The former home of The Social Club — Nashville's famous swingers club which faced a massive public backlash when it tried to move to Madison and responded by reclassifying as a church — caught fire Wednesday night.
Congratulations to The Tennessean for securing the best few paragraphs of a news story we've read in some time:
Pour House owner Ted Shelton saw white smoke coming from the building at 700 Division St. just before its roof burst into flames."I called my friend Capt. Bubba Long and told him, 'Y'all need to get down here,' " he said. "Right about that time, flames came out the roof."
Shelton called around 8 p.m., and firefighters responded in about a minute and a half to the location, he said.
Long said it took longer to find the fire than to put it out.
"It was weird in there," Long said. "It was like eight-by-eight prison cells all through it."
Hey, function over fashion, ya know?
The daily adds that most of the building – which is scheduled for demolition soon – only sustained smoke damage.
Nashville Fire Department spokesman Brian Haas confirms to Pith that the building was vacant at the time and adds that it was locked when firefighters arrived on the scene. Haas says the department is "investigating it as a suspicious fire that may have started in a utility room near a furnace in the building" but that the exact cause is still under investigation.
