NASHVILLE, Tenn. – When Nashville was working toward opening its first major art museum, other cities – Milwaukee among them – were eager to tap internationally recognized starchitects to design their striking new buildings.

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Music City, however, had a stunning Downtown structure just waiting to be transformed.

As the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, edges (nay, sprints) toward its 25th anniversary, its beautiful home – a 1934 mashup of Art Deco and Classical elements built as the city’s main post office – looks as good as ever.

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“It’s a wonderful place to come to every day,” says Director of Communications Ellen Jones Pryor, who should know. Involved since before the museum opened, Pryor has worked at the Frist for more than two decades.

On the exterior, the two-story building – designed by Nashville’s Marr & Holman – fills its block with a 250-foot-long facade fronting the city’s main thoroughfare, with projecting entrances at each end.

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The entrances have surrounds in black granite framed by fluted marble pilasters capped with some angry-looking eagles, that ubiquitous symbol of the U.S. Postal Service.

Above a quartet of aluminum doors is a large opaque transom window behind a patterned grille, also in aluminum, which is the material of choice for much of the decoration inside the building, too.

A horizontally-oriented staircase is bookended with granite blocks each topped with a light fixture that conjures an Art Deco lighthouse.

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Though the shape of the building is decidedly horizontal, its exterior decoration tends vertical, with those fluted pilasters and tall two-story window bays with decorated spandrels. Above the entrances four vertical marble details blossom at their tops.

But there some horizontal elements outside, too, including a decorative frieze along the roof line and another slightly narrower course running just above the tops of the windows.

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While the north (Broadway) side was the main entrance to the U.S. Post Office, the Frist utilizes the south side as the main entrance, where there is closer access to parking, and where a single-story addition houses a cafe and the entry.

On the west side is an entrance to a basement-level branch post office that opened as a replacement when the main post office operations moved out near the airport.

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Inside, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

Perhaps counterintuitively for a building erected at the height of the Depression, this one is incredibly elaborate. But that was exactly the point.

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At a time when unemployment soared and many Americans were on the knife’s edge, the government wanted to instill hope and faith in its institutions and make them appear strong.

This building would surely have had that effect.

The main lobby is a long double-height corridor that is better described as a main hall.

Along the north wall are aluminum doors and large ornate aluminum grilles running the length of the space. On the opposite side were once customer service windows and post office boxes, again with grilles above.

A trio of long black strips adorned with silver stars runs the length of the ceiling in the 250-foot space, each strip edged in fluted aluminum. Original Deco chandeliers dangle periodically from the central strip.

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There are original post office benches and tables still in place. Old mailboxes serve a collection points for museum donations.

The grilles include panels representing different professions (the dolphins, paired with a ship's propeller, are meant to represent working on the sea) and at the far ends of the hall, those panels depict the modes of transportation used at the time by the U.S. Postal Service.

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The walls are marble etched with vertical lines.

The floors are a mix of terrazzo and marble with geometric and zigzags in shades of green and black.

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Along the south wall of the hall one can easily see that the marble floors have been worn down in spots where customers would have stood at the service windows to conduct their business before turning on theirs heels to leave, each one wearing away another little layer of surface area.

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At the far ends of the hall, adjacent to the entrances, are staircases that are surely among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

The stairs are in green marble, the railings in aluminum, wainscoting is in gray marble and the ceilings have fluted moldings.

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Taken together, these stairwells are breathtaking.

They lead up to former post office administrative offices that are now used as offices for Frist staff and as rooms for education programming. A couple “Postal Cashier” windows, also with grilles, survive up here, as do original clocks, marble floors and other details.

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But I haven’t even discussed the back of the building, adjacent to the south wall of the hall.

Running parallel to this wall, on the other side, is a long space that was once lit by skylights that were covered over in the 1950s.

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During the renovation, the architects opened clerestory windows to bring light back into what is now a decidedly postmodern lobby for the galleries with staircases at either end of this space.

To the south of this atrium was the sorting and processing area, where heavy sorting machinery required solid footing, thus the floors were all done in end-grain pine. Those floors remain in place in what is now the main gallery space of the museum.

