Melrose Billiards Is Closing, and Its Replacement Is a Proxy Fight Between Old and New Nashville

It’s easy to romanticize the soon-to-close Melrose Billiards.

When you approach from the Franklin Road level, there’s no giant entrance — just a single porthole door with a neon “Billiards” sign over the frame; the first wave of cigarette smoke hits you before you’ve even gotten inside. Going down the curved staircase, you descend into a fog.

That haze extends across the bar, a subterranean, open room punctuated by concrete columns and lights hanging from the low ceiling over snooker and pool tables. A giant neon Budweiser sign, among others, adorns the wall.

It’s Monday night, so beers are two-for-one — $4.75 for two plastic cups full of Gerst is the cheapest drinking option available in this part of town. The bar is a combination of old and young; a couple vaping in the corner look like they’re on a date, while the trio across from them in the booth with a ripped seat has settled in for an evening of drinking. Everyone at the bar is smoking, but the grayest-haired man has taken the healthy option: He’s sucking down Marlboro Ultra Lights through a filter (good luck, buddy). Every one of the pool tables has a game in progress, and there’s ping-pong going on in the back. 

Vents run the length of the space, whose decor might be categorized as “late-era Cold War bomb shelter chic.” They might be bringing in cool air, but they sure aren’t taking anything out — after 15 minutes I already know I’m going to have to wash or burn my clothes as soon as I get home. 

Chandler McCullough is behind the bar. With three years’ tenure, he’s the newest bartender on a staff where some employees’ seniority is measured in decades. Two-for-one deals like tonight’s and happy hour until midnight on Wednesday are good for business, but everyone knows the real rush won’t start until 11 p.m., when refugees from earlier-closing places start heading this way. The day-drinkers may be there at 3 or 4 p.m., but 1 a.m. is when the place normally hums, particularly on a Friday or Saturday night. Recent years have seen the hipsters come in, hoping for a glimpse of Jack White playing pool or John Prine shooting snooker, but the real boon came when the Melrose apartments were built three years ago, giving a permanent bump to the crowd.

Ask McCullough about the news that Melrose Billiards is closing in September, and he’ll say, reflexively, that “it’s the end of an era.” And to a certain extent, that’s true; Jim and Jerry Chandler took over the place in 1969, and for the next 41 years, it was largely unchanged. Then the floodwaters rose to the ceiling in 2010. “I didn’t know our tables could float,” Jerry says. The regulars helped clean up the place when the floodwater receded. To be honest, it looks like a flood hit down there, but that’s part of the dive bar charm.

On this particular Monday night, Al Green’s cover of “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?” is playing, and I’ve got a second beer left to finish. There are a couple of games on the TVs and Golden Tee in the corner. Cheap beer, a good jukebox and decent entertainment — that’s how a dive bar that’s closing gets romanticized as a proxy fight between Old Nashville and New Nashville.

Ask the regulars and the staff, who are loyal and don’t want to see the place screwed up, and they understand what’s going on here. It sucks, but it’s a business.

When the new place opens by the end of the year, there will be a new ventilation system and flood control to keep it dry when it rains hard (which is good, because even when you paint those walls, it keeps the smell down only for a few days). It will have pool tables and ping-pong, video-game golf and cheap beer. Will it be the same? I have no idea, but I believe Austin Ray, who will run the Melrose Billiards successor, when he says the new place is not turning it into some tiki bar.

“We want to create a bar that preserves the history and the spirit of Melrose Billiards,” Ray says. “It would be a travesty to change too much when you’re dealing with a 70-year-old bar. This is going to take some care and compassion to get it right.”

Ray has taken a lot of crap over the past week. Even though he grew up here and is as Old Nashville as you can find — his mom, Gayle Ray, was sheriff in the ’90s — he’s apparently the reason the city is going straight to hell right now. At least that’s what irate folks are saying on Facebook. 

“The decision was an emotional one more than a business one,” he says. “My assumption is that some people are going to see me as the bad guy no matter what. But the neighborhood is too important to me.”

And ultimately that’s why I have a hard time mustering a lot of anger at Ray. He opened M.L. Rose across the street when that stretch of Franklin Road was mostly pawn shops and worse, opened a second outpost in an old gas station on Charlotte Pike and has spent most of the past decade doing things the right way. 

The owners of the building — Fulcher Investment Properties and Parkes Development, the companies of longtime Nashville developers Ed Fulcher and Joe Parkes — chose not to give the Chandlers the long-term lease they had been seeking. It’s a point of contention for Jim Chandler, who told me Fulcher had promised it to them for years. Chandler is mad enough to use words like “hijack” in describing how they lost the space they’ve occupied for 47 years. I don’t know that I blame him: Parkes is on both sides of this deal, as landlord and as a partner with Ray in The Sutler.

I also don’t think this means the city is losing its soul, as the New Nashville Outrage Machine seems to think. If you want to be pissed, be pissed at Fulcher and Parkes, but ultimately they’re the ones who bought that land, sank millions into it and kept it from becoming a grocery store or a Starbucks or any of the half-dozen bad proposals that were floated in the past 20 years. They own it and the Chandlers haven’t had a lease in decades. Cold-blooded? Maybe. But any longtime Melrose Billiards-goer can remember when everything above the ground was either closed or falling apart. Fulcher and Parkes improved the area measurably, actually restoring the building above and bringing residents to the area instead of just shoppers.

The city is changing. That means along with all the good things — great high-end dining, a booming craft-beer scene, a huge variety of eating and drinking options — there are going to be some casualties along the way. Sure, the Chandlers deserve better in this deal, and I hope they find a new spot — Jim Chandler says they’re looking for leads right now — because you want the folks who are also behind mainstays like Sportsman’s Grille and Gerst Haus to succeed. 

But if you’re running into Melrose Billiards to Instagram a place where you haven’t spent any appreciable time in years just so you can bellyache on social media about its passing, just realize you’re part of the New Nashville’s problem, too.

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