Finally, my two favorite things: Wine bars and being at street level!
Southcomm's resident bow-tie-wearing emo apologist J.R. Lind broke
some newsover on Nashville Post earlier this week, and it may be of interest to some of you West End-frequenting record purchasers. It appears as though the site at 2400 West End — currently home to an F.Y.E. and once the location of the sorely missed Tower Records — will soon be home to an eight-story hotel. Sez J.R.:
The Metropolitan Planning Commission will this week vet plans for a 222-room, eight-story hotel with a street-level wine bar, submitted by architects Ragan-Smith Associates on behalf of the tract's owner, RMR TN-West End, a local arm of Memphis-based real estate investor Robert M. Rogers.
What does Music City need less of? Record stores! What do we need more of? Street-level wine bars! For many audiophiles, the legitimacy of 2400 West End died
when the F.Y.E.-Tower switch first went down(i.e., roughly four years ago, when F.Y.E. won the location’s 5-year lease at auction). I’ll admit it: Other than
going to see Mr. Belding do karaoke thereand the time a couple months back when I bought my lady-friend a copy of Pineapple Express, I haven’t really visited F.Y.E. since the change. Still, a record store closing is a record store closing, and now — with no Cat’s, Tower, Great Escape, F.Y.E. or Turtle’s — Grimey’s is the only record shop in what Grimey’s honcho Doyle Davis calls the “downtown/midtown/West End area.” “I think this shows the way things are going,” says Davis. “The only stores hanging in there and/or thriving are indies and I can’t for the life of me imagine anybody opening a new record store but some delusionally passionate music fanatic, i.e. one of us.”
