Vendome Theatre

You are now at the Nashville Public Library. Feel free to step inside for public restrooms and water fountains. While you’re here, let your mind time travel back to 1887. Imagine a grand opera house with a stained-glass roof, interior frescoes, two balconies, and eight private boxes. Welcome to the Vendome Theatre—one of Nashville’s premier venues for live performance and film from 1887 to 1967.

Located on Church Street facing the State Capitol, the Vendome was a cultural landmark—its main curtain once depicted Paris’s famed Place Vendôme. The debut week featured soprano Emma Abbott, the first woman in the U.S. to lead her own opera company, performing seven operas in seven nights. Though fire destroyed the theater in 1902, it was quickly rebuilt by architect Tignal Franklin Cox.

In the early twentieth century, manager W.A. Sheetz brought major touring productions to Nashville, including the Sothern and Marlowe Shakespeare Company. These featured local talent like John Lark Taylor—Nashville’s first silent film accompanist and later a co-founder of the Nashville Little Theatre at The Hillsboro.

In 1919, the Loew’s chain purchased the Vendome and converted it into a vaudeville and movie house. A Wurlitzer organ was added in 1926, and the theater thrived into the civil rights era. In 1961, the Vendome was one of several downtown theaters targeted by student-led sit-ins—including John Lewis and the Reverend James Lawson—seeking to desegregate public venues.

In 1964, the Vendome hosted the world premiere of the Hank Williams biopic Your Cheatin’ Heart. Just three years later, a fire broke out after a screening of the Ernest Borgnine film, The Dirty Dozen, destroying the building in 1968. The site largely remained vacant until becoming a shopping mall, then the Main Branch of the Nashville Public Library.

Thanks to the vision and philanthropy of the Ingram, Frist, and Turner families, the library now carries forward the Vendome’s legacy as a cultural gathering space. Its auditorium regularly hosts author talks, public events, and documentary screenings. Where audiences once gathered for opera, lectures, and vaudeville, Nashvillians still come here to engage, learn, and be inspired. 

Want to learn more about the library or Nashville’s role in the woman’s suffrage or civil rights movements? You are in luck! Type “Nashville Public Library” into the search bar, and select one of ten tours that contain a stop here at the library. Next, we head to one of Nashville’s best kept secrets, The Arcade. It’s just a short walk around the corner.

From the library, walk down Church Street and turn LEFT onto Rep. John Lewis Way (formerly 5th Ave N). This street was named for the pioneering Civil Rights activist because of the Sit-Ins he participated in and helped plan in the early 1960s on this very street. Take our Downtown Civil Rights Sit-Ins or Civil Rights Movement tours to learn more about this important history. Your next stop, The Arcade, is on your right about halfway up the block. Feel free to walk through as you listen to this stop.