Are we witnessing the end of Broadway as we know it?
That may sound dramatic, and it may even excite some people who aren’t happy with the direction Nashville has moved in recent years.
The city has experienced a massive boom in popularity over the past decade or so, drawing record numbers of both tourists and people moving to Music City. (I moved here myself in 2016, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much things have changed just in the past 10 years).
One of the most visible signs of the city’s growth has been Lower Broadway, the strip of bars in downtown Nashville that serves as a tourist destination and draws in millions of tourists every year to the dozens of bars located in a 5 block stretch.
Even when I moved to Nashville 10 years ago, Broadway was a fun place to go on weekends that was filled with small honky tonks and musicians playing mostly country music, with the occasional Journey or Paramore cover thrown in there.
But starting around 2017, things began to change. Those small honky tonks gave way to massive, multi-story entertainment venues owned by giant hospitality corporations and named after some of country music’s biggest stars. Six-story bars with bands on every floor became the norm, and as the bars grew so did the crowds.
Of course with that came a changing culture, from people who came to Nashville for gritty dive bars and live country music to a younger crowd looking to get drunk and party to top 40 hits, rock music, and DJs spinning EDM in the corner of fancy bottle service rooms.
And another consequence of all that growth is now turning into a full-blown crisis for many bar owners.
Property values in downtown Nashville have skyrocketed, with Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville recently setting the record for price per square foot when it sold to Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves for a staggering $75 million.
Prices are being driven higher by out-of-state investors and hospitality companies eager to capitalize on Nashville’s growth. But with skyrocketing property values also comes the corresponding property tax increases – something that’s threatening to put many of the bars on Broadway out of business.
New property appraisals were completed in 2024, meaning that 2025 was the first year for the new tax bills that in some cases have quadrupled in just one year.
The issue first came to light last year when Rob Mortenson, the head of the Broadway Entertainment Association, told FOX17 that the rising taxes could very well spell the end for some of staples of the Broadway scene:
“These are folks that have been there for 40 years on Broadway, and, you know, they can’t pay the taxes. Their option is, I was told, we’re either going to go bankrupt or go to jail, one of the two, because we literally can’t pay the taxes.”
Layla Vartanian, the owner of Layla’s Honky Tonk on Broadway, also previously said that it’s the largest property tax increase she’s seen since she opened up her bar in 1997:
“I’ve never seen an increase of any kind of property tax or any kind of tax in such a short period of time. We’re having an increase of 300-400% on these buildings down here, on our commercial buildings. Even on personal properties, residential properties, the increase is 300% and 400%.”
And Tom Morales, owner of Acme Feed & Seed, recently made headlines when he warned that he may have to close his bar after his property taxes went from $129,000 to $600,000 per year overnight – which he says is more than his rent and net profit combined.
While the Tennessee legislature is working to provide some relief and help out business owners (because it’s not just bars on Broadway who are facing existential threats thanks to the property tax increase), Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell has been criticized for his seeming indifference to whether businesses are able to stay open.
In response to the warning from Morales, the mayor basically said it wasn’t his problem:
“It’s not up to me whether he keeps that business open. The market evolves. New businesses start even as beloved old businesses close.”
Of course if the property taxes are so high that nobody can afford to start a new business, that’s going to become a problem for the city in the form of decreased tax revenue and fewer tourism dollars. And several Broadway bar owners recently spoke to the Nashville Business Journal warning of what one called a potential “bloodbath” coming down the pike.
According to Barrett Hobbs, who owns several bars in Nashville including Bootleggers (one of my favorite bars on Broadway, and one of the few that still feels like the “old” Nashville), Whiskey Bent Saloon, Doc Holliday’s, and Scoreboard, said bar owners are reaching the limits of what they can afford to absorb – and what customers are willing to pay:
“Two years ago was really when we started to see early indications that this is going to be a bloodbath. People don’t believe us; they’re like, ‘Oh well, they’re making plenty of money.’
That’s not the case. When your property tax goes up, your insurance goes up, everything goes up. You can only sell beer for a certain amount of money. … Every line item in our industry has gone up in the last decade, anywhere from 5% to 30%.”
He compared it to a beloved cartoon character getting an anvil dropped on him:
“I envision a cartoon in the old days with the Bug’s Bunny when the big magnet falls out of the sky and crushes the coyote. Straw doesn’t do it justice how big this is.”
And Morales, the owner of Acme Feed & Seed, says pretty much every local owner on Broadway is anxious about the future:
“Everything we work for this year is going to pay property taxes for next year, and we don’t even know where the economy is going. We’re scared shitless. We’re on the front lines of the economy.”
He also warned that forcing local owners out only makes way for out-of-state billionaires to come in and take over…although from his comments it doesn’t seem like the mayor would be upset about that for some reason. But according to Morales, he should be:
“Why do you want a billionaire owning something that was once cool or once informative? So here we go, we’re just going to get a generic Nashville. Why should people care? Because I grew up proud of being from the music capital of the world, that’s why people should care.”
Meanwhile, Broadway bar owners are forced to wait on appeals to find out whether they’re going to get a break from the property taxes that very well may end up breaking them.
And if that does happen, we get one of two things: A Broadway that’s (even more than it already is) full of cookie-cutter bars owned by out of state investors looking to cater to tourists, or massive multi-story venues sitting empty because nobody can afford to open a business there anymore.
Regardless of your feelings about Broadway, both are substantially worse options than the way it is now.
