Outside The End during Nameless Fest IV in June 2018
The Midtown buildings home to Obie’s Pizza and live music venue The End, respectively, have sold for a collective $1.6 million, the latest in a series of 2020 transactions on a street colloquially known as the Rock Block.
The main address of the property is 2219 Elliston Place, with The End — housed in a quirky building positioned in back of the structure fronting Elliston Place — expected to continue operations, according to a source with information about the transaction and who asked to go unnamed.
The new owner is a general partnership, details of which the Post was unable to determine at publication time. Though the Davidson County Register of Deeds has yet to record the transaction, the source confirmed the sale.
The seller was Ann Paige Donnell Burklow, a member of a family whose ownership of the property dates to 1927.
John Toomey, Nashville market lead with Brentwood-based Urban Grout Commercial Real Estate, facilitated the transaction, according to the source. Keith Craft, principal broker with Nashville-based Regency Company and a longtime manager of the property for the Burklow family, assisted in the transaction.
The deal is the equivalent of $360 per foot based on the collective size of the two buildings. Elliston Square, The End’s predecessor, opened in the 1980s. In 1999, Bruce Fitzpatrick took ownership of the dive bar and underground live-music favorite that had been renamed The End.
Sharing the building with the aforementioned Obie’s was New York Pizza. Neither restaurant has been open since the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year. In the 1980s, Obie’s seemingly was Nashville’s only restaurant offering Chicago-style deep dish pizza.
The sale follows three Rock Block transactions from earlier this year. In May, local real estate investor Marc Stengel paid $2.8 million for the surface parking lot located next to the Krispy Kreme donut building at 2103 Elliston Place. In July, Stengel paid almost $2.9 million for properties located at 2201/2205 and 2209 Elliston Place. And in October, Stengel, who oversees Ridgefield Properties, paid $2 million for both the building home to Buffalo Exchange and the surface parking lot adjacent to it.
Stengel is a long-time friend and business partner of Nashville-based developer Tony Giarratana, whose Giarratana LLC is planning to reinvent a segment of the street with Rock Block Flats (read more here). The source said the buyer in the most recent deal is not affiliated with Stengel and Giarratana.
This post originally appeared at our sister publication Nashville Post.
