Notice the neon signs and open garage doors spilling fiddle music onto Lower Broadway, the densest live-music strip on earth. The neon signs, the boot shops, the open garage doors spilling fiddle music onto the sidewalk — this strip runs roughly four blocks from the Cumberland River to Fifth Avenue, and on any given night it is several thousand people deep. Broadway's honky tonk identity is actually a survivor's story.
In the 1970s and 1980s, downtown Nashville was in steep decline. Urban flight had emptied the storefronts, and the city's entertainment economy had migrated to the suburbs. The bars that stayed open on Broadway did so barely, serving working musicians and tourists brave enough to venture into a neighborhood that polite Nashville had largely abandoned.
When the city began its downtown revival in the 1990s, those bars were still there — and they became the seed of what you see now. Today Lower Broadway drives an enormous hospitality economy, with rooftop bars and multi-story entertainment complexes stacking floors of live music above the original honky tonk footprints. The bachelorette economy is real and visible here.
So is the original thing that made Broadway matter.