Things to Do in Downtown Nashville Beyond Broadway

Broadway earns its reputation, and it is one street. Downtown runs in every direction from it, and a lot of what is worth seeing is a short walk away.

Standard Proof sits at 219 Rep. John Lewis Way N, a block off Printers Alley and a few blocks up from the honky-tonks. Everything below is within a short walk of our front door, so you can put together an afternoon or an evening without moving your car.

First Saturday Art Crawl. On the first Saturday of every month, galleries along Fifth Avenue of the Arts and upstairs in the Historic Arcade open their doors for free. No ticket, no RSVP. It runs in the early evening and draws well over a thousand people. It happens on our block, and we’re open through it.

The Arcade. A glass-roofed shopping arcade from 1903, running between Fourth and Fifth. Lunch counters downstairs, galleries upstairs. One of the few places downtown that still looks roughly the way it did a century ago.

Printers Alley. Two blocks east. Nashville’s old printing and publishing district, then its nightlife district, and still a narrow brick alley full of neon.

Ryman Auditorium. 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N, the same street as us and a few minutes’ walk. The daytime self-guided tour is worth it even if you aren’t seeing a show. Ryman Alley runs from the back door over to Tootsie’s, the path performers have taken between sets for decades.

Country Music Hall of Fame. 222 Rep. John Lewis Way S. Large, well made, and easily two hours if you let it be.

Johnny Cash Museum. Smaller and denser, over on Third Avenue South. Good when you have only an hour.

Nashville Public Library. The main branch on Church Street has a Civil Rights Room looking out over the intersection where the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins took place. It’s free, and most visitors never hear about it.

Frist Art Museum. A 1930s art deco post office turned art museum, about ten minutes’ walk down Broadway.

Bicentennial Capitol Mall and the Farmers’ Market. North of the Capitol: a long green mall with a map of Tennessee you can walk across, and a year-round market hall at the top of it.

And us. Standard Proof is a whiskey distillery and cocktail bar in a late-1890s corset factory - exposed brick, twenty-foot ceilings, barrels along the walls and a motorcycle parked inside. Happy hour runs Monday to Friday, 4 to 7. We run a hands-on cocktail class every day: 90 minutes, $60 a person, and you make the drinks yourself. Open Sunday to Thursday until 9, Friday and Saturday until 11. Twenty-one and over.