Photo: Eric EnglandEarlier this month, in response to an inquiry about available rooms at the Stadium Inn, an employee working the front desk said the run-down hotel that has been operating in the shadow of downtown Nashville for decades had no vacancies.

In fact, the opposite turns out to be true. The whole hotel — which had been largely occupied by low-income residents or people living on and off the streets who would stay there for months or years at a time — is vacant and has been for at least several weeks. According to one former resident, the hotel abruptly raised rates on residents — from $250 per week to $650 per week in one case — to effectively force tenants out without having to formally evict them.

"People were put out because they couldn't pay," says Mary Elizabeth Mack, who'd been living at the hotel for two months. "They were putting people out at 10, 11 o'clock at night."

Now the hotel's owners have applied for an interior demolition permit from the Metro Codes department. The permit has not been issued yet, but the application says "future tenant to obtain further permits." Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial real estate firm handling the project, has so far declined to elaborate on the status of or plans for the property.

It's not clear what will become of the flophouse that once hosted professional wrestling and has stood as an emblem of a grittier Old Nashville, but it does appear that it won't be the Stadium Inn for much longer. The first word about changes at the hotel came by way of an unsourced tweet from Scoop: Nashville's Jason Steen.

The hotel is not all pre-boom charm, though. While it has served as a backdrop for music videos, it has also allegedly been the site of illegal and dangerous activity. A lawsuit filed in 2018 called it a "hotbed of criminal activity," citing alleged rapes in 2015 and 2017, as well as four suspicious deaths. For homeless outreach workers, the hotel has represented a serious dilemma. They are intimately familiar with the poor conditions there.

"When I think of my experiences in Stadium Inn, I think of smelling smoke and urine, seeing mold in multiple bathrooms, and hearing toddlers crying, elderly folks coughing, and dogs barking through the halls,” Lindsey Krinks, an outreach worker with homeless advocacy organization Open Table Nashville, told the Scene earlier this year.

At the same time, homeless advocates also rely on the Stadium Inn and hotels like it as a shelter for people who have nowhere else to go.