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Nearby is a fascinating display case explaining the construction and purpose of the end grain flooring and including an original section of flooring showing how the slices of 2x4s were bound together with wire into roughly 46-inch blocks that were laid to create the floor.

Upstairs, there’s more gallery space and the museum’s hands-on ArtQuest area that might, at first glance, appear to be aimed at kids, but which Media and Public Relations Director Buddy Kite says is really for all ages and can be a popular date night destination for couples.

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Fortunately, as the nomination form for the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places noted in 1994, “Throughout its 50-year history the Post Office has undergone remodeling several times but these alterations have not occurred to the main facades. The majority of changes have occurred in the work room areas and the rear loading and parking sections.

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“The major facades of the structure still retain their original appearance as does the lobby. The Post Office remains one of Nashville's best and most intact examples of the Art Deco style.”

This remains true today, as most of the changes made for the Frist have been done in these same areas.

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Interestingly, the building might not have ever existed had it not been for the Depression.

At the time, noted Christine Kreyling in her catalog for the Frist exhibition “A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum," "there was no compelling need for more space for postal operations. A 1927 treasury inspectors’ report on Nashville’s federal building notes that ... ‘as far as the immediate needs of the post service are concerned, the present space is sufficient’,” though it did suggest that a better loading dock was required.

However, as the Depression began to etch a deeper groove into Nashville – which would ultimately lead to the collapse of a big local bank and brokerage firm and cause even more hardship for Nashvillians – “one of the first things the Treasury Department did to provide relief for Nashville was to change its mind,” Kreyling wrote.

In summer 1930, Congress appropriated $205,000 for land next the Customs House, where postal operations were located, and allotted up to half a million dollars for construction. However, by early the following year, it was advertising for land adjacent to Union Station (now a hotel), because the trains were the most important transportation mode for the mail at the time.

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Later in 1931, Marr & Holman were hired to design the building but within the very detailed specifications – and subject to the approval – of the Treasury Department’s Office of the Supervising Architect.

The rules laid out by this office for the design and construction of buildings were so tight that the Knoxville post office, designed by different architects hemmed in by the same regulations at around the same time, is said to bear “striking similarities” to the Nashville building.

By February 1932, members of the architectural firm were in Washington to share their plans, which were approved the next day.

If some people still thought the need for a new post office did not exist in Nashville – and some did think that – the more than 1,000 people who turned up in June 1933 hoping to snag one of the construction jobs on the project likely did not agree.

The project, Kreyling noted, led to the hiring of bricklayers, masons, steelworkers, tile setters and others by contractor Frank Messer and Sons of Cincinnati, including, at the office of Marr & Holman, “draftsmen who temporarily swelled the ranks.”

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The first order of business would be to clear the buildings that stood on the site, which was not vacant. These included, according to Kreyling, two hotels and a number of small businesses, including a fruit stand, most of which served travelers using Union Station across the street.

By Nov. 26, 1934, the building was ready and opened just 18 months after construction began and a year and three weeks after the laying of the cornerstone.

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Eight days earlier, before the USPS had moved in, Postmaster William Gupton held an open house and it was estimated that as many as 50,000 Nashvillians showed up.

Dignitaries were on hand, and music was provided by the Postal Carriers band, which performed in the lobby.

“Families with children, dowagers in furs, elderly gents in their Sunday best wandered through the lobby,” Kreyling wrote, “up and down the marble stairs, into the walnut-paneled offices of the postmaster and his crew of supervisors, murmuring ‘wonderful,’ ‘magnificent’ and ‘swell’.”

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A mother told her daughter, “no wonder it cost a million dollars. Yes, I said a million, Sarah.”

In 1987, the heavy lifting of the USPS in Nashville shifted to a facility in an office park near the airport – planes having replaced trains as the key means of moving the mail – and the downtown building became a neighborhood branch.

The next year, the USPS issued an RFP for redeveloping the building.

The year after that, a developer was hired to help and Kreyling noted that the company’s president, “released schematic drawings by Tuck Hinton Everton Architects that showed a 19-story office tower looming over the 1934 building like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, dwarfing the tower of Union Station."

