The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, formerly the 1935 main post office in downtown Nashville, is an excellent example of Art Deco design and painstakingly restored. Because the building wasn't a WPA project, there's no painted mural. Instead you will find amazing architectural detail: bas relief in metal and stone, marble floors and walls, metal fretwork, and more.
Union Station, completed in 1900, is now a Wyndham Historical Hotel. It once served eight passenger railroad lines with a huge barrel-vaulted lobby featuring two live alligator ponds and an enormous train shed, now demolished, that was the largest unsupported structure in America, capable of housing ten trains at once.
The likeness of the Roman god Mercury seen at the top of the clock tower is the third to stand there. The original 1900 bronze statue was toppled by a 1951 storm. During a renovation project in the mid-1990s, a painted two-dimensional trompe l'oeil Mercury was erected; it was blown down in the 1998 downtown Nashville tornado but soon replaced by the current figure.
Both buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
