A View From Above
🏙 O’Connell reflects on three years in office · Both 5th Congressional District candidates have odd ties to Columbia prostitution investigation · The Nations Bar and Grill Takes a Dive · Much more!
Peter Thiel in Nashville The renowned entrepreneur and thinker will deliver his four-part lecture series on the Antichrist. As the war for AI rages and parties push for regulation to ward off Armageddon, his thoughts have never been more pertinent. (Buy Tickets)
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O’Connell reflects on three years in office at Southeast Precinct, highlighting community progress and public safety.
From Megan Podsiedlik
Mayor Freddie O’Connell was flanked by Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake and other local officials during today's media roundtable at the city's new Southeast Precinct. The mayor began by reflecting on his last three years in office and highlighted some recent achievements.
“We have the best credit rating in our city's history,” said O’Connell, before touting Nashville's tax burden as the lowest of any major city in Tennessee. “The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that we have the third best business longevity in the country,” he continued. “Entrepreneurs are not only launching here, but finding long-term success here.”
Mayor O’Connell also pointed to progress on the East Bank, the upcoming cut to the local grocery tax, and rising MNPS graduation rates.
Public Safety & Crime “Little else matters in our city if people don't feel safe, and the successes we've seen over the last three years in safety have been historic,” said O’Connell. “Crime is down in every category and in every precinct each of the last couple of years.”
Chief Drake emphasized the significance of precision policing and community engagement. "There are some communities that felt like they didn't have a connection with the Metro Nashville Police Department,” said Drake. “They now do, and we have a lot of collaborations that are going.”
“The gun criminal of today should not be committing another gun crime tomorrow or next week,” continued Drake. “That's why precision policing is one of our core pillars, along with organizational excellence—trying to do well at what we do—but also community engagement, getting to know people.”
Mayor O’Connell also underscored the importance of officer support and retention. “We've worked to invest alongside [Chief Drake], not just in strategic assets like this precinct, but in additional officer take-home cars, in making sure that we maintain a police department that is among the best paid—not just in the region, but in the state and surrounding area,” said O’Connell. “Again, recruitment and retention have been a key part of that, and then we have also tried to support the department with innovation that's built on those three core strategies.”
Drake also mentioned that traffic stops are up 91 percent in the new Southeast Precinct area. “But that doesn't mean everyone receives a citation,” the chief made sure to mention. Instead, officers are encouraged to educate drivers and meaningfully connect with the community.
✹ PETER THIEL'S ANTICHRIST LECTURES
What Do You Care About the Antichrist? For the past few years, Silicon Valley entrepreneur cum Philosopher Peter Thiel has traveled the world to deliver secretive lectures on the biblical Antichrist. And he's coming to Nashville next. The Nashville Antichrist Lectures will draw from history, literature, art, theology, and politics to explore the biblical Antichrist through Thiel's unique vantage point at the frontier of science and technology.
Taking place over four days, your ticket will grant you access to each of the four lectures scheduled to take place on consecutive Mondays starting on September 28th in partnership with the Meriwether Academy.
✹ THE NATIONS BAR AND GRILL TAKES A DIVE
The thirteenth installment in Tales from the Westside
From Rachel Gladstone
When I moved to the Nations in 2001, it was an industrial, working-class neighborhood with stranger danger overtones. There were no restaurants, bars or coffee spots to frequent; just a few gritty watering holes, crack houses and gnarled old dudes brown bagging it on random street corners, mumbling to themselves.
The singular bar on 51st Ave. was as gritty as they come. A shack with tar-paper shingles and a questionable tin roof, it featured live music and cheap beer. The gravel parking lot was perpetually filled with beaters and rusted-out trucks, and in the morning the stench of stale beer was so prevalent you could smell it from a block away. The bar’s most redeeming feature was its name: Area 51. And even though I found the play on words very clever (and still do to this day), I never went in; the thought of setting foot in there made me kind of queasy.
By 2010 a few bars and restaurants began to pop up along 51st, spurred on by a flood of young families buying and restoring the neighborhood’s historic homes. By this time, Area 51 had been remodeled and renamed The Stone Fox. The building featured a stuffed fox in a round window just below the roofline and continued to provide the neighborhood with live music but without the rancid bouquet of stale beer and cigarette smoke lingering well into dawn.
HEADLINES
- 🔎Columbia massage parlor prostitution investigation tied to Tennessee congressional candidates. A statewide investigation into suspected prostitution and human trafficking at massage businesses led to two arrests at a Columbia location. Property records show that Columbia Mayor and 5th Congressional District candidate Chaz Molder is part-owner of the strip-mall property. It turns out that a paid employee of former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher’s campaign, Molder’s opponent in the 5th District, was a customer present at the time of the raid. At this time, it’s unclear what the man was doing inside the business, but he has not been charged with any crime. (WKRN)
- 🏥 Regulators clear Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown’s ‘Immediate Jeopardy’ status. Federal regulators have removed the “Immediate Jeopardy” designation from Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown after CMS validated the hospital's corrective measures following the August medication error. This means the hospital fixed enough of the safety problems that federal regulators no longer consider patients to be in immediate danger because of those deficiencies. Four joint-replacement patients had received potassium phosphate instead of the intended anesthetic mepivacaine, and the hospital had previously been warned that failure to correct the problems could threaten its Medicare agreement. (WKRN)
- 💜 Tennessee saw highest rate of women killed by men in nearly 30 years. A Violence Policy Center report found that Tennessee's rate of women killed by men reached 2.6 per 100,000 women in 2024, up from 1.6 in 2014 and the state's highest rate in 29 years. The report counted 97 women killed by men in Tennessee in 2024; 73.3 percent were killed with firearms, while 86.2 percent knew their alleged killer. (WKRN)
- 🚛 Driver arrested after intentionally crashing semi-truck into East Nashville Aldi. Police arrested 34-year-old Kristofer Scruggs after they say he intentionally drove a semi-truck through the front of the Aldi on Gallatin Avenue shortly after midnight. Scruggs was making a delivery, and surveillance footage reportedly showed him circling the parking lot before driving into the store. Police estimate more than $250,000 in damages, but no one was injured. (WSMV)
✹ PAMPHLETEER TOOLS
Pamphleteer Tools Council Watch tells you who funds your councilmember and how they vote. The Property Tax Calculator tells you what that cost you.
DEVELOPMENT
- GBT Announces 300,000 SF Retail Development In Gallatin TN (Now Next)
- The Boring Company buys Murfreesboro Pike property (Post)
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🎸 SWMRS @ Cannery Hall, 8p, $54, Info
🪕 AMERICANAFEST @ Multiple Venues, Info
🎸 Country Club Day ft. The Cowpokes @ Acme Feed & Seed, 12:30p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelley's Heroes @ Robert's Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
SATURDAY
🎸 Face To Face @ Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, 7p, $29+, Info
🪕 AMERICANAFEST @ Multiple Venues, Info
🎸 Kelley's Heroes @ Robert's Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
SUNDAY
🥁 Nothing Personal @ Brown’s, 3p, Free, Info
🎸 The Animeros @ The Basement, 7p, $27.22, Info,
🪕 Bluegrass Jam @ Station Inn, 7p, Free, Info
+ a night for musicians and singers from all over the world to gather and enjoy making music together
🪕 Sundays Between with Easy Green @ Tennessee Brew Works, 1p, Info
+ a fusion of two beloved musical genres – Bluegrass and the iconic sounds of the Grateful Dead!
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
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Today's newsletter is brought to you by Davis Hunt, Megan Podsiedlik, and Camelia Brennan.