Access Memphis Editorial Team

Mud Island is a landform in the Mississippi River just north of Downtown Memphis, separated from the main riverbank by a narrow channel called the Wolf River Harbor. Harbor Town is the planned residential and mixed-use neighborhood built on the northern part of that same landform, starting in the late 1980s. One is a piece … Read more

East Memphis is the large, largely residential and commercial district that lies east of Midtown, roughly between the I-240 loop and the city’s eastern limits. It has no fixed municipal boundary, but it is understood locally as the area centered on Poplar Avenue, home to office towers, single-family neighborhoods, and several of the city’s museums … Read more

Whitehaven is a neighborhood in the far southwest corner of Memphis, Tennessee, running along Elvis Presley Boulevard toward the Mississippi state line. It is a large, mostly residential district best known nationally as the location of Graceland, but it is also one of the city’s biggest majority-Black neighborhoods with its own commercial corridor, schools and … Read more

Soulsville is a neighborhood in South Memphis built around the site of Stax Records, the soul label that operated there from 1957 into the mid-1970s. The name comes from Stax’s own promotional tagline, “Soulsville U.S.A.,” and today it refers both to the surrounding streets and to the nonprofit organization that runs the museum, school and … Read more

Binghampton is a neighborhood in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, sitting north and east of Midtown, roughly between Summer Avenue and Sam Cooper Boulevard. It began as an independent community outside the city before Memphis annexed it in the early twentieth century, and it is generally described by local historians and community organizations as one … Read more

The Broad Avenue Arts District is a roughly half-mile stretch of Broad Avenue in the Binghampton neighborhood of Memphis, made up of early-20th-century commercial storefronts that were largely vacant by the 1990s and have since been reoccupied by galleries, artist studios, small manufacturers and a brewery. It is not an official city ward but a … Read more

What Is Cooper-Young? Cooper-Young is a residential and commercial neighborhood in Midtown Memphis, named for the intersection of Cooper Street and Young Avenue at its center. It developed mainly between the 1890s and the 1930s as a streetcar suburb, and its core is listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, … Read more

Midtown Memphis is the band of the city between Downtown and East Memphis — a district built from turn-of-the-century residential neighborhoods, a concentrated medical center, two universities and a string of independent commercial strips, rather than a single landmark or tourist corridor. People call it “the real city” because it is where most of Memphis’s … Read more

South Main is a several-block stretch of Downtown Memphis, running south from around the Peabody Place area toward the National Civil Rights Museum, built up around late-19th and early-20th-century warehouses that once served the city’s cotton and wholesale trade. The “Arts District” is not a separate place — it is the name commonly used for … Read more

Downtown Memphis is the historic riverfront core of the city — the original street grid laid out above the Mississippi bluff, bounded roughly by the river to the west, a rail corridor and Danny Thomas Boulevard to the east, and running from around the Pyramid in the north to the medical district in the south. … Read more