The Kinley Hotel in Chattanooga operates a retro speakeasy tucked off its lobby, no sign, no door. You have to know where to look. Now, I had no idea about speakeasies when I checked in. I was only stopping over on my way to a beach writing break. But the Kinley drops hints about their hidden bar, some subtle, some impossible to miss. The bar also has a website and legally obtained permits, so no, G-men won’t be busting in with guns drawn. And yes, getting past the lookout is easy enough. They let me in, if that says anything about their standards.
This was 2022, and I’d been brainstorming ideas for a recurring character: Vernon Stagg, a small-time Nashville lawyer with more bluster than skill. Vernon headlined two earlier stories for AHMM, and I was shooting for a third. The problem was finding the right setup. The stories have a particular voice and feel, and I needed an equally offbeat premise to set the characters in motion. If that sounds simple, it’s not. Humor is hard work.
Then, boom. Here was a faux speakeasy 130 miles away from my writing desk. A recurring gag in the earlier stories was that Vernon kept getting banned from his favored drinking holes. So yes, a speakeasy could work, or a hotel bar playacting the part. Even better, speakeasies are a very Nashville idea.
A century later, we tend to view the Prohibition Era through a Gatsby-sequel lens. Prohibition wasn’t confined to Manhattan jazz clubs or an Untouchables Chicago thing. People flaunted Prohibition everywhere. In Nashville, ignoring the Eighteenth Amendment nearly sunk the Nineteenth. This was 1920 at downtown’s Hermitage Hotel, where captains of industry teamed up with Anti firebrands to run a 24/7 whisky lounge on the eighth floor. Their goal: drown the Suff cause in illegal booze. It nearly succeeded.
Welcome to Nashville. The town that ran the Jack Daniels Suite is the same town that formed Tennessee’s first temperance society and, in 1909, passed a state prohibition law a decade before the Volstead Act. The true believers deliver their speeches, but, as can often happen in the South, much of the show is performative.
No ban was ever getting enforced here, not when Nashville’s saloon culture is as old as the churches. Today’s honky-tonk mega-district sits exactly where yesterday’s saloons entertained locals, railroad stopovers, and riverport crews. And of course, any ban overlooked why the saloons flourished in the first place. Business got done in the saloons. Friendships and alliances got sealed. Political machines cultivated influence.
The exception proves the rule. The most successful dent in Nashville’s saloon trade was the Union Army. The Union generals tried to regulate the place, but the party moved to the edge of town—and made good money off the Bluecoats. When the Union left, the bars spread back downtown like bramble.
Prohibition followed that playbook. The saloons went underground, often literally. It’s rumored that the Maxwell House Hotel vault served as a locker club for its guests. Not far downhill sits Nashville’s most famous scofflaw, Printer’s Alley. Before Prohibition, the narrow stretch housed over a dozen publishers, print shops, and the pressrooms for the city’s major—and feuding—newspapers, The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner. The alley happens to be perfectly central for downtowners, a good place to hitch a horse, load a delivery wagon, or after 1909, run a drinking hole. When Prohibition faded, the clubs hung their signs outside. Today, it’s a neon tourist draw.
If Chattanooga is trying faux speakeasies, Nashville’s entertainment complex would definitely give it a shot—and go full blast with it. As it turns out, Nashville has. Since I submitted the finished story to AHMM, at least two hidden-door bars have opened downtown.
Big money entertainment venues and five-story corporate honkytonks. This is the modern Nashville—and yet, a lot like its roots. It’s the Nashville that Vernon can’t quite figure out anymore. Drawing Vernon into that boomtown time warp, speakeasy-style, spurred “This One Oughta Go Different” to life.
I just had to leave town to see it.
Trace Evidence 