My southern U.S. tour continues with this second Memphis installment. Comparing is a great way to understand a place, so lets compare Memphis and Buffalo.
With a city population of about 655,000 and a metro population of 1.3 million, Memphis bests Buffalo’s 1.1 million metro by a just small margin. However, with a GDP of just under $67B ($51,538 per capita), it appears to be substantially more wealthy than Buffalo, at about $46B GDP ($41,818 per capita). However, The cities are roughly equal in wealth and population once you add the 400,000 nearby Canadian population and their $18B (US) GDP.
Beside population, there are several parallels between Memphis and Buffalo, including sprawl, silver bullet projects, abandonment, pedestrian malls with street cars, and hipster neighborhoods, or not. While Buffalo and Memphis share this list of commonalities, they are in truth, very different cities. Memphis is slightly bigger than Buffalo, but having gown up much later, it is far less urban and in my opinion far less interesting as a place. Outside of its compact downtown, Memphis resembles a much smaller city that spreads out endlessly.
When in a new city, one of my first actions is to find out where to go for the walkable human friendly neighborhoods. Unfortunately, in many American cities, these are far and few between and often not easy to find. Buffalo is familiar with this problem in the form of complaining hockey players from time to time. Tourist literature guided us to the supposedly hip midtown neighborhood, which promised bohemian shops, restaurants, and quaint residential streets. No bus or train would get us there from downtown so we drove.
After a few missed turns and some backtracking we passed a street-side Urban Outfitters store (more Urban Outfitters later in this series); We must be getting close! A few minutes more and we came to our destination. The neighborhood was pretty with quaint streets of one-story bangalows and Victorian houses. But, the commercial strip was the equal to just one block of Elmwood. The neighborhood was a small island of urban sanity in a sea of mostly forgettable stuff. We stayed about half of an hour and headed back downtown.
Example of one of the many fine historic buildings still in great condition.
Downtown Memphis has a very fine collection of historic buildings, with a few worthwhile modern buildings, several crummy ones, and at least one downright deplorable structure (see below). A spectacular 1920s tower looked empty but perhaps was being readied for renovation. Overall, downtown Memphis is probably better preserved than downtown Buffalo. Commercial activity included a healthy number of high-quality establishments and a sprinkling of down-scale and empty storefronts. It did not feel as empty as Buffalo’s downtown with its long stretches of empty stores.
The streets were not tremendously active but they were populated at all hours, even on a weekend. However, by my observations, the people appeared to be mostly tourists. Memphis does not visually present itself as a great vacation spot but it has a few major tourist destinations that definitely make an impact on the city. I mentioned two big ones in the first Memphis installment. The city’s big claim to fame and major reason for its tourist industry is music. Memphis played an important part in the development of American music including the Blues and Rock and Roll. Major music icons such as Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and many others got their start on the city’s Beale Street, Sun Studio, and Stax Records. These places draw hundreds of thousands of music tourists a year. You can read much more on the history of the Memphis sound here. They may not make the music here now as they did in the past, but music is still an important part of the city’s culture and identity.
The very good and the very very bad.
The Memphis music scene, past and present, centered on Beale Street. This densely built strip of two and three story commercial buildings was the historic heart of the African American community in Memphis. Beale is credited as the birth place of the Blues. It was so important in American cultural history that it was declared a national historic landmark way back in 1966! Despite this recognition, the street fell on hard times, becoming a virtual ghost town 10 years later. Almost every building was boarded and abandoned by the 1970s. Community efforts, often called obstruction in Buffalo, eventually turned the street around. Most of the buildings were saved and reenergize with uses. It is now packed with live music establishments and tourist shops, which attract huge crowds.One interesting music venue is actually housed in a park like setting behind the ruins of a pair of buildings.
To get a sense of what Beale is like now, Imagine Chippewa Street in Buffalo, but double the number of commercial establishments on each block and triple the number of people you mind find on a typical weekend. Now add that number of people pretty much every day; night and day. On weekend nights, double the number of people again. The street is permanently closed to traffic in order to handle the crowds. At night you cannot enter the street without an ID and without being searched for weapons by the police. The atmosphere is exciting, with music streaming out from buildings in every direction. It is all great urbanism, but something is missing.
Beale is not a natural, organic part of the city. Like Midtown, it is an island, surrounded by big parking lots, green space, and big-ticket silver bullet projects. The street feels separated from the city . Perhaps with time this will change. But several recent mega project in the area have served to reinforce this separation. This is the way we think of cities these days. We travel to destinations we don’t think of places like this as part of the city fabric continuum. This is why we so easily sacrifice the stuff between. We have to get to our destination and everything in-between is just in the way.
Beale Street ruin bar. I believe this is a permanent solution.
Sunday on Beale Street.
