Park
Fannie Mae Dees Park
Concrete sea-serpent sculpture wrapped in mosaic tiles made by a thousand neighborhood volunteers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to a Nashville neighborhood park traces how a rebar-and-concrete sea serpent sculpture, built in nineteen eighty by artist Pedro Silva and about a thousand local volunteers, rose from a stretch of land cleared by urban renewal and eminent domain. It follows nurse and activist Fannie Mae Dees, whose home was lost to that same clearance, and the decades-later crisis that sent the concrete structure itself into decline. Look closely at the grout lines and you can still spot individual hand-made tiles from the original nineteen-eighty build.
This audio guide was created using AI.