Reactivating Nashville's Downtown

Downtown Nashville today is a world apart from that of just ten years ago, when the city center labored through the urban schizophrenia of many downtowns. By day, it was a bustling central business district for banking, commerce, law, and government services. By night, it was a place that people fled for their havens in suburbia. Most windows in the city’s office towers fell dark after nightfall. The evening cityscape was punctuated by the blinking of a few neon signs along Lower Broadway, a once-proud boulevard tracing west from the Cumberland River that became weighted with pornography shops, souvenir vendors, and honky-tonks. [Editor's note: The full text of this article is only available to ULI members.]