“Most people will tell you they like what’s happening,” said Sylvia Rapoport, a Nashville native and president of the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, which helped Metro Parks fund the $9 million restoration. “There’s an excitement about Nashville that we’ve never had. Young people are coming here to settle.”

Nashville’s unleashed growth, though, has stirred civic concerns about how to solve the region’s swelling traffic problem, and about the city’s identity. City leaders and many residents agree that Nashville is in dire need of an improved transit system. Mayor Megan Barry, who took office in late September, campaigned on a platform that included promoting more bus and rail options.

The transition to a city with livelier street life and much taller buildings has also unnerved some residents and spurred a discussion about Nashville’s distinctive way of life.

“The flavor of Nashville is changing,” said Bob Bernstein, the founder and owner of Bongo Productions, who moved from Chicago in 1988 and owns a collection of popular Nashville restaurants and coffee shops. “Real estate prices, rents, they are going nuts. New, shiny stuff is happening all around. People who don’t own real estate, small operators, are being priced out of businesses they built.”

“The city is on fire,” added Richard Lloyd, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. “There’s excitement about the big city thing. But there’s anxiety, too. Some of it has to do with whether we are losing some part of our soul. Nashville always had this tension. It wants to be taken seriously, be big time. But it doesn’t want to lose the homeyness.”

Still, in a departure from the polemical debates about growth in other American cities, which typically involve either unleashing developers or putting up high barriers of civic opposition, Nashville’s pursuit of a much denser urban experience is being undertaken with a kind of pragmatic wariness.

That approach worked for Bridgestone Americas, which settled in Nashville in 1992 and now employs 1,100 people in a leased office tower near the airport. Facing the expiration of its lease in 2017, the company began a national search in 2012 for new space that could have led to Bridgestone’s leaving Nashville. By November 2014, when Bridgestone announced that it would lease an angular glass and steel tower developed by the Raleigh-based Highwoods Properties, Nashville’s downtown makeover was well underway.