Baton Rouge
A happy circumstance — tagging along with my son for three months while he does medical school rotations in the South — has given me a might-be-a-resident’s view, albeit ranging from only a few days to a few weeks, at four river cities less than a day’s drive from Memphis.
Rolling back the clock and rolling up the miles by car and on foot, I tried to imagine what it would be like to start a career in Baton Rouge, Nashville, Chattanooga, Louisville, and Memphis. My unscientific survey was geared toward livability, riverfront activity, icons, and first impressions. Memphis stacks up pretty well in some categories, and pretty badly in others.
Baton Rouge is really wet and really crowded. The population has nearly doubled since Hurricane Katrina, and the amount of construction going on in the wetlands is alarming. The lovely LSU campus with its lakes and live oaks is only a couple miles from downtown and feels like the proverbial university built to support a sports program. Next to the stadium, mascot Mike the Tiger is getting a new abode that will cost almost as much as a football coach’s salary. Housing is scarce, and we paid $1,400 for a month for a one-bedroom apartment through Airbnb. The riverfront reminded me of Memphis: lots of barge traffic, an aging convention center, walkways and fountains, and not much to look at on the other side. There were fewer tourists than Memphis. Maybe the casino was getting them. Or the humidity keeps them away. Iconic statue: Huey Long, famed as The Kingfish, in the Old Capitol. Sticky number: 20 inches of rain in two days in August of 2016.
Louisville
Louisville is the flip-side of Memphis demographically, with about the same population but a 25 percent higher mean household income. It’s sort of Nashville without the traffic and high prices. The university, once an archrival of Memphis, is 10 minutes by car from the riverfront. The EPA says the Ohio River is more polluted than the Mississippi, but it doesn’t look it. Pleasure boats and kayaks are commonplace, parks abundant, and the pedestrian bridge doesn’t have to compete with a railroad. It also helps that Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the other side, has its own attractive riverfront. Louisville has consolidated government but there are 83 towns in Jefferson County, lest anyone think consolidation means unity. Iconic statue: Abraham Lincoln. Corporate angel: Yum! Brands. Hot ticket: Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson. A renovated 1,100-foot condo in the historic Belgravia neighborhood listed for $140,000. Wow.
Chattanooga
Chattanooga, if you believe Outside magazine, is America’s Best Town Ever. Of course if you believe Walter Cronkite and remember the Seventies, it was once America’s Dirtiest City. Quite a transformation, if you walk the pedestrian bridge over the Tennessee River and look back at Lookout Mountain and the spectacular art museum at the edge of downtown. Oh, the joys of a manageable river as opposed to one that rises and falls as much as 50 feet in a year. Nice, but as my son reminded me, “You don’t pick a city to go paddleboarding and rock climbing.” Cheap shot! There’s also a university with 11,000 students, an Amazon fulfillment center, super-fast internet, a free downtown shuttle bus, battlefields that put Civil War monuments in their proper place, and easy access to Nashville and Atlanta. Housing is pricey: A one-bedroom condo in the Southside historic district lists for $250,000.
Nashville
Which would be abargain in Nashville, where a small fixer-upper in East Nashville goes for $300,000. I used to live there and loved it; now I avoid it, probably because I remember too much. There’s the traffic, the television series, the ho-hum Cumberland River, the snootiness, the consumption culture, the parking that’s a bitch. In my nightmare I am trapped in a drunken blonde’s bachelorette party on Lower Broadway on a weekend. Sticky number: The population of the Nashville region is growing by 100 people a day.
Memphis
Memphis, my chil-dren’s now 30-something friends tell me, is not the place it used to be. It has changed for the better. There’s the bike bridge, the Greenbelt Park, Harbor Town, Crosstown Concourse, FedEx, St. Jude, and you can buy a house for $200,000. Yes but, says the Old Man, rolling his eyes: It also fights old battles over and over, charges $10 to get into its entertainment district, and racked up 228 homicides in 2016, a sticky number if there ever was one.
Cheap cities are cheap for a reason. You pays your money and takes your choice.
