While I understand why some in this thread are calling for the meeting hall to be underground and maintaining the street grid - I think we need to be realistic. Nashville sits on solid limestone, and they will not be putting a mega-convention-center underground just to maintain the grid. The old convention center disrupts the grid. The arena disrupts the grid. The bicentennial mall disrupts the grid. And, to keep this new project cheap and bring it to completion quickly, it will also disrupt the grid, being mostly above ground, with potentially above-grade or underground connections to the arena. I wouldn't even expect underground parking to be part of this plan, much cheaper to build a parking mid-rise. I think there will be some street-level retail, and possibly some direct connections to adjacent hotels, but this convention center will not become the new focus of downtown, and it will not be another city-financed mall because metro is still smarting from the failure of Church Street Center. The way metro sees it, better to build a mostly (or purely?) civic-purposed building and not take any flak for constantly loosing money, than attempting to build a money-maker, which would (necessarily) fall short of the goal.