Memphis, explained
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
Tom Lee Park is a public riverfront park that runs for roughly a mile along the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, between the Beale Street area and the bluffs to the south. It is named for Tom Lee, a Black Memphian who could not swim and who rescued 32 people from a sinking steamboat in … Read more
I Am A Man Plaza is a small public memorial in downtown Memphis, standing beside Clayborn Temple on Hernando Street. It marks the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, the labor action that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in the final weeks of his life. The plaza takes its name from the … Read more
Overton Square is a small entertainment and dining district in Midtown Memphis, centered on the intersection of Madison Avenue and Cooper Street. It was built as one of the city’s first purpose-made entertainment blocks in the early 1970s, went dark for much of the 1980s and 90s, and has operated since around 2012 under new … Read more
What is the Shelby County Courthouse? The Shelby County Courthouse is the county’s historic seat of civil justice, standing at 140 Adams Avenue in Downtown Memphis. Completed in 1910 in the Neoclassical style common to American courthouses of that era, it remains an active, working courthouse today and sits at the center of the city’s … Read more
Elmwood Cemetery is a roughly 80-acre burial ground in South Memphis, founded in 1852 and still active today. It holds the remains of Memphis mayors, cotton merchants, yellow fever victims from the 1878 epidemic, and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose grave was moved there in 2021 after decades in a public park. What kind … Read more
What is Victorian Village? Victorian Village is a small historic district in Downtown Memphis, centered on Adams Avenue, made up of large houses built for the city’s merchant and cotton elite in the second half of the 19th century. It is a residential and institutional street of surviving mansions, not a shopping or entertainment strip, … Read more
Central Station is Memphis’s historic downtown railway depot, built in 1914 on South Main Street. It still does two jobs at once: it is an active Amtrak stop on the Chicago–New Orleans City of New Orleans route, and it is the restored shell of a mixed-use building holding a hotel, apartments and a MATA transit … Read more
What is the Big River Crossing? The Big River Crossing is a pedestrian and bicycle path built onto the Harahan Bridge, a steel railroad bridge that has carried trains across the Mississippi River between Memphis, Tennessee, and West Memphis, Arkansas, since 1916. The walkway opened in October 2016, using one of the bridge’s old outer … Read more
The Hernando de Soto Bridge carries Interstate 40 across the Mississippi River, connecting downtown Memphis, Tennessee, to West Memphis, Arkansas. Locally it is called the “M Bridge” because its two steel tied-arch spans, seen from the side, form the shape of the letter M — a profile that is lit at night and visible along … Read more
Crosstown Concourse is a large mixed-use building in Midtown Memphis that combines apartments, offices, a school, a clinic, retail space and arts venues under one roof. Before its 2017 reopening, the building spent decades as a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog distribution center and retail store, built in 1927 and shuttered by Sears in 1993. … Read more
About what you read here. Everything on Access Memphis is general information and our own editorial opinion. We research carefully and we say when the evidence is unclear, but we can be wrong, things change, and no article can know your particular situation. Please do your own research and make your own judgement rather than treating anything here as the final word. Prices, products and specifications around the topics we cover change constantly, and what suits one person will not suit another. Check current details yourself, and where a decision involves real money, safety or something you cannot undo, it is worth confirming with a qualified professional before you act.