You may ask, as one waiter did, "Why Memphis?", but in fact it's a great little city. No, not for Graceland (though we did go there to satisfy Vivian's Inner Elvis); the late 80's exhibit of pharoah Ramesses II, denizen of the original Memphis, had, I think, a much more interesting king.
Memphis is a slice of old Mississippi River culture, a gateway to the Deep South, breathing the Blues and birthing Rock 'n' Roll, with a port city's mix of everybody. There's history good and bad here: the Lorraine Motel infamously saw Martin Luther King, Jr. slain; the site is now the excellent National Civil Rights Museum (you can, rather eerily, visit the room where King was staying).
The Downtown is even more hopping than when I last visited 10 years ago. Beale Street is perhaps a bit more commercial, with the Hard Rock Café and the park now sponsored by Budweiser, but there's still great Blues to be heard both on and off the street (the highlight: Robert "Wolfman" Balfour playing Delta licks, accompanied by a guy playing a one-man-band drum set and home-made cigar box bass guitar). The area around South Main is even picking up, thanks to its proximity to the Civil Rights Museum, though it reminded me of some of the higher end froo-froo in Pasadena.
Which brings up the gentrification issue. A woman named Jacqueline Smith has been protesting the Civil Rights Museum for the last 14 years, from the time she was evicted from her motel room at the Lorraine. I can't buy her claim that the museum represents "ethnic cleansing," but there is good reason urban renewal is sometimes derided as "Negro removal." Public works projects have a strange habit of plowing over non-white neighborhoods.
There's a similar conflict going on now in downtown Santa Ana, between the growing "arts colony" and the existing Latino community. "Bring in the artists" has become an exceedingly popular formula for reviving urban areas in the past 20 years. It goes like this: starving artists move in to blighted neighborhoods seeking cheap rent; bohemian scene develops; galleries move in to sell artists' works; expensive restaurants and boutiques come to cash in on urban chic; rents go through the roof; artists and other poor residents flee.
Now, wrecked slums and empty storefronts are good for no one. And it's understandable why cities risking money on redevelopment projects would go for the cash cows. But it would be nice to see a more mixed type of renewal, with maybe a few big projects to serve as a higher-end core, surrounded by areas with more modest projects to stimulate and attract local and affordable small businesses.
But, as Vivian and I were discussing the other day, you never hear about new "low-end" magazines, targeting the poor. And I suspect you won't any time soon.
Miles: 5812
Posted by yozhik at August 1, 2003 11:28 PM