In many ways, Nashville is a town untouched by time. A place where you can still find children walking to school in the fresh-cut, green-scented breeze of a September day. An in-town landscape of sprawling lawns and elegant homes. Sidewalks, ice cream trucks and

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been reclaimed and reborn as riverfront bars and restaurants, urban lofts and the souvenir shops of revitalized tourism. A new Symphony Hall modeled after the crown jewel of Vienna, Austria, sits next to the Country Music Hall of Fame. A magnificent art museum now

the Vanderbilt University professor-cottages and bungalows of the 1920s. Old roses climbing the trellises of sleeping porches like pink children in whitewashed tree-forts. Not yet enough traffic or city noise here to drown out the birds.

And a river runs through it. The river that originally led French explorers to the same spring-fed and leafy banks that would eventually give birth to a trading post, then to the muddy first-streets of Nashville downtown proper – early in the 19th Century. Nashville, yes. Sole social, educational and cultural oasis of the South outside of Charleston until the 1920s – having played host to tours of major national theatre and opera companies as early as 1817; to a spectacular Nashville Centennial exhibition in 1890; and to half the Presidents of the United States by 1900.

"The Athens of the South," they called it. First city in the nation to introduce a Metro-sponsored system of public education, in the 1820s. Bigger than Atlanta right up until World War II. All built on the banks of that river – the once-mighty Cumberland River. Her waters neutered now by the flood-control efforts of the Tennessee Valley Authority – having misbehaved and overstepped her banks as far up Broadway as 5th Avenue more than once in the early 20th Century. And then again in the Great Flood of 2010.

The river on whose banks a new Nashville is being forged again.

The rusting scrap yards of forgotten industry that once covered the east side of the river for 50 years or more have moved aside to accommodate a gleaming NFL stadium – home of the Super Bowl-contending Tennessee Titans. And on the opposite side of the river, an arena housing the anomaly of one of the youngest hockey franchises in the NHL – the Nashville Predators – right here in the country-music bosom of the Confederate South.

The old-brick warehouses between 1st and 2nd Avenues downtown – once reserved for the cargo of river trade then abandoned in the late 1960s and 70s – have

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occupies the refurbished husk of an old U.S. Post Office building on Broadway. There is a grand new Downtown Library, new hotels, swank contemporary office space and a thousand-unit apartment building occupying a once-desolate stretch of Church Street left empty in the recession of the early 80s. Bringing the former energy of bustle back to that strip just around the corner from the famed Ryman Auditorium where Harvey's and Loveman's Department Stores and the Knickerbocker Theater once sold Nashville its sack suits and hooped prom dresses; its Humphrey Bogart films and the wartime news of WW2; the poodle skirts and James Dean movies of the Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Elvis years of the 50s that followed.

And there are brave new "loft city" developments rising up from the abandoned railroad yards and warehouses in the pre-downtown hollow adjacent to Nashville's Union Station. The rebirth of urban living for an entirely new generation of Music City-dwellers, signaling the emergence of new life among Nashville's forgotten ruins and spawning the first glimpse of a teeming inner-city increasingly populated by an eclectic mixture of imported youth and vision. Fueled – like the rest of this town's Renaissance – by the discovery of unexpectedly fertile ground among the authentic relics of Old Nashville; by the boundless opportunities for participation in the process of a city reinventing itself; by an undercurrent of human electricity even TVA could not have squeezed from this river. And by the sizeable human and financial capital of an energetic influx of New Nashvillians who have suddenly discovered this town and its "creative class" of writers, singers, musicians – and increasingly, its idea-generators, marketers and change-makers. Louisiana Pacific, Nissan North America, Mars Pet Foods, Oreck and more. All attracted to this city still untouched and untainted by the cynical view that most of the advertising and media world has of America from the ivory towers of its major-market periphery. Businesses eager for new ideas. A city poised for growth and ready for change.

The perfect home for an agency like BOHAN.