Beale Street in Memphis

11 November 2020 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  11 minutes

© Andreas Faessler/cc-by-sa-3.0

© Andreas Faessler/cc-by-sa-3.0

Beale Street is a street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, a distance of approximately 1.8 miles (2.9 km). It is a significant location in the city’s history, as well as in the history of blues music. Today, the blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are major tourist attractions in Memphis. Festivals and outdoor concerts frequently bring large crowds to the street and its surrounding areas. Beale Street was created in 1841 by entrepreneur and developer Robertson Topp (1807–1876), who named it for a forgotten military hero. (The original name was Beale Avenue.) Its western end primarily housed shops of trade merchants, who traded goods with ships along the Mississippi River, while the eastern part developed as an affluent suburb. In the 1860s, many black traveling musicians began performing on Beale. The first of these to call Beale Street home were the Young Men’s Brass Band, who were formed by Sam Thomas in 1867.   read more…

Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis

24 June 2019 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Museums, Exhibitions, Palaces, Castles, Manors, Parks Reading Time:  18 minutes

© PaddyBriggs

© PaddyBriggs

Graceland is a mansion on a 13.8-acre (5.6 ha) estate in Memphis, Tennessee, once owned by the singer and actor Elvis Presley. His daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, has been the owner of Graceland since the passing of her father. It is located at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in the vast Whitehaven community, about 9 miles (14.5 km) from Downtown and less than four miles (6 km) north of the Mississippi border. It was opened to the public as a museum on June 7, 1982. The site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 7, 1991, and declared a National Historic Landmark on March 27, 2006. Graceland is the second most-visited house in the U.S. after the White House, with over 650,000 visitors a year.   read more…

Memphis in Tennessee

23 March 2018 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  14 minutes

© Christopher Boyd Jr/cc-by-sa-3.0

© Christopher Boyd Jr/cc-by-sa-3.0

Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of Tennessee and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers. Memphis had a population of 653,000, making it the second largest city in the state of Tennessee. The greater Memphis metropolitan area, including adjacent counties in Mississippi and Arkansas, has a population of 1.4 million. This makes Memphis the second-largest metropolitan area in Tennessee, surpassed by metropolitan Nashville. Memphis is the youngest of Tennessee’s major cities, founded in 1819 as a planned city by a group of wealthy Americans including judge John Overton and future president Andrew Jackson. A resident of Memphis is referred to as a Memphian, and the Memphis region is known, particularly to media outlets, as Memphis and the Mid-South.   read more…

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis

1 July 2017 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, House of the Month, Museums, Exhibitions Reading Time:  7 minutes

Lorraine Motel © DavGreg/cc-by-sa-3.0

Lorraine Motel © DavGreg/cc-by-sa-3.0

The National Civil Rights Museum is a complex of museums and historic buildings in Memphis in Tennessee; its exhibits trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Two other buildings and their adjacent property, also connected with the King assassination, have been acquired as part of the museum complex. On October 21, 2016, the museum was honored by becoming a Smithsonian Affiliate museum.   read more…

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