Historic Metro Courthouse — Davidson County Criminal Court

The 1937 Art Deco city hall and county courthouse on Nashville’s Public Square. Davidson County Criminal Court sat here until 2006 and handed down both convictions retold in the Tennessean’s Murder on Music Row podcast.

Emmons Woolwine and Frederic Hirons won a 1935 design competition tied to the Public Works Administration. The courthouse opened December 8, 1937, and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

A Davidson County jury convicted James Charles Cavaye of felony murder in the January 1998 death of David “Skull” Schulman, who owned Skull’s Rainbow Room in Printers Alley. He received life plus 24 years.

In November 2025 the state’s star witness at that trial, Jason Pence, told the Tennessean he had lied in his testimony. No petition to reopen the conviction had been filed as of that report.

In 2003 a jury convicted Richard Frank D’Antonio, a former Cash Box chart director, of first degree murder in the March 1989 shooting of chart researcher Kevin Hughes on 16th Avenue South. He got life.

The criminal divisions moved across the street to the Birch Building in 2006, and the 2003 to 2007 restoration rebuilt this interior to modern standards. The courtrooms of the trial era are gone.

Public Square, a parking lot from 1976, was rebuilt in that restoration as a free plaza with reflecting pools and observation towers, open daily. The lobby is reachable through security screening during business hours.