Speaking of Silver Bullets, Memphis is the king of sliver bullet projects. The most famous of these would be the Pyramid Arena, which is located just north of downtown, wedged between the Mississippi River and a tangle of highways. It rises about 30 stories in height and looks like it was separated at birth from the Egyptian themed Luxor hotel and casino Las Vegas. It was designed to show the Egyptian heritage of the Memphis name and to house a pro sports team. It was opened in 1990 and was a major flop from the beginning. The Memphis Grizzlies played, I believe, one season in the place. But the building did not meet NBA standards, so the league demanded a new arena. Being the obedient city, Memphis gave the league another arena in the form of the $250,000,000 Fedex Forum, which opened in 2004. The Fedex forum was built next to Beale, I assume, in an effort to feed off the success and life of the popular street. With no game going on while I was there, the place might just as well have been a mausoleum.
Meanwhile, the old Pyramid Arena has sat empty since Fedex opened, obsolete at only 14 years old. Today the pyramid is being converted to a Bass Pro store, which should be just amazing and will be a huge draw for tourists; they say. Unfortunately, while the Bass Pro promises streams of shoppers at the north end of downtown, the south end is not so charmed. Also built next to Beale was the 300,000 square foot Peabody Place Shopping Center. It opened in 2001 and officially closed in 2012; obsolete in 11 years. For the longest time I could not figure out exactly what this building was. It looked like a giant convention center, but I was staying across the street from the convention center. Could they have two convention centers? No, this was a dead mall. The signs of failure were written all over this monster from the start. Bad design and over dependence on a few key anchor tenants, who soon left or went out of business, doomed it from the start. Even thought they built it right next to lively Beale Street with its constant stream of consumers, no one thought, that it might be advisable to actually have some stores lining the street.
But the Pyramid Bass Pro should be different right? Buffalo dodged the Bass Pro silver bullet and should celebrate with each new Canalside victory. Again, instead developing the city organically the smartest people in the room developed a destination that turned its back on the fabric of the city. Fail!
The dead downtown mall, Peabody Place. It has towers and rotundas, not unlike early Canalside visions.
One other interesting site I visited is a new urbanist residential development on Mud Island, which was initiated in the 1980s. Mud Island is a narrow strip of land in the Mississippi at the north end of downtown. The development is called Harbor Town. The new neighborhood near downtown was the vision of developer Henry Turley, who envisioned a dense human scaled neighborhood like the ones he remembered as a kid. Back in the 1980’s, this wasn’t a vision many could understand. Turley proceeded anyway and with his architects and planners, created a simple picture book of guidelines for building in the new subdivision. It was filled with clear images showing “do this, don’t this”. This is not unlike Buffalo’s proposed Green Code.
The completed neighborhood is dense and walkable with charming narrow streets. Houses are built with high quality materials and refined detailing. They are sited close to the sidewalk with many having elaborate porches and tall proportions. It is very pleasant and very upscale. Wikipedia says that many of the Grizzlies NBA players live here. The neighborhood is not true new urbanist, however. It is basically a better quality residential subdivision. Like other places I described in Memphis, this neighborhood on an island is also its own island separated from other places and other land uses. This is not a fatal flaw, but it keeps Harbor Town from being a real part of the city. It is next to downtown but it might as well be 15 miles away.
Harbor Town on Mud Island.
One last thing I want to talk about is the Memphis Street Car lines. The system uses restored vintage cars that are gorgeous, but a bit slow and clackity. However, that is part of their charm and the trolleys have become their own tourist attraction. The system was installed 20 years ago and now has 36 stations and 3 lines. The Memphis Area Transit Authority claims 1.5 million riders a year and a route length of about 6.1 miles. By comparison, Buffalo’s 6.4 mile long, single light rail line, runs modern one to four car trains which typically carry between 6 and 7 million people per year. The Memphis system has narrow hours of operation, but the cars were always full when I was there on a weekend. I don’t know how much they are used by regular commuters. It was pretty much 100% tourists that I saw. Still, the cars brought a delightful sight and sound the to the streets. Like Buffalo, the trains run on a short Main Street transit line in the downtown section. The transit mall seems moderately successful, with its several restaurants, stores, and Hotels sitting among a smattering of vacancies.
It is unfair for me to make judgments after such short visit, but I will anyway. Buffalo is the better city of the two and will have a more secure and prosperous future. Too much of Memphis has been built as a place between destinations. We don’t care about the in-between stuff, so it will be hard to care about much of Memphis when it hits the declining years that are common to all places. While Buffalo’s residents have spent a good 60 years trying to wreck the place, there is a tremendous amount of stuff remaining that is very much worth caring about. WIll people want to save the sprawl around Graceland in 15 years, when many of Elvis’ rabid fans begin dying off?