Belle Meade Theatre

This piece is a part of our 2015 Nashville Trail Map. Check out all the points on the trail and download our hand-illustrated map here.

“This is the grand shell of the Belle Meade Theater, the first place I saw an R rated movie, or at least the first place I saw a Pg13 one (whatever the Indiana Jones had Sean Connery?) After its demise as a cinema it lived on as “Bookstar,” a big independent bookstore where I got copies of books for summer reading like “There Eyes Were Watching God” and “The Chocolate War.” Pretty sure Bookstar had an adult magazine section that I figured a covert way of sneaking around. Then Bookstar went away in the early 2000s and it became a Harris Teeter grocery store. And when Kroger dismantled the Teeter empire last year it closed again. Now it’s just a weird art deco shell sitting in the middle of the sprawl of West Nashville traffic and shopping. God knows what it will turnover into.”

4301 Harding Pike

Contribution from William Tyler – William is a native Nashvillian, a guitarist and composer. williamtyler.net.