The Rock Block Has Been One Developer's Project Since 2019, and This Fall It Finally Shows

Sekvan Mohammed poured his last beer at Corner Bar on Elliston Place in late March 2025, closing out a 20-year run behind the same taps. Mohammed had run the place since 2004, and his general manager, Torre Wyatt, had been with him the entire two decades. If you lived nearby, you probably noticed the closing and moved on, one more Midtown bar gone the way of a hundred others.

What's less obvious, unless you've been tracking Metro planning filings the way some of us have, is that the building's next chapter and the building across the street that everyone loves both trace back to the same name: Tony Giarratana.

Giarratana is the Nashville developer known for downtown towers like Alcove and the 60-story Paramount. But in 2019 he did something out of character. He bought Elliston Place Soda Shop the night it closed, then moved the 1939 diner into a larger space next door to preserve it. Since that purchase, he has quietly acquired the majority of the block on both sides of Elliston Place, stopping just short of the two music venues that anchor its ends: EXIT/IN on the north side and The End on the south. Corner Bar's building was one of the last pieces standing between where he started and the plan he's had since.

The Same Name on Both Sides of the Street

That plan has a name now: 22 Elliston, a proposed 17-story mixed-use tower slated for the former Corner Bar site at 2200 Elliston Place. Filings with Metro's planning department describe 356 apartment units over ground-level retail and restaurant space, with a five-story parking garage on an adjacent parcel. Chicago-based Goettsch Partners is designing the building.

Corner Bar isn't the only piece. Behind the preserved historic facades that used to front The Gold Rush, Smack, and Samurai Sushi, Giarratana is building Rock Block Flats, a six-story apartment building. He has said publicly he wants to bring The Gold Rush back as part of that project, reviving a dive bar that closed years before Corner Bar ever poured a drink.

Scott Moskowitz, who ran the newsstand-turned-general-store Mosko's on the same block from the late 1970s until the early 2000s, has a theory about what should happen next. He told Nashville Scene he'd like to see the new Rock Block bring back a piece of what the block looked like in 1992, when it held Discount Records, Elder's Bookstore, and a half dozen other small tenants alongside his own shop. His read on the neighborhood's appetite: give people an authentic piece of Nashville and they will show up for it.

For years this stretch of Elliston Place has looked stalled, one empty storefront next to another closed bar next to a soda shop that somehow kept humming along. It wasn't stalled. It was one buyer patiently assembling a block, parcel by parcel, since 2019. As of late August 2026, Nashville Scene reported the Rock Block developments are moving forward again after what the paper called a yearslong delay, which is the closest thing to an official signal that the wait is ending.

A Different Kind of Vacancy, a Few Blocks South

Not every empty storefront on West End belongs to Giarratana's project, and the other big reopening story on the corridor right now has nothing to do with him.

Tin Angel closed in 2019 after 25 years in business when owners Rick and Vicki Bolsom retired. The building at 3201 West End Avenue sat empty for six years. In September 2025, Metro issued a $2 million permit to renovate the space for a new restaurant called Kuya, from the team behind East Nashville's Noko and its sister restaurant Kase x Noko. Partners Jon Murray, Wilson Brannock, and chef Dung "Junior" Vo, a James Beard semifinalist, are bringing an Asian-inspired concept to the space, though menu details are still under wraps. The name comes from a Filipino term meaning elder brother, commonly used as an expression of respect. Nashville-based Artisan Build Construct, which also worked on Noko, is handling construction.

Kuya adds to a stretch of West End that already welcomed Ford Fry's Little Rey in 2025. Neither of those openings needed Giarratana's towers to happen first. Read together, they say something the Rock Block story alone doesn't: the appetite for reinvestment on this corridor isn't limited to one developer's long game. It's broader than that, and it's already showing up in occupied storefronts, not just filed permits.

The Park Doesn't Care Who Owns the Block

While all of that plays out building by building, Centennial Park keeps running on its own separate schedule, and that schedule doesn't wait on planning approvals.

Musicians Corner is in its 17th season this fall, with free Friday concerts running from August 28 through September 25. The season opened with a lineup that included Birdtalker and Sweet Lizzy Project, and Labor Day weekend brought Free Fest, a three-day run produced with Lightning 100 and Amazon featuring Arlo Parks and Rayland Baxter. On September 18, the park hosts a partnership night with AMERICANAFEST, bringing official festival showcases to Musicians Corner at no cost.

The calendar doesn't stop when the concert series wraps. Kidsville Family Festival returns September 26 with crafts, games, and performances for families. Celebrate Nashville follows on October 3, and the Tennessee Craft Fair takes over the park lawn October 9 through 11. None of this required a zoning variance or a demolition permit. It happens every year, funded by the nonprofit Centennial Park Conservancy in partnership with Metro Parks, on a rhythm that has nothing to do with who owns the buildings a few blocks east.

What This Actually Tells You

If you've lived near Elliston Place for a while, you already knew the block felt frozen. What you might not have known is that the freeze had an owner and a timeline. Giarratana bought the Soda Shop to save it, then spent six years buying up its neighbors, one closing bar and one empty facade at a time, building toward a plan that only became public knowledge with the Corner Bar's closing in the spring of 2025 and confirmed as active again this past August.

At the same time, a completely unrelated team took a six-years-vacant building a few blocks south and is betting on it without waiting for anyone else's tower to open first. That's not a coincidence to read past. It's a sign that West End's food and retail corridor has enough independent momentum that it doesn't depend on a single developer's timeline to stay interesting.

And Centennial Park, sitting between both of those stories, just keeps doing what it has done for 17 years: free music, free festivals, and a walking trail that doesn't care whether the block down the street is a construction site or a milkshake counter that's been serving the same corner since 1939.

Knowing which of these clocks you're watching, the patient one on Elliston Place, the faster one a few blocks south, or the one that never changes at Centennial Park, tells you a lot about what this stretch of West End will actually feel like a year from now.

If you're curious how any of this touches what your West End home is worth, or you're weighing a move to a block that's about to look different, the team at Parmenter Group knows this corridor building by building. Contact a local real estate advisor to talk through what's actually changing on your street.