Sylvan Park's Newest Hangouts Are Living Inside Its Oldest Buildings

Stand at the corner of Murphy Road and 45th Avenue North this month and you'll see a building doing something unusual for a Nashville neighborhood in growth mode. It isn't new. The exposed brick is original. The arches over the bar are the same arches that stood for more than 40 years when this was McCabe Pub, the neighborhood tavern that closed in early 2024 and left a corner lot nobody in Sylvan Park quite knew what to do with. Now it's Lion's Share, and the people who spent close to $4 million gutting and rebuilding the inside made a point of keeping the bones. Walk in and you're standing in the same room, just wearing a different coat.

That's the story worth telling about Sylvan Park heading into fall 2026. The two biggest additions to the neighborhood's social life this year did not clear a lot or pour a new foundation. They moved into buildings the neighborhood already had memorized and gave them a second job. At the same time, the creek that runs behind all of it is about to get a literal extension for the first time in years, stretching the walkable edge of Sylvan Park toward a part of West Nashville it has never been physically connected to before. New rooms, same skeleton. That's the pattern, and it says something about how this particular pocket of Nashville is choosing to grow.

A Hunting Lodge Where the Beer Taps Used to Be

Chef Robbie Wilson and his wife, Emily Perry-Wilson, opened Lion's Share on April 11 at 4410 Murphy Road, the address longtime residents still call "the old McCabe's" without thinking twice. Wilson has the kind of resume that could have landed anywhere in the city. He helped steer the culinary direction for the M Street Hospitality group that built Virago and Kayne Prime in the Gulch, then spent years running kitchens on the West Coast, earning a James Beard Foundation Best Chef: California semifinalist nod along the way. He chose Sylvan Park's corner tavern.

The renovation leaned into what was already there rather than erasing it. Perry-Wilson has said the vaulted wood ceiling, the exposed brick, and the notable arches all survived the rebuild, now framed by leather banquettes, houndstooth textures, and a 32-seat bar built for lingering. Wilson has described the goal plainly: he wants Lion's Share to be "a favorite restaurant, not a best restaurant," which is a different ambition than most seven-figure renovations aim for. Before the tavern opened, the same team ran a fast-casual companion spot called SuperNormal directly across the street, a burger-and-soft-serve operation that let them start serving the neighborhood while construction on the bigger project finished.

Down the Street, a Massage Studio Became a Wine Bar

A few blocks over, a 1930s house on 54th Avenue North went through its own transformation. The building spent years as Zen Blossom Massage and Wellness. On May 13 it reopened as Antoinette's Wine + Provisions, a wine bar and small grocery run by Lauren Maranto, a certified sommelier and West Nashville resident who wanted something on her side of town that felt like a friend's living room rather than a formal tasting room.

The house still reads like a house. There's a sofa to sink into, an 11-seat communal bar, and a backyard with almost half an acre of green space where kids and dogs are welcome. Because Tennessee law requires the wine bar and the to-go retail sides of the business to sit in separate rooms, Maranto built the space around that rule instead of fighting it, with a curated grocery on one side and the pour-and-stay bar on the other. Most bottles run under $50, and because her license covers beer and wine but not spirits, she built a cocktail menu entirely out of wine, including an espresso martini made with chocolate wine and port. In the kitchen is Luke Williams, a chef who trained under James Beard Award winner Chris Hastings and has cooked at Flyte, The 404 Kitchen, and Tailor around town.

Two buildings, two very different former lives, one shared decision: don't tear it down, teach it a new trick.

The Greenway Is About to Do the Same Thing to the Neighborhood's Edge

The pattern extends past the restaurants. According to Metro's current greenway project list, a 0.38-mile stretch of the Richland Creek Greenway is set to break ground in late 2026, running from Highway 70S through a new development along Richland Creek, under White Bridge Road, and connecting to the existing trailhead at Old White Bridge. The easement for it has already been dedicated.

That segment matters because of what it links. The site plan for Belle Meade Village, the mixed-use project rising on the old Belle Meade Plaza site at 4525 Harding Pike, sets aside roughly 60 percent of its 15.5 acres for green space and calls for activating Richland Creek so it connects across White Bridge Road to the greenway, and from there directly into Sylvan Park and McCabe Park. Construction on that site began in October 2025, and the controlled blasting phase wrapped on April 3 with a developer-run event the team called "Boom to Bloom." The project isn't slated to finish until 2028, but the greenway segment tying it back to Sylvan Park is moving on its own, faster timeline.

Put plainly, Sylvan Park has never had a paved, walkable connection running directly into the Belle Meade side of White Bridge Road. By the time this greenway segment opens, it will. The neighborhood's edge is being redrawn the same way its restaurants are being reborn: using what's already on the ground, extended rather than replaced.

If you already walk the existing Richland Creek Greenway, the neighborhood association's fall calendar gives you two more reasons to be out there. The Sylvan Park Neighborhood Association has a creek clean-up with the Harpeth River Conservancy set for Saturday, October 17, and a street tree planting day on Saturday, November 7, both organized through the same group that put fresh string lighting around the Sylvan Park roundabout this year for better nighttime visibility at the crossing.

What Still Happens on a Monday Night at McCabe Park

None of this changes what the neighborhood actually runs on day to day, which is still McCabe Park Community Center. Opened in 2011 as the city's first LEED-certified community center, it sits at the literal center of Sylvan Park and stays busy from early morning senior fitness classes through evening pickleball. Longtime resident Jessie Kelley, who grew up in the neighborhood, put it simply in a conversation with a local news crew earlier this year: she thinks the center is the glue that holds the community together, and she thinks Sylvan Park has a great vibe. Neighbor Ted King uses it for exercise and pickleball when the weather turns bad. The Sylvan Park Neighborhood Association holds its next monthly meeting there on September 14 at 7 p.m., the same room where the Richland Creek Run has been organized for years, a certified 5-mile race that raises money for Greenways for Nashville and runs straight through the neighborhood along the creek both new businesses now sit a few blocks from.

That's the throughline. A tavern that kept its arches. A wine bar that kept its house. A greenway extending along a creek that's been running through Sylvan Park the whole time. A community center that's been the same gathering point since 2011. Sylvan Park isn't chasing reinvention this year. It's finding new uses for what it already had, and doing it well enough that the additions feel like they were always supposed to be there.

If you're the kind of person who notices when a neighborhood is doing something right, and you ever find yourself wondering what a place like this is worth, or what it would take to make a move here yourself, The Bickerstaff Group would be glad to talk it through with you, no obligation attached.