Landmarks & Sights

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

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 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