The Edge District is a small area on the northern rim of Downtown Memphis, running roughly along Union Avenue and Danny Thomas Boulevard between the Downtown core and the Memphis Medical District. It was the city’s automobile row in the first half of the twentieth century, and its surviving dealership and garage buildings now hold Sun Studio, breweries, apartments and offices rather than showrooms.
Where is the Edge District, and what are its boundaries?
The Edge District sits between Downtown Memphis and the Memphis Medical District, roughly bounded by Danny Thomas Boulevard to the west, Union Avenue and the surrounding blocks to the south, and the rail corridor and medical campuses to the north. The Memphis Medical District Collaborative, the nonprofit that coordinates development across the wider medical campus area, describes the Edge as one of the transitional districts sitting at that seam — hence the name.
It is a small footprint by the standards of most Memphis neighborhoods: a handful of blocks rather than a broad residential grid. Its identity comes less from a fixed boundary line than from a shared architectural stock — one-and two-story commercial buildings built for cars, not people, now doing something else entirely. For the wider question of where Downtown itself starts and stops, see Access Memphis’s explainer on Downtown Memphis’s boundaries.
Why is it called the Edge District?
The name reflects position, not a marketing decision made from scratch. The area sits literally at the edge of Downtown, on the seam where the dense commercial grid of the city center gives way to the hospital and university campuses of the Medical District to the north. Local promotional and redevelopment material from the Memphis Medical District Collaborative uses “the Edge” as shorthand for this in-between stretch, distinguishing it from the medical campuses proper and from the Downtown core to the south.
What was Automobile Row?
Before it was the Edge, this stretch of Union Avenue and Danny Thomas Boulevard functioned as Memphis’s automobile row. From roughly the 1910s through the mid-twentieth century, car dealerships, showrooms and repair garages clustered here, taking advantage of the area’s position just outside the older Downtown commercial district and along early roads and rail lines used to ship vehicles and parts. Local history collections, including the Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Memphis Public Library, document this period of the city’s commercial geography, when new industries — automobiles chief among them — pushed outward from the original Downtown core rather than displacing it.
The buildings from that era are recognizable even now: low-rise brick structures with oversized plate-glass display windows meant to show off cars from the street, and open interior spans meant for garage bays rather than offices. Many of those same floor plans and window openings survive in the district’s current buildings, adapted rather than replaced.
What is actually in the Edge District now?
The single most nationally known site in the district is Sun Studio, at 706 Union Avenue — the recording studio where Sam Phillips recorded Elvis Presley’s first sessions and where Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and other Memphis and Delta musicians made recordings that shaped early rock and roll. Sun Studio operates today as a working studio and a museum with a self-guided tour of its history; details on hours and tour format are on the studio’s own site. Access Memphis covers the building’s recording history and current operation in a separate article on what was recorded at Sun Studio.
Beyond Sun Studio, the district’s other automobile-row buildings have been converted piecemeal over the past two decades into apartments, breweries, office space and small businesses — a pattern of adaptive reuse rather than demolition and rebuild. That is a common shape for redevelopment in older Memphis commercial corridors; a comparable example on a much larger scale is the conversion of a former Sears catalog distribution warehouse into Crosstown Concourse in Midtown, though that building sits well outside the Edge District’s boundaries.
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How does the Edge District relate to the Memphis Medical District?
The Edge is generally treated as one of the areas within the broader footprint that the Memphis Medical District Collaborative works to develop. The Collaborative is funded and governed by the area’s anchor institutions — the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital among them — and its stated mission is neighborhood-level economic development around those medical and educational campuses. The Edge functions as the southern, Downtown-facing edge of that larger institutional district, which is why its identity is tied up with the medical campuses even though its own building stock has nothing to do with medicine.
Immediately to the east, across a few blocks, sits Victorian Village, a cluster of nineteenth-century mansions with its own separate history and preservation status; readers researching the district cluster north of Downtown may want Access Memphis’s piece on Victorian Village for that adjacent story.
How do you get to the Edge District, and is it walkable from Downtown?
The Edge sits close enough to the Downtown core that it is generally reached on foot from the northern end of Main Street or by short drive or rideshare; it is not served by a dedicated rail line of its own. The Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) operates bus routes through the area, and current route maps and schedules are published on MATA’s own site rather than repeated here, since they change. For a broader look at how transit, walking and driving fit together across Memphis, see Access Memphis’s guide to getting around the city.
Because the district is small and its main landmark — Sun Studio — sits on a single block of
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by dconvertini, source, CC BY-SA 2.0
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