SoBro means South of Broadway, and you are in the former industrial and warehouse district directly south of Nashville's entertainment corridor. The name nods to the printing and publishing houses that operated here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As downtown Nashville declined in the mid-twentieth century, SoBro's warehouses emptied and the district became a no-man's-land of vacant lots.
The construction of the Country Music Hall of Fame here in 2001 was the catalyst for transformation. The Music City Center convention facility, opening in 2013, reinforced it. Hotels, towers, restaurants, and entertainment venues have filled in rapidly around those anchors.
SoBro is now one of the most intensely developed parts of downtown Nashville — a place where the original industrial character has been largely replaced by a hospitality economy serving convention and tourism traffic. The district is a case study in what happens when a city decides that entertainment and convention tourism should drive urban redevelopment. The economic results have been substantial.
The architectural results are mixed.