The Müuse Atlas / United States / Tennessee / Nashville

Filming on Lower Broadway, Nashville

The street runs downhill to the Cumberland between brick fronts from the late nineteenth century, with a sign on nearly every one.

The north side of the 300 block of Broadway on a sunny afternoon, brick and stone fronts of three and four storeys with a sign on every one, a candy shop and a boot store at street level.

What Lower Broadway looks like

Broadway runs downhill from Fifth Avenue to the Cumberland. The buildings along it are brick and mostly late nineteenth century. Almost every one has a projecting sign over the sidewalk, and several run neon the full height of the front.

It was Broad Street first, and its east end finished at the shipping docks. A section further west was called Auto Row early in the twentieth century, when car dealers and tire shops took it over. Lower Broadway is the name for the part from First Avenue to Fifth, and the blocks between Second and Fifth went on the National Register in 1980.

The Grand Ole Opry left the Ryman in 1974 and most of the businesses that lived off it closed within a few years. and the at 417 were among the few that held on. The Opry began playing the Ryman again in the 1990s and the bars came back with it.

Tootsie's is at 422 and has been purple since a painter turned it that color without being asked. The Ryman is half a block up Fifth Avenue, and its back door faces Tootsie's across the alley. at 401 was a hotel from 1892 until the 1980s, and Opry acts stayed there after a show.

The at 316 has a front window that lifts open to the sidewalk, with the band on a platform a few feet inside. is up the hill at 501 and the riverfront steps are at the bottom.

Films shot in Lower Broadway

Robert Altman filmed Nashville around the city in the summer of 1974, and hardly any of downtown is in it. Tootsie Bess would not let him shoot inside her bar. The production used the Old Time Picking Parlor on Second Avenue instead, and that room is no longer there.

Coal Miner's Daughter, 1980

Broadway looking east from above Fifth Avenue, the street running downhill toward the Cumberland with low brick buildings and projecting signs along both sides.

Part of Coal Miner's Daughter was filmed inside at 422, on the north side of this block. It also shot in the Ryman, half a block up Fifth Avenue, in the years the auditorium stood empty. John Carpenter's Elvis had filmed there in 1979 and Clint Eastwood's Honkytonk Man in 1982.

What Lower Broadway can double for

Lower Broadway can stand in for a neon bar street at night and an 1880s commercial block above the shopfronts.

Areas like Lower Broadway

Beale StreetSixth StreetSecond Avenue North

Look

Main streets

“a downhill street of brick honky tonks with neon signs stacked up the fronts”

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