Tomorrow, Five Points Pizza turns 15. The original walk-up window on Woodland Street will hand out free slices from 5 to 7 p.m., the twelfth year they've run this tradition, and one lucky customer will win free pizza for an entire year. It is exactly the kind of anniversary that makes East Nashville feel unchanged. The window is the same window. The slice is the same slice.
But that stability at Five Points is covering for a lot of churn just outside it. Last year, a brewery that helped define Main Street left Main Street entirely. A 19th-century mansion that was supposed to reopen as a taproom more than four years ago still hasn't poured a drop. And a chapel built before the Civil War beat it to the finish line by turning into a soft-serve shop and a French café. If you've been assuming the neighborhood's food and drink scene still radiates outward from Five Points the way it did a decade ago, the actual map has moved.
The Brewery That Left
Crazy Gnome Brewery opened on Main Street in 2020, delayed first by the tornado and then by the pandemic, and spent five years building a following in its small building behind Main Street Liquor Market. In March 2025, it closed that location and relocated to 1005 W Kirkland Ave, a short drive away in Inglewood. It wasn't the first East Nashville brewery to move rather than expand in place. Fat Bottom brewed on the east side for years before pulling up and resettling in The Nations, on the opposite side of the river. Main Street's brewery lineup has never been as fixed as it looks from the outside.
The Space Didn't Stay Empty Long
Within months, a permit was filed for the same 948 Main St. address: a new concept called Stoke Haus, from Chad Mueller and Mike Morbitzer, two brewers who cut their teeth at Tennfold before striking out on their own. While they built out the space, they ran pop-ups around town, collaborating with Brave Idiot and Barrique Brewing, and were targeting a late-July-2025 opening for a concept built around "ice-cold haus brewed beer" alongside barbecue. If that timeline held, the taps have been pouring on Main Street for just over a year now. If it slipped, as build-outs often do, the address is still worth a look next time you're on that stretch. Either way, the lesson holds: Main Street didn't lose its brewery identity when Crazy Gnome left. It lost one operator and gained another inside the same calendar year.
Why the Landmark Still Isn't Open
Compare that turnaround to the McGavock House, the neighborhood's most-watched adaptive reuse project and its biggest disappointment on a timeline. The house was built in the 1840s, once owned by the influential McGavock family (Randal McGavock served as Nashville's mayor in the mid-1820s), and has sat on the National Register of Historic Places since 2007. In March 2022, Birmingham-based Good People Brewing Company announced plans to turn it into a taproom, its first outside Alabama. By late 2023, a permit valued at $445,000 had been filed for the renovation, covering facade repair, a new taproom interior, a covered rear porch, and basement dining space. The target was a late-2023 opening.
That date came and went. By August 2024, the most recent reporting on the project showed the 0.85-acre property, which carries addresses at both 908 Meridian St. and 206 Vaughn St., listed for sale. Four years after the announcement, there is still no confirmed opening date and the site has apparently changed status from "under construction" to "for sale." If you've been driving past the house wondering when the beer garden opens, the honest answer as of the most recent public information is that nobody knows, possibly including the people who filed the permit.
Here's how the two projects stack up side by side:
| Project | Building age | Announced | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stoke Haus, 948 Main St. | Existing commercial building | Permit filed after March 2025 closure | Targeted late-July-2025 opening; address active |
| Good People Brewing, McGavock House | Built 1840s, National Register since 2007 | March 2022 | Permit filed late 2023; property reported for sale August 2024 |
The Church That Actually Opened
While the mansion stalled, a different historic building quietly delivered. Eastwood Village is a 26,332-square-foot restored chapel that started life in 1853 as Hobson United Methodist Church, later served as a Union Army hospital and a boys' school during and after the Civil War, and eventually grew into a full church campus by the mid-20th century. Developer Vintage South, led by Nathan Lyons, partnered with Greg Powell's Legacy Partners to bring the building back as a mixed-use gathering spot for shopping, dining, and offices.
Two tenants have already moved in and both are worth the detour. Cone-cept, a soft-serve shop known for its blueberry swirl and a rotating list of other flavors, opened planning to run seasonally from Memorial Day through Labor Day. It got popular enough, fast enough, that the owners scrapped the seasonal plan and now run year-round. Down the same stretch, The Yellow Table Café brings French crêpes, savory galettes, and pastries from chef Anna Watson Carl, who spent years studying and teaching in France before bringing the concept home. A 173-year-old chapel beat an 1840s mansion to reopening day, and it did it with soft serve and crêpes instead of beer.
The Shipping Containers Filled the Gap
Inglewood, the same area Crazy Gnome relocated to, has its own new anchor: Lost & Found, an open-air spot built from stacked shipping containers, permanently parked food trucks, and a lawn where families, couples, and groups can each find their own corner without a reservation. The lineup includes:
- Fortunate Sun, the patio cocktail bar
- Birdie's Bottle Shop, for wine by the glass in the air conditioning
- Pizza Lolo, now a brick-and-mortar Neapolitan pizza spot
- Chivanada, serving Colombian empanadas
- QBOP, Korean BBQ out of the food truck village
- The Pepper Pott, Afro-Caribbean plates including chana curry
- Katrin, L.A.-style tacos
- Sarabha Creamery, with ice cream flavors like Indian coffee, saffron, and pistachio
- Retrograde Coffee, running out of a mobile truck
None of this existed in this form a few years ago. It is now doing the job Main Street used to do on a Friday night: give people a low-stakes place to land without a reservation.
What Hasn't Moved
Five Points is still the neighborhood's emotional center, and Five Points Pizza's anniversary this week is proof the constants matter as much as the churn. A few miles south, the intersection of Riverside Drive and McGavock Pike is having its own quieter moment. The base layer there, Mitchell Delicatessen, Village Pub and Beer Garden, Sabell's, and Dose Coffee, has held steady for years. What's new is the density stacking up around it: chef Chad Newton's You Are Here group opened Golden Prawn #3, a Chinese American takeout spot, in the small space that used to be Castrillo's Pizza, joining three other restaurants that have opened at that same intersection recently. Riverside Village is becoming its own dining pocket the same way Five Points did two decades ago, just without the festival crowds.
The Read
None of these openings happened at Five Points. The intersection everyone points to when they describe East Nashville is the one place that has barely changed this year. The actual growth, and the actual disappointment, is happening at the edges: a brewery trading Main Street for Inglewood, a chapel turning into a dessert shop faster than a mansion could turn into a beer garden, a shipping container lot filling the gap left behind, and a second dining corridor building itself one lease at a time at Riverside and McGavock. If you want to understand where this neighborhood is actually headed, watch the addresses nobody's writing festival coverage about.
Jamie Parsons tracks this kind of turnover the same way she tracks comps, because in a neighborhood like East Nashville, the two are rarely unrelated. If you're weighing a move in this part of town, or just want a second opinion on how a specific block is trending, Jamie Parsons is worth the conversation.