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The plan was to build it by 1992 but, according to Kreyling, “the bottom fell out of the office market before the scheme could be realized.”

Then, in 1996, the Frist Foundation proposed converting the building into a much-needed visual arts center.

“There was a community visioning process in the ‘90s,” Pryor recalls, “and literally hundreds and hundreds of people all over the city in churches, community centers, libraries were given the opportunity to say, 'what do we want Nashville to be in the year 2000?'

“Out of that came a list of wants, you know – we don't want urban sprawl, we don't want traffic, we want professional sports and everybody was shocked when all of a sudden there was ‘we want a museum.’ Nashville, at the time, was the largest city in the country without a major museum. There was a void.”

This latter idea, Pryor says, caught the attention of the Frist Foundation.

“You know, 'this is something the Frist Foundation can really take a lead on, so let's see if we can.' It was, ‘can we do it? If so, where are we going to put it, what’s its name going to be, what’s it going to look like?' And it was hammered out over years.”

The post office then sold the building to the quasi-governmental Metropolitan and Development and Housing Agency, which underwrote the renovation to what Pryor describes as a “core standard,” and then, she adds, the Frist Foundation, “did everything over and above that to get it open.

"So that included purchasing more land for parking, it included all of the environmental issues that had to be dealt with here, all the controls, the security issues and everything that needed to be done to make it Grade A museum space.”

The principal architect on the renovation project was Seab A. Tuck III of Tuck Hinton Architects, who worked with GSC Design Building and R.C. Mathews Contractor.

“We took it over in November of ‘99,” Pryor recalls, “and we created a handover ceremony. At that point the building had only been built in the ‘30s, so it wasn't that old, and still there were huge gaps in the building's history, so wanted to create a moment in time that everybody could look back on and say, ‘this is a momentous time in the, in the history of this building.’

“It was held in lobby, and then the demolition and all that started that afternoon.”

According to Pryor the building was in pretty good shape for the most part.

“The bones were good, but the upstairs had been closed for a long time,” she remembers. “So there was still (sorting) equipment up there, but the windows had been broken, there were kitties living upstairs, and the rain came in, so it swelled the wood and it (buckled) the floors (downstairs). All of that had to be dealt with.”

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The walls were also covered in grime not only from pollution from the trains running in and out of Union Station and The Gulch across the street but from customers and employees smoking.

Looking at it now, however, you’d never know.

The museum opened as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (the name was changed to the Frist Art Museum in 2018) on April 8, 2001 and nearly 24 years later, the building gleams and makes an impression.

So do the shows, which come from all over the world.

The Frist does not have a collection of its own, which means it truly offers an ever-changing experience.

“I think maybe there is a desire for Nashville to have a collecting museum,” says Kite, “but we put on, on average, 12 to 15 exhibitions a year.  So you get three months, and the people who love art know you can't sleep on it, you’ve got to come because it's just gone.

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“It's exciting and it also gives us a lot of opportunities to work with community partners, and bring folks in.”

When I visited there were engaging shows featuring a local Cuban-American artist, an African-American artist and a family-focused show on Japanese culture from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as a show in the Community Arts Gallery highlighting work from local IB and AP high school art students.

It was a weekday morning and the Frist was vibrant and alive, thrumming with activity. If anyone was unhappy that the Frist doesn’t have a vault of paintings of its own, I couldn't see it.

“We do organize our own exhibitions,” Kite adds. “We have a curatorial staff and they've done some incredible shows and we travel shows, too. We had a big collage show last year and after it was here, it went to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and then to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.”

Pryor adds, “We have worked with museums all over the world. We had antiquities from the British Museum, we're getting ready to work with them again. We have worked with Victoria & Albert, we've worked with the Tate, we've worked with the Vatican.

“We punch above our weight in that way. In the beginning, that was concern because we didn't have a permanent collection, so it was like, ‘What are we gonna barter with (with other museums)?’ But there is such a kind of interesting freedom in not having a collection because it enables us to respond relatively quickly to the world around us.

“Nashville has changed immensely since we started this conversation. Some of the things we're doing now, we couldn't even have envisioned that (at the beginning). We just had no idea.”