Nashville’s Downtown Tests the City-Within-a-City Concept
Downtown Nashville will soon be home to Tennessee’s biggest mixed-use development. But can the live-work-play concept survive a pandemic?
Nashville’s downtown has transformed in the past decade, and one of its most ambitious development projects is set to open in the coming months.
Photographer: Eilon Paz/BloombergFreddie O’Connell remembers when Nashville’s Lower Broadway wasn’t a strip of country music bars frequented by bachelorette parties and tourists for its Instagram-worthy backdrops. The city council member for District 19, who represents the city’s burgeoning downtown, remembers decades ago, when there was a seedy Times Square feel, when adult bookstores lined what’s now honky-tonk highway. He’s seen various attempts to revitalize the neighborhood, from the now-demolished 1987 convention center, which he labeled “a failed approach at urban design” that ignored the streetscape, to the transformative Bridgestone Arena and the revitalization of the city’s downtown due to tourism and rising real estate prices.
But a new development set to open this fall, Fifth + Broadway, named for the key downtown intersection around which it’s centered, will crystalize how busy developers have been in downtown Nashville.