The bluff came first. Everything else followed.
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
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 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
The Memphis Zoo is a 70-plus-acre zoological park inside Overton Park in Midtown Memphis, accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) and operated as a nonprofit by the Memphis Zoological Society. It opened in 1906 and holds several thousand animals across curated exhibit areas built around geography rather than a single theme. Where … Read more
Overton Park stopped an interstate because a local citizens’ group sued the federal government, and in 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of Transportation had never properly justified routing Interstate 40 through it. The highway was never built there. I-40 was rerouted around Memphis instead, and the park stayed whole. What was … Read more
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
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
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