Several weeks ago, I wrote about White Station, the little train depot at Poplar and Mendenhall. See “Elvis Presley’s Mystery (Train) Station.” According to various biographers, Elvis got off the train there after returning to Memphis after his 1956 appearance on the Steve Allen Show, and then strolled all the way to his home on Audubon Drive, just south of the park.
Now, at least one writer said that Elvis walked across “a big field” on his way home, and several people have pondered just where that was. I surmised it could have been any of the subdivisions under construction at the time.
But my pal Ed Frank, director of Special Collections at the University of Memphis Libraries, has studied maps and aerial images of that area taken in the early 1950s, and has decided that the “big field” was Audubon Park. He provided me with the great aerial photos shown here (click on them to enlarge them). Poplar Avenue is the big street running diagonally across the bottom of both pictures. The view is looking towards the southwest, and that other big street, at the left, running north and south, is Perkins. This was years before Perkins Extended was pushed across Poplar. That’s present-day Cherry Road cutting across the park.
Elvis would have walked west (to the right in the photo) down Poplar, turned south at Perkins, and then crossed Audubon Park to get to his home, which would have been towards the top of the photo.
