Downtown

The story of Downtown

Downtown Nashville is where the city keeps its legends: the Ryman Auditorium — the 1892 'Mother Church of Country Music' — Printer's Alley, and the neon canyon of Lower Broadway. It's also where Nashville changed the country twice: in 1920 Tennessee's ratification of the 19th Amendment was won here (Frankie Pierce Park tells that story in paint), and in 1960 students trained in nonviolence desegregated the 5th Avenue lunch counters — that street is now Rep. John Lewis Way, with a Good Trouble mural to explain it. Between the history, garage-scale walls keep going up wherever there's blank concrete.