A downtown tour of Memphis and a talk with a former Memphis cop.
Memphis Tennessee. You probably already have an opinion about it. You’ve heard it’s really dangerous, and Elvis lived here and they have really good barbecue. All of that is true. I like Memphis. I don’t love Memphis. But I don’t think Memphis really cares what I think.
Of course, you probably know, the city of Memphis has a lot of history and culture. This is home to much of the Civil Rights movements that took place last century. Sadly, this was the site of Martin Luther King Jr’s 1968 assassination. It’s also one of the places where blues music really took hold, and music is a big part of this city’s culture. We’ll see Beale Street in a bit. It’s world famous for its clubs that have been playing music for a century now. You knew Elvis lived here - and his former home Graceland is in Memphis. Sadly, Graceland is surrounded by a ghetto. Other famous musicians from Memphis include Johnny Cash, BB King, Al Green, Aretha Franklin and even Justin Timberlake. He is now an actor.
BBQ is a big deal here - and Memphis hosts the annual World Championship BBQ cooking contest, which brings in 100,000 people every year.
Downtown has an arena that’s home to the NBA team the Memphis Grizzlies. Also downtown is the University of Memphis.
A lot of the economy here was based on cotton and lumber for a long time. Today, Memphis is a manufacturing and logistics center. FedEx uses the Memphis airport as its biggest hub. Half of all FedEx volume passes through Memphis, as does 70% of all US mail. There’s also a big port along the Mississippi which handles a lot of shipping too.
It’s relatively cheap to live here, but there’s a reason it’s so cheap. Much of the city is rundown and about 30% of the population lives in poverty. The population here is about 650,000 but it peaked 20 years ago. It’s now on a slow decline, despite the fact that Tennessee is bringing in huge numbers of new residents. At one point Memphis was growing faster than nearby Nashville, but it seems like everyone’s heading to Nashville these days. While Memphis has great food, great music and a lot of energy, the crime here is off the hook. Memphis continues to break records for murders, and there’s no sign it’s gonna let up. There’s years when Memphis is considered the most dangerous city in the nation, up there with St. Louis and Detroit.
If you looked at a map of where to live in Memphis, you’d see there aren’t a lot of great areas outside of the east side of the city. The west side on the other side of the river is Arkansas, and that’s west memphis. That’s bad over there, fella. South memphis is riddled with crime and poverty, as are large pockets of the north end. Most of the safer, nicer parts of the greater Memphis area are on its east side. So if you moved here, that’s where you’d want to look first. Collierville is the fancy part of town.
There’s crime in just about every pocket of this city. It’s not just because there’s a murder every single day here. Just about everyone in Memphis has been robbed at some point. Or WILL be robbed at some point if they haven’t already. The schools are behind and there’s a lot of drug use here and a lot of gangs. We’ll talk about that in a bit.
Some people say Memphis leaders have given up - that Memphis is too broken to fix. Others are more hopeful. If Memphis can get revitalized, and cleaned up and maintained, it would be a great place to live.
Speaking of which, while in downtown Memphis, I went out for an evening of barbecue and music on Beale Street. This is where all of the music venues and great restaurants are located. It’s actually not very big - a couple blocks long.
The music was pretty good.
The next morning I checked out the Mississippi River from my hotel room and then walked down to the famous Peabody Hotel to see the daily duck march.
But back to downtown again. I sat down with Mike, a retired police officer here, who served as the president of the Memphis Police officer union. Mike’s been here his whole life and even ran for mayor once. Here’s that conversation.
Graceland By Joseph Novak - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikime...
Graceland By User:Maha - User:Maha took this picture himself, CC BY 2.5, commons.wikime...
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