Correction, 11 May 2007, 11:07 p.m.:

As a comment to this article spells out, the ownership of the Bell's Bend property included relatives of the Kitchells whose roles were not publicly known when this story was filed, despite efforts to reach Mr. and Mrs. Kitchell in advance of publication.

According to Susan Cowden, who posted the comment, most of the land was owned by a family corporation that included Louise Kitchell, her sister Mary Brockman and the sons and widow of Fred Cowden Jr.

As originally posted:

They're not making any more real estate in Nashville's traditional residential neighborhoods, in case you haven't noticed. And a land sale finalized today appears to be based on the premise that Nashville homebuyers may finally be ready to move into some of the city's sparsely populated areas north of the Cumberland River.

A partnership including local developer Jeff Zeitlin has purchased some 490 acres of Bell's Bend farmland from Nashville interior designer Louise Kitchell and her husband, real estate agent Joseph Kitchell. The sale price was $7.25 million.

Reached this afternoon, Zeitlin said it would be premature to discuss plans for the property, and he declined to name his partners. But he had laid out plans in 2005 for some 1,200 homes in the area, encountering some pushback from people living nearby who felt that such density would cause traffic problems on the stretch of Old Hickory Boulevard that runs through the bend and dead-ends at the river.

Zeitlin said his group had placed the Kitchell property under contract some time ago. "We're just honoring those agreements and taking down the properties at this time, and we'll evaluate what we do with them down the road," he said.

The tracts sit next to Metro's 808-acre Bell's Bend Park, created in 2001, a decade after Bell's Bend was in the headlines amid controversy over a proposal to site a landfill there. The area is reachable only from the north, but there has been talk in recent years of either building a bridge at the southern end of the bend or reviving a version of the Judge Hickman, a car ferry that ran across the river until about 15 years ago.