Bellevue, Tennessee
Bellevue is a
suburb of
Nashville. It is the home of a marginal regional shopping mall, the Bellevue Center. It is one of the more densely populated areas of
Davidson County, Tennessee due to the high concentration of
condominiums and town houses. It is incorporated as part of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County.
It is hard to set a population figure for a place such as Bellevue due to the absence of any set, definable boundaries, but it is realistic to think of it as probably being Nashville's second largest suburb after
Antioch, with nearly all of the growth coming since the later
1960s and early
1970s. This is partially due to the widening of
U.S. Highway 70S to four lanes shortly before this, and the advent of regular bus service to downtown Nashville. Bellevue can probably be considered as being coextensive or roughly so with the
United States Postal Service ZIP Code 37221.
Four decades ago, Bellevue was a small community which existed primarily to service the needs of nearby
farms. It was located mostly along the
railroad tracks near the
Harpeth River, and had only a few buildings such as a hardware store, a
post office, and a
Masonic lodge hall. The suburbanization was made official when the United States Postal Service changed the designation of the office there from "Bellview, Tennessee" to a branch of the Nashville office in the late 1970s.
Harpeth Valley Elementary School, located on the outskirts of Bellevue along
Tennessee State Route 100, was the inspiration for the title of the hit
country song "
Harper Valley PTA".
Bellevue is the primary focus of the weekly newspaper
Westview, which is published there.