Nashville Faces Hotel in Heart of Country-Music History
By Margaret Foster | From Preservation | Feb. 21, 2007
Nashville's Lower Broadway historic district is surrounded by
office towers and parking lots.
Credit: Tennessee Preservation Trust
In Nashville, a National Register-listed historic district may get a 19-story hotel if developers get their way.
Three historic buildings will be demolished to make way for the Westin Hotel, but locals say the 200-feet-tall complex will change the character of the area where country music is king and the largest building is 70 feet tall.
"There's really a national interest in it because of what this area means to the history of country music," says Patrick McIntyre, executive director of the Tennessee Preservation Trust. "It's really the epicenter of country music in the way that Bourbon Street is connected with jazz. The key difference is that [this area] is less than a block in depth in places."
Denver-based Sage Hospitality Resources and Fayetteville, Ark.-based Barber Group last year applied for a zoning change to build a $100 million Westin Hotel. Until last week, they have had green lights: The city's metropolitan development and housing agency approved the plan 7-2 in August, and in November, the planning commission voted 8-2 to approve it.
On Feb. 15, however, the city's historic zoning commission approved a historic zoning overlay, a local designation that would protect the Lower Broadway district. But that protection, which the metro council must approve, doesn't apply to the Westin proposal.
Earlier this month, a group of people who own music venues in the Lower Broadway district paid for a full-page ad in the Tennessean that called for the overlay to apply to the Westin. The Feb. 4 ad featured a depiction of the new hotel towering over the streetscape.
"It's like a ribbon of authenticity in a sea of change," McIntyre says. "On one side, you've got a lot of surface parking, and on the other side, you've got modern office buildings."
The National Trust urged the city to deny the developers' request. "No part of the city relays Nashville's history, and the influence of country music, more than this fragile, river-focused section of downtown," wrote National Trust President Richard Moe in a Nov. 10 letter to the metropolitan planning commission. "Should the current proposal be accepted, the loss of historic buildings along Broadway may initiate a change in boundary for this National Register historic district, prompting the first reduction in size of any National Register district in the city."
The council is scheduled to make the third and final decision on the project on Mar. 20.
Sage Hospitality plans to open the 350-room hotel in the fall of 2008.
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