Downtown Memphis, it seems, has been all over the news these past six months. Newcomers to town can be forgiven for thinking that this is something special and different for our city, but those of us who have been here a while have seen this movie before. Perhaps we should call this particular wave of Downtown change a Second Coming, but more correctly, it’s probably a third or fourth, all part of an ongoing city-center renaissance that began with baby steps way back in the late 1970s.
The big news Downtown these days came along last October, when Memphis Brooks Museum of Art announced that it was considering a move from Overton Park — where the museum’s been a fixture since 1916 — to a site on a large riverside block on Front Street, between Union and Monroe, now occupied by a fire station and a parking garage. Brooks’ decision to move Downtown was characterized as part of an evolving “civic terrace” along the bluff, envisioned in a Memphis Riverfront Concept Plan developed by Studio Gang, a Chicago-based urban-development consulting firm.
The driving force, so to speak, behind the Brooks relocation has been AutoZone founder (and art collector) J.R. “Pitt” Hyde, long a pivotal figure in shaping the destiny of Downtown Memphis. Hyde moved AutoZone’s headquarters Downtown in 1995 — his was the first Fortune 500 company to do so — not long after he was instrumental in founding, in 1991, the nearby and now world-renowned National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. And it’s no coincidence that the baseball and soccer stadium at Union and Third opened in 2000 bears the name “AutoZone Park.”
Studio Gang has not been idle since the Brooks announcement. This winter the group put forward a master redevelopment plan for Tom Lee Park, the details of which you can glean from Jon W. Sparks’ feature story this month on page 64. The plan is certainly ambitious, one that comes with a hefty $70 million price tag. No doubt, it will have its share of detractors. One group that’s already expressed concern is the board of the Memphis in May International Festival, producers of the Beale Street Music Festival and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, claiming that Studio Gang’s plans will reduce significantly the space in the park for these two signature events.
There’s more than a little irony involved in this contemporary disagreement. Flash back 40-plus years, to the third annual Memphis in May Festival, in 1978, when a then-tiny group of organizers put together a music festival, a Sunset Symphony, and the first-ever “world championship” barbecue contest over three weekends in May, in a seldom-used public park alongside the Mississippi. Memphis in May, in fact, was perhaps Act One in the now long-running Downtown revival. And yes, the location was the very same Tom Lee Park now about to be rejuvenated and recreated.
Since 1978, Downtown has been steadily transforming itself; there’s been no shortage of urban pioneers over the past four decades. Look no further than The Peabody hotel, now 150 years young, abandoned in the 1970s, and brought back to life in 1981 by the Belz family. In 1984, the equally dormant Orpheum Theatre was also revived, while Beale Street next door was slowly but surely brought back to life later in the same decade; it’s been the entertainment center of Downtown ever since.
In the early 1990s developer Henry Turley ventured into the Mississippi itself, transforming an uninhabited sandbar called Mud Island into a vibrant urban community now home to several thousand residents. And in this century, we’ve witnessed the growth of similar Downtown residential communities, from Uptown in the north (around a burgeoning St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital) to South Main at the opposite end of Downtown, stimulating explosive growth in terms of restaurants and nightlife all across the center city.
Fact is, it’s been quite a long time since Downtown stood still. The challenge we have today is to keep what we have viable, all while making our city ever more vibrant. Personally, I’m waiting now for enhanced rail transportation. Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the train from Downtown to Nashville and Little Rock as well as to New Orleans and Chicago?
