The SoBro building that once housed the historic Elm Street Methodist Church will be reinvented in a major way as it is prepped for a fall 2020 unveiling of the Bob Dylan-affiliated Heaven’s Door Spirits and Center for the Arts.
With a main address of 614 Fifth Ave. S., the facility — announced last year as a distillery and “brand experience center” — will include a craft whiskey distillery and whiskey library, an art sanctuary, a restaurant and a 360-seat live performance venue, according to a release. It also will display some of Dylan’s paintings and metalwork sculptures.
The announcement comes as Dylan prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of his revered album Nashville Skyline on April 9.
Nashville architecture firm Tuck-Hinton was the most recent tenant of the former church building. The release does not note either the cost of the renovations to the building or the architect. The above image shows new buildings that are set to accompany the historic building.
In August 2017, Corsair Distillery owner Darek Bell and a group of Chicago-based real estate investors paid $6.2 million for the 0.8-acre multi-parcel at the northeast corner of the intersection of Fifth Avenue South and Elm Street. Tuck-Hinton had operated from the space for 22 years prior to that. The church building, which local-history scholar Jim Hoobler cites as built in 1860 (hat-tip to Betsy Phillips), was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
The Heaven's Door craft whiskeys lineup includes a Tennessee Straight Bourbon (90 proof), a Double Barrel Whiskey (100 proof) and a Straight Rye Whiskey finished in French cigar barrels from the Vosges region of France (100 proof). In 2018, Heaven’s Door also introduced a limited-release 10-Year Tennessee Straight Bourbon (100 proof).
