Nashville’s Lower Broadway entertainment district hardly ever sleeps. It’s full of honky tonks, restaurants, bars and museums, and the entire area was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, making changes to existing real estate nearly impossible.
That was the situation DPR Construction found itself in when it began work on Jon Bon Jovi’s (JBJ) Nashville near the corner of Broadway and 4th Avenue, now the tallest live entertainment venue on the street . The simple honky tonk is quickly becoming a thing of the past, with Nashville’s top stars adding their names to four- and five-story performance spaces with multiple balconies, stages spanning at least two stories, and imposing electrical needs the aging of the historical infrastructure.
Lainey Wilson, Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert, Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton and Kid Rock, just a little bit of country, have music venues/bars in the entertainment district and Morgan Wallen will be joining them soon.
The first three levels of JBJ’s Nashville have open views of Broadway and the venue’s stage, allowing elevators to be used to work on these floors.
Photo by Bryan Adams/DPR Construction
“Living in a Prayer”
JBJ’s is owned by Big Plan Holdings, with Bon Jovi himself as a partner. The 0.16-acre site, a former parking lot, had serious problems from inception in April 2022.
The DPR team had to fit five floors and 37,000 square feet of entertainment space into a narrow L-shaped structure between Losers Bar on 4th and Nudie’s Honky Tonk on Broadway, both historically protected buildings. A third listed building, the Merchants Building, stands on the corner of Broadway and Fourth across from Loser’s. None of the buildings could be altered because business continued during construction. Most bars close at 3am on Lower Broadway, but open again at 10am, with all kinds of entertainment on Broadway during the day, including taping of the adverts for the National Football League.
The Upbrella system allowed DPR to place all of its panels within the specified time frame to keep the project on track. The record for the self-executing team was 16 panels in one day.
Photo by Bryan Adams/DPR Construction
The mass of foot and vehicle traffic meant that closing streets and sidewalks was a non-starter for the city. Without space for a tower crane, another solution would have to be found. DPR should build the building directly against the public sidewalk on both 4th Avenue and Broadway and within inches of historic buildings. Swinging materials onto rooftops or nearby streets was simply out of the question. With the exception of a lane closure on 4th Avenue where the DPR dumpsters and restrooms were located, there was no rest area.
To support five stories and 70 feet high, DPR had to dig and had hoped to find plenty of stable rock to support the site. Exploratory surgery revealed a different story.
“[The panels] come within inches of those surrounding bars.”
—Brent Bunting, Nashville Business Unit Leader, DPR Construction
“It ended up being a lot more soil than rock, a lot more soil than we expected,” says Samantha “Sam” Rowland, senior project engineer at DPR. “We had to use a soldier pile breaking system that basically covered the entire footprint of the building. We didn’t have any right-of-way to cross properties below the buildings or above, so we couldn’t use any ground nails nor anything like that. So we had micropiles all around the perimeter. It was a very extensive excavation process.”
While geotechnical contractor Rembco worked on site preparation, a process that took 10 months, DPR and its virtual construction team focused on the challenge of moving materials without a crane. Because JBJ’s, like most of Nashville’s new generation of honky tonks, has an interior that makes the stage visible from the first three floors, elevators located on the ground floor could transport material through the atrium The biggest problem was placing the prefabricated panels that make up the outer skin of the building. On the outside of the building, the steel could be raised traditionally, but once the skeleton was up, space was limited.
The schedule called for rotating trade contractors to perform mechanical, plumbing, and electrical work on a tight schedule, requiring all trades to participate in preconstruction BIM coordination.
An edifying system
“[The panels] come within inches of the surrounding bars,” says Brent Bunting, DPR’s Nashville business unit leader. “It was a lot of coordination, below, above, that we had to do with the neighbors.”
Rowland says that the clearances from where the panels were to be placed next to neighboring walls varied; “Between the buildings, it depends on where you are. Some places are 12 inches, some three inches.”
DPR’s BIM coordination created a suitable sequence to move each panel thanks to the first BIM collaboration with the Ubrella team, SMS SMS steel and architect Centric.
Photo by Bryan Adams/DPR Construction
DPR turned to the Upbrella system, a solution from Boucherville, Quebec, that uses a monorail and trolley configuration that can be mounted on the steel frame of a building. Instead of swinging the heavy exterior panels over neighboring buildings, which would have required permission and permission from the neighbors, Upbrella deployed its monorail system with crane trolleys that carried the panels into place around the site and only on the spot. Upbrella has been used on five projects in Canada, one in Monaco and now at JBJ’s.
