The Neuhoff District

The Long Vacancy Ends

About those historic buildings — they went up between 1906 and 1950, roughly 700,000 square feet added a building at a time, the way a packing plant grows. Not the early 1920s, whatever you may have read. Including from me.

What Got Built

Just over nine acres, 914,000 square feet, four blocks. Block One is new — a 14-story office tower, 288,000 square feet of Class A over ground-floor retail, LEED Gold. Block Two is the Curve: the original plant, kept. Its curved facade stands, its industrial steel windows were refurbished, and where the structure was too far gone to save, the architects inserted a new lobby core — a building within a building, LEED Silver. Blocks Three and Four are the apartments, Monroe House and Taylor House — 194 and 348 units, 542 together — and beneath all of it runs a five-story underground deck with more than 2,100 spaces.

My favorite thing on the site is none of that. In an open-air courtyard, a group of the plant’s original concrete columns stands free — the building around them was demolished, and the columns were kept. A colonnade holding up sky. You can read the whole project in that one decision.

Who Moved In

Oracle. That’s the sentence I waited four years to print. In March 2026 they signed a long-term lease for 116,000 square feet at 1320 Adams, taking occupancy in the back half of the year — offices that look across the river at the campus site they’re clearing. Boston Consulting Group is here. Butler Snow took 31,000 square feet at the top of the tower. Fifth Third, JE Dunn, Frazier & Deeter, Rubicon Founders. By spring 2026 the offices were 84 percent leased and the 542 apartments were at 92, with the first residents in since June 2024.

Street level filled in too: Fishmonger, Close Company — a subterranean cocktail bar from the Death & Co team — Mas Tacos Tambien, Babychan, Sid & Ann Mashburn, six padel courts at Sensa, the River Steps. Monday Night’s taproom has been here longer than any of them; it gets its own page in these liner notes.

What the Juries Saw

ArchDaily named the Neuhoff District a 2026 Building of the Year winner in commercial architecture. The Chicago Athenaeum gave it an American Architecture Award. USGBC Tennessee called it 2024’s Iconic Building, NAIOP named it Mixed-Use Development of the Year, Interior Design magazine shortlisted a Curve interior for Best of Year, and Metro Nashville added a Historic Preservation Award. The Curve took an AIA Tennessee Award of Merit on its own. Every one of those went to the buildings and to the architects who made them — S9 Architecture and Smith Gee Studio. I photographed the work, often for the submissions themselves.

What Isn’t Built Yet

Phase two is announced, not under way: a second tower, a sky-bridge, a boutique hotel inside one of the remaining industrial buildings, a floating barge on the river. Renderings exist. Groundbreakings don’t. Same for the pedestrian bridge to the East Bank — that one is Oracle’s project, Foster + Partners’ design, 863 feet of it, and its site plan only went to Metro Planning in June 2026.

This district has never once held still for me. I don’t expect it to start.