What Happened to Second Avenue in the 2020 Bombing?

February 19, 2026

On Christmas Day 2020, at approximately 6:30 a.m., a bomb concealed inside a recreational vehicle detonated on Second Avenue North in downtown Nashville, near the AT&T data building located between Commerce Street and Church Street. The blast damaged 65 buildings, most of them historic structures built in the late 1800s. The explosion collapsed at least one building entirely.

The perpetrator was Anthony Warner, a 63-year-old computer repair technician from Antioch. He was inside the RV when it exploded and was the only fatality. Warner had targeted the AT&T building, a major telecommunications hub, and the blast disrupted phone service across a wide area including emergency services in parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama.

How It Almost Became Much Worse

About an hour before the explosion, the RV began broadcasting a recorded announcement warning of a bomb. Six Metro Nashville Police officers heard the warning and spent that hour evacuating residents from nearby buildings. A 15-minute countdown recording followed, then a version of Petula Clark’s 1964 song “Downtown” played before the blast. The warning gave responders enough time to remove people from immediate danger. The motive behind Warner’s decision to warn people remains incompletely understood.

The Damage

The bomb destroyed 65 buildings in what was one of downtown Nashville’s most architecturally significant corridors. The structures most heavily damaged were 19th-century commercial buildings, several of which had stood since the 1880s. Businesses on Second Avenue that had survived decades of urban cycles, including the Great Depression, highway construction that damaged downtown in the mid-20th century, and Broadway’s own period of urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s, were destroyed in a single morning.

The Old Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant that had operated on Second Avenue for decades and was a Nashville dining landmark, never reopened. The building later sold for $17.5 million in 2024. B.B. King’s Nashville Blues Club, which had anchored the entertainment end of the street, also did not return.

The Recovery

Reconstruction began in 2022 and continued in phases through 2025. The total city-funded rebuild cost exceeded $39 million. The Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency oversaw construction across three blocks. The street was fully reopened to vehicle traffic on December 22, 2025, five days before the five-year anniversary of the bombing.

Business owners suffered through years of construction closures. Broadway capture, the percentage of Lower Broadway visitors turning onto Second Avenue, dropped from a pre-bombing average of about 30 percent to as low as 12 percent during the most disruptive construction phases. Revenue at some Second Avenue businesses dropped by more than 60 percent.

Some buildings at the epicenter remained unrestored as of early 2026 because private property owners are still resolving individual insurance claims. The city can rebuild public infrastructure; it cannot compel private owners to restore damaged buildings on any particular timeline.

Sources

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