“Between the buildings, [clearance] it depends where you are. Some places are 12 inches, some three inches.”
—Sam Rowland, Senior Project Engineer, DPR
Jacques Gauthier, Director of Business Development at Ubrella, met DPR’s Charlie Dunn in 2019 and introduced him to the system. Dunn, DPR’s draft storyteller, recommended it to the Nashville team.
“My understanding is that they had something like six weeks to put up the facade,” Gauthier said. “We calculated all the radii so that they can move all these panels without ever encroaching 1 millimeter on the neighbors.”
Upbrella also helped save space on the small site by taking the panels directly from the trucks that delivered them instead of needing to make room for a rest yard before placing them.
“It’s basically a structural steel system mounted on the roof, like you would a window washing system,” explains Bunting. “It has a trolley line, the whole perimeter of the building, like a gantry crane inside a warehouse. This trolley crane goes all the way to where you’re going to pick up the material. At the ends of the L-shaped site , we would have to have delivery trucks show up, pick up the truck, or just get off the truck on the ground, lift the facade, and then transport it to where it is finally installed.”
The side entrance to JBJ’s was to be built between Losers and the Merchants Building, both historic buildings. The single lane closure in the quarter was the only rest space DPR had, barely enough for the contractor’s dumpsters and restrooms.
Photo by Bryan Adams/DPR Construction
Once at the placement site, the crane truck lowered the panels into place and DPR’s self-executing team secured each panel to the floor deck from inside the building. It was the first time Upbrella was used in the U.S. Rowland and DPR’s VDC team used the project’s building information model to plan the “flights” of the panels around the building, in through the necessary small spaces and up to the installation.
The L-shaped site where JBJ’s Nashville was supposed to fit was an old parking lot squeezed between three historic buildings.
“There was nowhere you could put a crane so the counterweights weren’t turning [neighbors or the street] sometime. So Upbrella was really the only feasible option that we found that would allow us to put the skin on,” says Rowland.
Rowland says Ubrella’s DPR team worked with engineering the entire system and modeled it for DPR so it could be incorporated into the contractor’s BIM coordination.
Centric Architecture’s floor plans allowed for three floors of performance space, two bars and a rooftop that is the highest on Broadway.
“They were very easy to work with and they were able to contract with our steel erector. We didn’t have to bring in another contractor. With the trolley cranes we used on the monorail, we were able to train our own self-executing crews to do— it will work,” he says.
The exterior panels were pre-fabricated by supplier Forge out of their Atlanta facility, and when they arrived on site, DPR’s self-executing crews picked up a good pace. The highest production day was 16 panels in one day, and DPR easily met its placement deadline. Southeast Miscellaneous Erectors and SteelFab Inc. are the erector and steel fabricator for the project.
DPR also worked with Architect Centric before placing any panels to sequence the panels correctly for installation.
DPR, Volunteer Electric, ICON Mechanical and Merryman-Farr made the most of the limited space (about 8,000 square meters per floor) within the footprint.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR
It’s electric!
“We have calculated all the radii so that they can move all these panels without ever encroaching 1 millimeter on the neighbors”
— Jacques Gauthier, director of business development at Ubrella
For the three-level stage where Bon Jovi and other bands play, BIM coordination was also important due to the electrical and mechanical needs of modern performance.
There is an AV rack below the second level of the stage and all cables run through the floor to the AV rack. The lower level of the stage houses the subwoofers and other large speakers, and the entire box is concrete, but the actual decks where the band members are are a steel structure with slab-on-metal roofs. All penetrations were coordinated using DPR’s BIM model.
Volunteer Electric did all the electrical work, and two trades, Merryman-Farr and ICON Mechanical, placed all the mechanical equipment in the 37,000-square-foot space.
“We have a lot of different groups here, and we were able to do this because of extensive BIM coordination that took place over almost a year,” says Rowland.
DPR and its mechanical subcontractors had to provide plumbing and electrical needs for a rooftop bar and a performance venue near the balcony facing Fourth Avenue.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR
As with any project on Lower Broadway, constant communication with the city was key to getting it done on time.
“We had to make sure we coordinated with the Department of Transportation, Metro Water and Metro Sewer, maintaining constant communication with all of them and the neighbors so we didn’t block their doors,” says Rowland.
JBJ’s Nashville recently opened and hosted its first concert with a little band called Bon Jovi. n
