One hundred years ago today an era of Nashville history came to a close.

On the morning of February 3, 1916 former gambler and saloon keeper Ike Johnson committed suicide in his room at the Southern Turf building on 4th Avenue, just days before he was to be evicted from the room where he had lived for the previous twenty years.

Ike had been one of the leading lights of the Gilded Age saloon scene in town, owning and operating some of the “toniest” establishments in the city, only to lose it all when Prohibition was enacted following the killing of his old nemesis, Senator Edward Ward Carmack, in 1908.

He was known as a glittering tough, a generous gambler, an abstemious saloon man, and a lifelong bachelor with a soft heart for children and animals. And though he himself said that “It is not good for a man to live the way I have lived,” his passing was mourned by even those opposed to his lifestyle. With his death, one of the last links to Nashville’s opulent Victorian highlife was severed.

He rests today in a quiet spot in Mount Olivet Cemetery. His palace, the Southern Turf, still lives on today, reincarnated as a modern office building. It is one of the last reminders of the old “Gentleman’s Quarter,” where nighttime never seemed to fall before 1900.