One Saturday in September, the Parthenon Belongs to the Under-Twelves
There is a specific kind of Nashville Saturday that is hard to plan and wonderful when it happens: the one that costs nothing, wears the children out, and does not require a ticket you have to find on your phone in a parking lot. Centennial Park has one of those on the calendar for September 26.
The Kidsville Family Festival returns to the park that day, running from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free. It is built for children of all ages, and the day is stocked with the things that actually hold a small person's attention for five hours — live performances, hands-on arts and crafts, games, face painting, character meet-and-greets, and enough food trucks that nobody has to negotiate about lunch.
Kidsville is not just one Saturday
The festival is the marquee day, but it is the visible tip of something that runs all year. Kidsville is a program of the Centennial Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that looks after the park and the Parthenon, and its whole premise is that arts and educational programming for kids should be free at the point of entry — not discounted, not sliding-scale, just free.
That adds up to more than 100 free events a year: storytelling, hands-on art, interactive learning, music. The Storybook Walk winds through Centennial Park. There is an afterschool program. Family Play Day and the Family Festival are the signature gatherings. Programming is aimed at children twelve and under, and it does not all happen at the park — Kidsville also turns up at community centers and outreach sites across the city, which is the part that matters most for families who cannot easily get to West End on a weekday.
The park was built to be shown off
There is a pleasing symmetry in a children's festival landing here, of all places. Centennial Park exists because Tennessee threw itself a birthday party. The grounds were the site of the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition — a world's-fair-style spectacle of temporary buildings, exhibitions and crowds, thrown up on what was then the edge of the city.
Almost all of it was designed to be torn down afterward, and almost all of it was. The exception is the building everyone now takes for granted: a full-scale replica of the Parthenon of Athens, built as the exposition's art pavilion because Nashville had spent the century calling itself the Athens of the South and evidently decided to commit to the bit. It was meant to be temporary too. Nashville could not bring itself to demolish it, rebuilt it in permanent materials, and has been quietly living with a Greek temple in a city park ever since.
A hundred and thirty years later the crowds are back on the same lawn, this time with face paint.
Practical notes
Centennial Park sits at 2500 West End Avenue, roughly a mile and a half from downtown and directly across from the Vanderbilt campus. That location is the one genuine complication: parking around West End on an event Saturday is competitive, and the lots nearest the Parthenon fill first. Arriving near the 10 a.m. start, rather than at the lunchtime peak, is the difference between a short walk and a long one.
Bring water and sunscreen — late September in Middle Tennessee is still capable of a genuinely hot afternoon — and a picnic blanket if you would rather claim a patch of shade than chase one.
If you are building a fall out of this, the park has a good run of free weekends ahead. We laid out the full Musicians Corner fall schedule, which is also free and also in Centennial Park, and put together the dates and pricing for Cheekwood Harvest and Boo at the Zoo for the paid end of the season. For the next seven days specifically, see our weekly family roundup.
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