Memphis, explained
Tom Lee Park is a mile-long public park running along the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, between the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and the area near Beale Street Landing. In 2023, it reopened after a multi-year redesign that replaced a mostly flat, tree-sparse lawn with a landscaped park built around the site’s seasonal flooding, led by the … Read more
===ARTICLE-BODY-BELOW=== What actually lives along the Memphis riverfront? The Memphis riverfront is a run of parks, bridges and civic landmarks strung along Riverside Drive above the Mississippi River, plus the river itself — a working channel that carries barge traffic, migratory birds and fish that never make it into a brochure. It is both a … Read more
Swimming in the open Mississippi at Memphis is not something regional safety agencies recommend, and there is no supervised beach for it — the current, undertow and heavy barge traffic make the open channel genuinely hazardous. Recreational boating does happen, but mostly in the calmer slack water beside downtown rather than the main river channel … Read more
T.O. Fuller State Park is a state-managed park inside the Memphis city limits, in the far southwest of the city near the Mississippi River. It covers roughly 1,100 acres of bluff and bottomland forest, and it is historically significant as one of the first state parks in the United States developed for use by African … Read more
Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park is a large, forested Tennessee state park on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, roughly 13 miles north of Downtown Memphis in Shelby County. It is managed by Tennessee State Parks and holds hiking and horse trails, a campground, cabins, and a stocked lake — not a garden or a … Read more
The Wolf River Greenway is a paved, multi-use trail being built in phases along the Wolf River in Memphis and Shelby County, for walking, running and cycling. It is led by the Wolf River Conservancy, a nonprofit river-protection group, working with the City of Memphis and Shelby County government. When finished, it is meant to … Read more
Martyrs Park is a small public park on the bluff above the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, and it is a memorial to the victims of the yellow fever epidemics that struck the city in the 1870s — above all the outbreak of 1878, which killed thousands of residents and drove most of the rest … Read more
Big River Crossing is a lighted pedestrian and bicycle path carried on the south truss of the Harahan Bridge, running across the Mississippi River between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas. The crossing itself is close to a mile long one way; walking it out and back, without detours on either bank, runs to roughly … Read more
The Memphis Botanic Garden is a public garden in East Memphis made up of more than two dozen themed plantings — a Japanese garden, an iris garden, a rose garden, a children’s garden and several others — spread across land inside the city’s Audubon Park. It is run by a nonprofit, not a city department, … Read more
What is Overton Park? Overton Park is a 342-acre municipal park in Midtown Memphis, laid out in 1901 as part of the city’s original park system plan. It holds the Memphis Zoo, the Overton Park Shell music venue, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, a public golf course, and — at its core — the … Read more
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