“We recently purchased a loft at the Art Avenue Lofts located at 231 Fifth Ave. N. We are trying to figure out what businesses occupied the building and the general history of the building. Any ideas?” — Mike and Stacy
For more than 60 years and until 1991 this building carried the name of McLellan’s, starting about 1927 in the true “five and dime” days when none of the store’s merchandise cost more than 10 cents.
Recent development on this stretch of Fifth Avenue between Church and Union streets has focused on an “avenue of the arts” gallery concept with loft residences on the upper floors. But for most of the 20th century, the west side of the street was pure retail and lots of it.
Shoppers in 1952 walking north from Church Street on that one side could visit Cain Sloan, W.T. Grant, F.W. Woolworth, McLellan’s, S.H. Kress and Loveman-Berger-Teitlebaum.
Some digging into old records by Metro Archives staff showed the building itself at 229-233 Fifth Ave. N. belonged to banker Benjamin F. Wilson (1837-1912) and his descendants from 1882 until its sale for redevelopment in 2005.
The high 1882 price Wilson paid for what came to be called the “Wilson Block,” $12,457, indicated the brick structure was already there when he made his purchase. Wilson lived a block away at 220 Sixth Ave. N., the 1900 census showed, so the concept of residences in the heart of the city was familiar to him.
Earlier first-floor retail for the building included a Piggly Wiggly Variety Store shown in the 1926 city directory. Upper-floor uses the same year included two lawyers’ offices and one for a dentist.
Lunch counter is historic
Buildings that old sometimes generate ghost stories. Nashvillian Douglas Montgomery, manager of this McLellan’s from about 1980 to 1986, recalled one this week involving the deceased operator of the store’s spacious lunch counter.
“He had gone up early each morning to the second floor stock room to make out his daily menu. One of the ladies who was a cook said she would still see him sitting at his desk,” Montgomery recalled. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I have witnessed this.”
The same lunch counter went down in history in 1960 as one of the downtown eating establishments where black college students protested segregation that prevented African-Americans from using them. Within months their effort proved successful, and public dining in Nashville was open to all.
The year 1960 also marked the death of William Walker McLellan, a Scotsman who started his chain of stores in North Carolina about 1913. Several mergers later, the 820 McCrory-McLellan-Green Stores were caught up in the McCrory Corp. bankruptcy of February 1992.
Wilson descendants leased the former McLellan’s space in 1992 to Family Dollar Stores, the last first-floor commercial tenant until the 2005-07 redevelopment.
Today upper floors of the building have 32 condos. One of them, at 904 square feet, was listed recently for $229,500.
-The Tennessean: George Zepp
