The Hermitage Hotel

Nashville's last grand turn-of-the-century hotel went up between 1908 and 1910 and is its best surviving Beaux Arts commercial building. Edwin Carpenter, a Tennessee native trained at MIT and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, gave it coupled Ionic columns and polychrome terra cotta. A big-band radio show with Frances Craig broadcast from the basement dance floor at mid-century. The hotel closed in the late 1970s and seemed bound for demolition until a 1980 conversion to suites and a second restoration in 1994-95. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2020.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — steps away
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• Tennessee State Capitol — steps away
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Ryman Auditorium — 0.3 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.3 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• War Memorial Auditorium Building — steps away
• Edwin W. Craig — steps away
• Tennessee State Capitol — steps away
• Downtown Presbyterian Church — steps away