Bellevue, Tennessee
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Bellevue, Tennessee, is a large unincorporated 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 hard to set a population figure for an place such as Bellevue due to the absence of any set, definable boundries, 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 70 South 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 Highway 100, was the inspiration for the title of the hit country song "Harper Valley PTA".