Overnight, people and money fled to the eastern part of the county, far from the Mississippi River that defined the Bluff City.
Russell Wigginton, who is now director of the National Civil Rights Museum, located in the former motel, said he didn’t venture downtown 10 times as an undergraduate at Rhodes College in Memphis during the mid-80s.
“The assassination of King just killed us economically as well as morally,” said Pitt Hyde, the founder of the retail chain AutoZone and, with his wife, Barbara, the backer of the city’s leading philanthropic organization.
In a city where the gap between rich and poor, white and Black, can seem to yawn as wide as the river, the architects behind the projects cite their ambition to bind Memphians together.
The fear is that an influx of money will turn a friendly, slightly sleepy place, in which the relative merits of rival barbecue joints is the favorite topic of conversation, into a version of Nashville, the hard-driving, corporate-heavy rival city to the east.
“It’s much more than an art museum,” Ascan Mergenthaler, a partner at Herzog & de Meuron, said of the Brooks, speaking from the Basel home office of the firm that designed the Tate Modern and the Beijing Olympics “bird’s nest” stadium.
“The idea of being on the river is very powerful,” said Mark Resnick, acting executive director of the Brooks, who last June replaced Emily Ballew Neff, the driving force behind the relocation.
At Tom Lee Park, a short walk from the site where the new Brooks is scheduled to open in 2026, Gang, who is Chicago-based, is overseeing the redesign in collaboration with Kate Orff of SCAPE in New York.
Striding vigorously down a new winding path there, compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, from the light-rail line on the bluff to the river 30 feet below, Gang said, “What does accessibility to all mean? Not just physical accessibility.
To the north of Tom Lee Park, another civic project is underway: the $10 million restoration of Cobblestone Landing, the largest stone-paved riverfront wharf in the country.
“There hasn’t been an acknowledgment of that time,” said Victoria Jones, executive director of Tone, a nonprofit organization that promotes Black artists in the African American neighborhood of Orange Mound.
“I was in that museum for two hours before I saw a painting with a Black face in it,” she said.
Tom Lee Park, a 30-acre grass strip with little shade that stretches a mile down the river, commemorates an African American worker who in 1925 rescued on his small motorboat 32 passengers from a capsized steamer.
“Tom Lee is a place that is so exposed and windswept and hot and sunny, if you’re there on a July day, you are there for five minutes and then you are running for shade,” Orff said.
Festival leaders opposed the design, arguing that the new topography would curtail their activities.
“Your social status in the city of Memphis is directly correlated to the number of invitations you get to go to the various booths,” Holt said.
With the collaboration of the Chicago artist Theaster Gates, the team kept the statue of Tom Lee in mind while planning the park’s topography, which meanders and coalesces much like the Mississippi’s oxbows and wetlands.
Johnathan Martin, a photographer whose work has been acquired by the Brooks, said he questioned his worth after he was awarded subsidized artist housing downtown.
In a city that is 64 percent Black, “there is no success that doesn’t robustly include Black people, Black neighborhoods, Black businesses,” said Carol Coletta, a city native who runs the Memphis River Parks Partnership, a nonprofit that oversees six miles of Mississippi riverfront comprising five parks, including Tom Lee.
“I’m not convinced that that effort was authentic,” said Adriane Johnson-Williams, a management and education consultant.
Daniels, at the Memphis River Parks Partnership, and Carl Person, the president of the Brooks, are leading figures in the city’s vibrant Black upper middle class.
“I think it would be amazing if Memphis became a destination for people interested in the art of the African diaspora,” she said.
During her job interview at the Brooks Museum, Rosamund Garrett, then an old masters specialist at the Courtauld Gallery in London, was asked to recommend a new acquisition.
The picture now hangs at the Brooks, where Garrett, hired as its chief curator, is reinstalling the collection “to be radically honest and radically transparent,” she said, and “to think about where the museum is equitable and where it isn’t.” She analyzed the museum’s holdings and found that 7.6 percent were by women artists, compared to the national museum average of 14 percent.
A recently endowed fellowship to support a curator who would stage an exhibition on an African American artist resulted in a show last summer of Elizabeth Catlett’s linoleum-cut prints of Black women, which had been languishing in museum storage.
It reopens at the end of the year with studios to record videos and podcasts, a cafe and a new collection of books with an emphasis on African American history.
On the east end, a mixed-use development christened The Walk and budgeted at almost $1 billion has begun clearing an 11-acre blighted site.
“It’s still dirt cheap.” But for the majority of Memphians, $1,200 in monthly rent for a 450-square foot studio is far from dirt cheap.
“That’s how you grow a middle class.” He added that “downtown is everybody’s neighborhood.” But South City, a Memphis neighborhood that is Tennessee’s poorest ZIP code, is only six blocks away.
“There is already the clear drumbeat that what’s going on downtown isn’t for us,” Johnson-Williams said.
What she is decrying is not the typical story of gentrification and displacement, because virtually no one was living in the downtown areas that are now being developed.
You’re not going to be more than two or three blocks away from the reality of most people in the world.