Davidson County · Middle Tennessee
Living in Midtown
Midtown is the corridor between downtown and Vanderbilt, taking in Music Row’s publishing offices, the Vanderbilt and Ascension Saint Thomas hospital complexes, the Elliston Place music venues and a dense bar strip along Division. It is disproportionately rental, with a small number of for-sale condominium buildings.
- County
- Davidson
- Distance to downtown Nashville
- ~1.5 to 2 miles
- Zoning
- Outside the Downtown Code, and mixed parcel to parcel
What’s actually there
- Music Row, meaning 16th and 17th Avenues South and the publishing and studio buildings along them
- Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown
- Elliston Place, historically the rock and roll block of Nashville
- The Division Street bar and restaurant strip, which turns over constantly
- Centennial Park and the full-scale Parthenon replica
The housing stock
A large apartment inventory serving the universities and hospitals, with only a handful of for-sale condominium buildings. The three people search by name are The Adelicia, Bristol on Broadway and Residences at Broadwest, with Rhythm at Music Row and several West End buildings nearby. Because the for-sale supply is thin, Midtown medians swing hard on very few sales, so I would not put much weight on a published neighborhood number here. Ask me for building-level figures instead, which are the only ones that mean anything.
Getting around
A mile and a half to two miles from 5th and Broadway, roughly six to nine minutes off-peak straight down Broadway and West End. For anyone working at Vanderbilt or either hospital, the commute is a walk.
Things to do in Midtown
Places worth knowing before you decide whether you want to live here.
Hattie B’s Hot Chicken
The Midtown location at 112 19th Avenue South.
Centennial Park and the Parthenon
A 132-acre park with the world’s only full-scale replica of the Parthenon, containing an art museum.
Exit/In
Elliston Place music venue, still booking shows. The closing headlines that circulate online date from 2022.
Elliston Place Soda Shop
Diner and soda fountain at 2105 Elliston Place.
Midtown Cafe
Restaurant at 102 19th Avenue South.
Bobby’s Idle Hour
Music Row’s last neighborhood bar, at 9 Music Square South.
Checked against each business as of August 14, 2026. Nashville loses restaurants faster than most cities, so if something here has closed since, tell me and I’ll get it corrected.
Buildings in Midtown, and which ones you can actually buy into
Here nobody searches by subdivision, they search by building. So the first thing each of these says is whether the units are individually owned and buyable or whether the whole tower belongs to one company, because several of them are marketed as condominiums and are not. Everything else is durable: what was built, when, and how many.
The Adelicia
A condominium, eighteen stories, and the established for-sale address in Midtown.
- A genuine condominium. Metro’s parcel records show 192 parcels at 900 20th Avenue South, owned by individuals and family trusts, with common areas held by the owners’ association.
- Eighteen stories and 186 residences across roughly 506,000 square feet, platted May 29, 2008. Developed by Corner Realty Partners, built by Brasfield and Gorrie.
- Includes 11,700 square feet of office and retail, a 3,000 square foot fitness area, a heated Olympic length pool, and five parking levels holding 328 spaces.
- Ground level units are brownstone style townhouses with their own entrances, which is a different product from the tower floors above them.
The Residences at BroadWest
A condominium, thirty-four stories, sharing its tower with a Conrad hotel.
- A genuine condominium. Metro’s parcel records show individually owned units at 1616 West End Avenue, held by people and family trusts.
- A 34 story residential tower alongside a 21 story office tower, 196 condominiums, with the Conrad Nashville hotel occupying fourteen floors of the residential tower.
- Roughly 1.2 million square feet in total, including more than 510,000 square feet of Class A office, a 2,500 space parking deck and a plaza of about an acre.
- Developed by Propst Development, designed by Cooper Carry, built by Turner Construction and Hoar Construction. The site was acquired in March 2018.
- One parcel inside the same regime is commercial office and retail rather than a residence, so the parcel count is not the residence count.
SkyHouse Nashville
A rental. Brokerage pages sell it as a condominium and there is nothing there to sell.
- A rental. Metro’s parcel records show exactly one parcel at 111 17th Avenue South, owned by a single company. There are no individually owned units.
- Twenty-five stories, 352 apartments, completed 2017, developed by Novare Group. An all-concrete structure at about 289 feet.
- Platted July 28, 2015.
