Tag: Madison Avenue

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Halloween 2015 Event Roundup

The last days of October provide numerous opportunities to don your scariest garb, beg for candy, paint sugar skulls, and act like a fool. Sometimes it’s even for a good cause. And because Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, the party goes on all weekend. Here’s a roundup featuring just a few of this season’s creepiest, kookiest, and ookiest opportunities for monstrous mischief.

Elmwood Cemetery’s annual Spirits with the Spirits party goes down Friday, October 30th, at 7 p.m., and allows visitors to raise glasses and make grave toasts in Memphis’ most scenic city of the dead. Tickets are $70, and the dress code is black-and-white casual, though costumes and characters are welcome (elmwoodcemetery.org). And speaking of the dead, Latino Memphis’ Day of the Dead Fiesta is also being held Friday. The fund-raising party features performances by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Opera Memphis, New Ballet Ensemble, and Mariachi Guadalajara, as well as Dominican DJ Giovanni Rodriguez and Colombian singer Marcela Pinilla and her band (7-11:30 p.m., at downtown’s Cadre Building. $70. Latinomemphis.com).

Costumed fun for the whole family starts early on Saturday with an opportunity to make Midtown a cleaner place. The Mad Sweep of Madison Avenue starts at 11 a.m. on Saturday, October 31st at Clean Memphis, 1859 Madison. Participants will pick up supplies and clear debris along the avenue from Cleveland to Cooper. The party starts at noon. Winners of the costume contest will receive gift bags valued at over $50 each, containing prizes from local Madison businesses. That leaves plenty of time to get ready for Mud Island’s annual Halloween on the Island, with games and trick-or-treating from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Admission is $5 per person.

Things heat up when the Halloween sun goes down. You can put on your “Million Dollar Boots” and take in the hip-hop stylings of Lord T & Eloise at the Sinners for Saints Ball, a benefit for the Church Health Center at Stop 345 (9 p.m.-3 a.m. Stop 345. $40). Or you can drop in on the Halloween Bash at Minglewood Hall, “A Scary Good Time,” featuring FreeWorld and benefiting Transformations Autism Treatment Center (9 p.m.-1 a.m. $25. halloweenbashmemphis.com).

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Opinion

Loeb Plan for Overton Square is Warmly Received

overtonsquare.jpeg

It was a one-night presentation of “The Future of Overton Square” by Loeb Properties at Playhouse on the Square Wednesday and the crowd pretty much said “Bravo!”

Bob Loeb said his company will invest $19 million in the square and hopes the city will spend another $12 million for infrastructure, a parking garage, a water-detention facility, and a new site for the Hattiloo theater, a black repertory theater now located in a 75-seat building on Marshall near Sun Studio. The “theater district” would have four playhouses and a Malco four-screen movie theater plus new stores and restaurants.

“We are committed to doing our part regardless,” Loeb told the crowd that nearly filled the theater. Details of the plan will be on the company’s website on Thursday.

Loeb, architect Frank Ricks, Hattiloo theater founder Ekundayo Bandele, and Playhouse founder Jackie Nichols spoke for about 30 minutes.

“We’re been waiting for the next shoe to drop and it finally has,” said Nichols, who founded Playhouse in 1975.

Questions were generally friendly in contrast to the criticism that earlier plans for Overton Square ran into from preservationists and others. Loeb’s plan does not include a grocery store, but the parking garage, now three stories and 450 spots, could be a financial sticking point because the price has gone up to nearly double what the City Council approved earlier this year. Councilmen Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn urged Midtowners to show their support to the mayor and council. The crowd seemed in a welcoming mood, responding warmly to both the Midtown design overlay and the announcement of a new Five Guys hamburger joint on Union near the square. There was one question about cannibalizing downtown and Cooper-Young and other parts of Memphis. Loeb said that is possible (Paulette’s moved to HarborTown and Hattiloo will leave a vacancy on Marshall), but he hopes to create a “rising tide” that does more than redistribute business.

“We recognize that it is a lot of money in tough economic times,” Loeb said. He added that the garage and theater district will require private security because “crime will kill this thing faster than any single item.”

The plan is to create pedestrian-friendly density by adding a revitalized Overton Square to other Midtown projects including the fairgrounds, Cooper-Young, Overton Park, Broad Street, and Madison Avenue. On Union Avenue, there are plans to move the police station, which would open up another site for development. And the original developer of the French Quarter Inn next to Overton Square said he plans to spend $12 million on renovations and reopen it as a “four-star” hotel if Loeb follows through. The hotel, a one-star at best when it closed, looks like it needs at least that much.

Other eyesores to be replaced include Yosemite Sam’s and the old Chicago Pizza on Madison. Ricks said the design preserves many of the existing features including the curved building at the southwest corner of Cooper and Madison but it eliminates the “speed lane” to slow down traffic. The reopening is scheduled for 2013.

Loeb said the city can expect about $2.8 million in new tax revenue annually from sales and property taxes.
He said the mulitplier effect will be positive if the development works and negative if Overton Square continues to decline.

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Russwood Park – A Nice Aerial View

Medical Center - Late 1950s

  • Medical Center – Late 1950s

I was rooting through the basement of the Lauderdale Library the other day, seeing if I could turn up a dusty bottle of Kentucky Nip to ease my lumbago, when I came across a stash of nice old aerial photographs of Memphis.

So I might share some of them with you from time to time. This one is an especially clear view of Russwood Park, destroyed by fire in 1961 in one of our city’s biggest blazes. So there’s one clue to the date of the photo: before 1961.

That’s Madison Avenue running diagonally across the top part of the photo — just about the only manmade object in this whole sweeping image that has survived, 40 years later. Across the street from the old baseball stadium is the original portion of the old Baptist Hospital. In the foreground you can see the incredible Italian Renaissance-designed Memphis Steam Laundry building, with one of the tallest smokestacks in town.

To the right are various older hospital buildings in our city’s medical center, most of them replaced by The Med complex. And if you squint your eyes and look very carefully, you can barely make out the circular Duke Bowers Wading Pool in the corner of Forrest Park.

Not a trace remains of any of these things, not even the little neighborhood down in the bottom left corner, so it’s a good thing somebody held onto these old photos after all these years, isn’t it?