder's answer

A part-owner of the building company, Eric Hensley, says the slowdown is not distress but strategy. In his account the company expects a stronger housing market next spring and is pacing completion to land in it, rather than finishing into a softer one now. He also says the property is monitored by cameras and that the grass complaint is being dealt with.

That is a coherent position, and in a market where Middle Tennessee builders have spent two years watching rates move against them, it is not an unusual one. It is also cold comfort to the people who live in sight of it.

One neighbor, Warren Tormey, has described the half-finished units as looking neglected and as though they are losing value where they stand. Another, Tim Booth, characterized the work as coming in bursts — a stretch of activity, then nothing, then a stretch again — across weeks and months. Tim Taylor, who has lived on the street for twenty-five years, is not opposed to the project at all; he would simply like to see it finished, for the sake of how the block looks.

That last position is probably the majority one. Almost nobody near downtown is arguing that the lot should have stayed empty. The argument is about the interval — the years between one thing being gone and the next thing being real.

The wider pattern

Murfreesboro has run this experiment several times in a short span, and it does not always end this way. A block away, a downtown sanctuary that sat through a cancelled hotel deal and seven years of uncertainty is finally under renovation, with its bell tower intact. At MTSU, Rutledge Hall has reopened with a new purpose rather than a wrecking ball.

The difference in those cases is that the historic fabric survived long enough for the money to arrive. On North Spring Street the order was reversed: the building went first, and the replacement is waiting on the market.

Whether that reads as prudent business or as a hole in the streetscape depends mostly on how far you live from it — and on whether next spring arrives on schedule.