- Pages titled SkyHouse condos for sale exist. Based on the parcel record, they are describing a building that has never sold a unit.
Aertson Midtown
A rental, and the single most misleading legal description in Nashville.
- A rental. Its parcels literally read Unit Residential, Unit Hotel, Unit Garage and Unit Retail of the Aertson Condominium, and all four are owned by one company.
- That is a master condominium splitting uses, not homes. It divides the building between the apartments, the hotel, the garage and the shops. There are zero individually owned residential parcels.
- 350 apartments, the 180 key Kimpton Aertson Hotel, and 38,000 square feet of retail across seventeen floors, completed spring 2017 by Buckingham Companies.
- If you take one thing from this page, take this: the word condominium in a legal description does not mean a unit can be bought.
Elliston 23
A rental on Elliston Place, built on the old Father Ryan High School site.
- A rental. One parcel, 331 units, one owner, no individually owned units. Marketed at 2312 Elliston Place while Metro records it at 2300.
- Completed late 2013, six floors, units averaging 844 square feet, developed by Southern Land Company and built to LEED Silver.
- Built features include 15,000 square feet of street level retail, a six floor garage, a 2,000 square foot heated saltwater pool, a 1,000 square foot fitness center and two landscaped courtyards.
- Father Ryan High School stood here from 1928 to 1991, and benches on the property were made from stone salvaged out of the school.
Elliston Place Quarters
A condominium, and by some distance the oldest regime in Midtown.
- A genuine condominium. Metro’s parcel records show 49 parcels at 2325 Elliston Place, owned by individuals and trusts.
- Its parcel records date to 1985, which makes it a generation older than every tower around it.
- Different in age and in scale from the 2005 to 2022 buildings nearby, which is worth knowing before comparing price per square foot across them.
- The instrument is in the old plat book format rather than a self-verifying modern one, so treat 1985 as the record date rather than a construction date.
Schools
Metro Nashville Public Schools
Look up an address with the district →
Served by Metro Nashville Public Schools. Metro zones by address, so two houses on the same block can differ. There is also a separate choice and magnet application. Verify the address in the district’s own Zone Finder.
I publish district and school zoning as published fact and nothing more. No ratings, no rankings, no comparisons. School zones are set by the district, assigned by address rather than by subdivision or city name, and they change. Confirm any address with the district itself, and evaluate the schools yourself against what matters to your family.
What a buyer needs to know here
Midtown’s condominium bylaws block short-term rental in a way that is easy to miss. Rather than saying no Airbnb, they set a minimum lease term of six months or longer, which achieves the same result and is far harder to spot skimming a master deed. Read for lease-term language, not for the word Airbnb. Midtown also sits outside the Downtown Code, so parking minimums do apply here, which generally means units are more likely to come with allocated parking than downtown or the Gulch. The flip side is that zoning is genuinely mixed parcel to parcel, with commercial and mixed-use lots where non-owner-occupied rentals may be permitted sitting directly beside residential lots where they are not, so the answer is address-specific rather than neighborhood-wide. Finally, noise here is the Division Street strip rather than Broadway, and it regenerates constantly, with venues open into the small hours. If you are looking at a lower floor, go at eleven on a Saturday night. And the same 2026 lender tightening on condominium project review applies to the larger buildings, so have your lender review the project before you write.
Common questions
Why does the bylaw matter more than the zoning in Midtown?
Because Midtown’s condominium buildings block short-term rental by requiring a minimum lease of six months or more, rather than by naming Airbnb. Someone skimming a master deed for the word Airbnb finds nothing and assumes it is allowed. I read for the lease-term clause, which is where the answer actually lives.
Is Midtown noisy?
Parts of it, and it is the Division Street bar strip rather than Broadway. That strip turns over constantly and some of it runs into the small hours. It also sits next to two hospital campuses that operate around the clock. None of that is a problem on the right floor facing the right way, but it is a real problem on the wrong one, so I would rather walk it with you late than have you find out after closing.
Is there much to buy in Midtown?
Less than people expect. Midtown is heavily rental because of the universities and hospitals, with only a few for-sale condominium buildings. That thin supply is also why published neighborhood medians here bounce around, since a handful of sales moves the number. Building-level figures are the ones worth looking at, and I can pull those.
Thinking about Midtown?
What are some of your must haves to make it a perfect home for you in this neighborhood?