DATELINE: NASHVILLE : Putting the Twang Back in the City’s Heart : The Grand Ole Opry left the Ryman Auditorium 20 years ago. Now the red-brick landmark will be filled with music, and a museum, again.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The Grand Ole Opry, that venerable country music institution, packed up 20 years ago from its longtime home in the red-brick Ryman Auditorium downtown and moved to the suburbs. After all, that’s where the fans were going.

And for some years now, fans shuttling between such commercial enterprises as Twitty City and the antiseptic glamour of Opryland--a combination amusement park and Las Vegas-style resort, sans sin--frequently have found time for pilgrimages to the Ryman, to walk its sacred aisles, touch its weathered pews and remember.

But now the auditorium--a onetime church in a funky corner of downtown--is about to reopen as a music venue and museum, part of a redevelopment effort that is turning the city’s heart into an entertainment mecca far surpassing what it was in the Ryman’s heyday.

In addition to the $8-million Ryman renovation, the company that owns the Opry is building a $7.5-million downtown country dance club that also will be used for taping shows for The Nashville Network on cable television.

The club is being built on Second Avenue, which already is becoming a vibrant entertainment district with jazz and rock clubs, restaurants and shops. A Hard Rock Cafe will open next door.

Adding to downtown’s luster is the city’s plan to build a sports and entertainment arena in hopes of landing a professional basketball or hockey team.

“I just don’t believe that we can be a first-rate city, a city that’s attractive, without a living and vital downtown,” said Mayor Phil Bredesen, who is credited with pushing the arena plan and a package of Opryland tax breaks through the City Council.

Until last year, downtown development moved at a fairly languid pace, slowed no doubt by the seedy gathering of honky-tonks, pawnshops and pornographic bookstores on Broadway, near Second Avenue. The seediness is what drove the Opry away in the first place.

“We had to move the Opry out of there because it was supported by tourists,” said E. W. Wendell, president and chief operating officer of Gaylord Entertainment Co., which owns the auditorium and Opryland. “They’d come to town to see the famous Grand Ole Opry and their cars would get broken into. They’d get mugged. We had to find another location or we’d cease to exist.”

The mayor notes that the convention center and a major hotel were built in the mid-1980s with their backs to Broadway, once the city’s grand avenue.

Now that is changing. With development spilling over onto the street, it is doubtful the unsavoriness can survive.

The Country Music Hall of Fame announced in February that it would relocate to the area from Music Row, where the recording industry is centered west of downtown. That alone is expected to draw 300,000 people to the area annually.

Wendell doesn’t think the new attractions will detract from Opryland.

On the contrary, the sprawling suburban complex is expanding its program of live music and adding to its already huge hotel-convention center. When the $175-million expansion is complete, the 2,870-room hotel will include such features as moving sidewalks, a $7.2-million retail operation and a 60-foot-wide indoor “river,” Opryland executive Jack Vaughn said. Conventioneers will be able to travel by boat from exhibition halls to the food court.

To get downtown from the Opryland complex, visitors will cross the real river--the Cumberland--on water taxis.

Wendell said he hopes the developments will make tourists want to plan weeklong vacations in Nashville instead of the now-typical weekend stays.

The rapid growth of Branson, Mo., as a family oriented spot to hear live country music had nothing to do with the developments, the mayor and Opryland officials insist. But Bredesen admits Branson may represent something of a lost opportunity if not an outright challenge to Nashville’s primacy as the capital of country music.

“I don’t see it hurting us,” he said. “It certainly doesn’t hurt Opryland. A fine hotel with impressive musical acts doesn’t compare with going to a strip someplace in Missouri, staying in a trailer park and going somewhere to see country shows. That’s not the field I choose to compete on.”

Sounding considerably less disdainful, Wendell said: “Nashville is really the heart and soul of country music because this is the creative community. This is where the songwriters are, and this is where the publishing companies are. Anything that promotes country music--I don’t care if it’s Branson, Mo., or downtown Los Angeles or New York City--anything that promotes country music is good for us.”