The bluff came first. Everything else followed.
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
Beale Street Baptist Church is a congregation at 379 Beale Street. It was organized in 1866 by formerly enslaved Memphians. The building that still stands dates to the early 1870s. It is generally recognized as the oldest standing African American church building in the city. The church later housed Ida B. Wells’s newspaper office. It … Read more
What is the Universal Life Insurance Building? The Universal Life Insurance Building is a mid-century office building on Danny Thomas Boulevard, just north of Downtown Memphis, built in 1949 as the headquarters of Universal Life Insurance Company — a Black-owned insurer founded in Memphis in 1923. It matters to Memphis’s Black business history because it … Read more
Who was W.C. Handy? William Christopher Handy (1873–1958) was a composer and bandleader who published some of the earliest blues songs ever written down as sheet music, including “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914). He worked in Memphis in the early 1900s, leading a band that played on and around Beale Street. He … Read more
Fourth Bluff Park is a downtown Memphis park sitting directly on top of the Chickasaw Bluff, overlooking the Mississippi River near Front Street and Court Avenue. Before its current name, the site was Confederate Park and, for part of its history, Jefferson Davis Park. It took its present name and design after a rebuild finished … Read more
The Chickasaw Bluff is the fourth in a numbered chain of four loess-and-clay bluffs that rise above the Mississippi River between far western Kentucky and Memphis. Memphis was founded on the fourth and southernmost of these, roughly 100 feet above the river’s floodplain — one of the only stretches of high, stable ground the lower … Read more
Memphis and Nashville are both Tennessee music cities about three hours apart, and they are routinely presented as two versions of the same trip. On the published numbers they are not close to each other — not in what they cost, and not in what they are. The cost gap, on published figures Memphis Nashville … Read more
Memphis has four music attractions that matter, and their prices span a range most visitors do not expect: from $15 to $260. The spread is not really about how much music history each one holds. It is about how Graceland tiers its tickets — and the cheapest Graceland ticket does not include the house. The … Read more
Memphis sits within about eighty miles of three states, which means its day trips are unusually varied for the distance. It also means the published mileages mislead you, because the roads leaving Memphis are not all the same kind of road. Here are the numbers, and then the arithmetic that most lists leave out. Day … Read more
Moving to Memphis from out of state generally means lower housing costs than most metro areas of comparable size, a car-dependent daily routine, a city split between Memphis proper and unincorporated Shelby County, and a utility and water system run by a single public provider. The adjustment is mostly logistical, not cultural — the harder … Read more
Tom Lee Park is a mile-long public park running along the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, between the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and the area near Beale Street Landing. In 2023, it reopened after a multi-year redesign that replaced a mostly flat, tree-sparse lawn with a landscaped park built around the site’s seasonal flooding, led by the … Read more
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