Riverside Drive is in the news a lot lately, as planners consider better ways to make use of Tom Lee Park and other features of the Memphis riverfront.
For years, the bluffs were hardly used at all. Old photos, in fact, showed images of the bluffs covered with garbage, since many businesses that backed up to the river simply used the river, and the riverbluffs, and a public dump.
Not only was our city's "front door" unattractive, it was unsafe, and that was demonstrated quite vividly in the 1920s when entire chunks of the bluff sloughed off and tumbled into the river, taking with it buildings and even a locomotive.
So in the 1930s, a major plan was unveiled to rebuild the entire riverfront, adding Riverside Drive and Tom Lee Park as not only useful features, but practical ones, too, since they tended to stabilize the bluffs.
This early view, looking south from about the area of Beale Street, shows a single vehicle on Riverside Drive sometime in the late 1930s. That elevated structure in the distance was a conveyor for one of the firms located atop the bluffs, allowing them to load their products directly onto barges in the river, without blocking traffic.
This fine view is from the Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. And a fine story about the entire complicated history of this roadway, during its construction hailed as "The Most Expensive Highway in the World," can be found in the forthcoming issue of Inside Memphis Business.
