The bluff came first. Everything else followed.
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
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
The Orpheum Theatre is a historic performing arts venue on Main Street in downtown Memphis, built in 1928 as a movie and vaudeville palace on the site of an earlier opera house. It now operates as a nonprofit performance hall hosting touring Broadway productions, opera, ballet and concerts, and it is a listed historic building. … Read more
Mason Temple is a large Church of God in Christ (COGIC) sanctuary in south Memphis that serves as the denomination’s world headquarters. It is the building where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. What … Read more
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