Penelope Huston – Memphis Flyer

The Carlisle Corporation has made a $1.5 million investment into the first ADA-accessible walkway that connects the bluff in Downtown Memphis to the riverfront at Tom Lee Park.

The path will be named Carlisle Cutbank Bluff in honor of the late Gene Carlisle. According to Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP), this is the first time that “commercial development has been connected to the riverfront.”

“The Carlisle Cutbank Bluff represents the partnership’s commitment to easy, equitable access to the new park,” said Tyree Daniels, board chair of MRPP. “This beautiful new feature makes it so much easier and more fun to move between Downtown and the riverfront. It means that visitors will find it much easier to get from upstairs on Main Street down to the river in a more equitable way, and we couldn’t be more excited about this achievement, but also making this available for our community.”

Chance Carlisle, CEO of Carlisle LLC, said, “Two things that really hit home for us was the ability to provide the first of its kind, ADA-accessibility to the park. For the last 40 or 50 years, with the exception of maybe a month or so in May, Tom Lee Park was sort of an afterthought, rather than a signature riverfront. It’s hard to be a great riverfront city without an excellent front door, and what Memphis River Parks has done, and all of the donors, is really give Memphians a park that we can be proud of, for all of Memphis.”

Carlisle said the river plays an important role in the future of Downtown, transitioning from a center for agricultural products and commerce to a “twenty-first century vision of it being about tourism, development, and a high-quality of life.”

He said, “This is what it means to be in Memphis, and to have that be associated with us is wonderful. It’s always been — and Downtown has always been — a neighborhood for everybody. The investments made at the Mobility Center, the investments made at Tom Lee Park, just continue to add to that momentum.”

The bluff includes an ADA-compliant switchback ramp as well as a staircase, two “stone scrambles” for climbing, and new trees and grasses.

Garrett Uithoven of Montgomery Martin Contractors says that the colorizations of the stone are designed to go from cool blues and grays at the bottom, and transition to cream beige and a red-orange at the top to reflect the natural recurring colors in the bluff along the Mississippi River.

“If you cut into the undisturbed bluff at any point along the river around this region, you would get that same color in the dirt and rock that make up the banks of the river,” Uithoven said.

He also says that there are accent lights with uplights that shine on some of the trees, with others shining on the stone faces.

The bluff will open in 2023, the same time that Tom Lee Park will be open to the public. Daniels says that Tom Lee Park is now 50 percent completed.

“Imagine the catalytic effect on Downtown, when Tom Lee Park is complete,” said Penelope Huston of the Downtown Memphis Commission. “To unlock the true power of Downtown, all the individual assets have to be connected, like they are here at the Cutbank Bluff.”

Former view of Memphis Park

Memphis Greenspace, the nonprofit that bought two Downtown parks and removed the Confederate statues from them last year, is now looking to activate and reinvent the spaces.

After additional Confederate memorabilia was removed from Memphis Park last weekend, Van Turner, director and president of Greenspace, said there are no longer any impediments in the park.

“Let’s recreate the parks and put there what people want,” Turner said. “The slate is clean.”

Over the weekend, proof of the clean slate was evident in Memphis Park, as it housed the city’s inaugural Dîner en Blanc, a pop-up dinner party established in Paris in the late ’80s.

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Penelope Huston, vice president of marketing at the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC), one of Greenspace’s community partners, said 1,175 people attended the dinner and with the Confederate memorabilia still in the park that type of event “would not have been possible.”

When the organizer of the pop-up dinner came to Memphis looking for an event venue, Huston said “there was no place she wanted to be more” after learning about the history of Memphis Park.

Downtown Memphis Commission

Memphis’ inaugural Dîner en Blanc

“It made sense to help wipe the slate clean,” Huston said.

In an average week, the park also brings in more than 200 people for DMC-sponsored yoga and pilates classes.

“All this is bringing in thousands of people who haven’t experienced that park before who are now coming into Downtown and engaging with the parks,” Huston said. “Those numbers are important because they would have all been zero before.”

However, things are moving slower in Health Sciences Park where Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife are still buried.

Turner said he hopes that the litigation surrounding the graves and markers will wrap up by the end of the year.

There has already been efforts to do programming in Health Sciences Park, Huston said, but there hasn’t been a lot of community engagement. “We haven’t given up, though.”

Huston said the challenge is getting people back into parks where they previously hadn’t felt welcomed.

“Because people have been out of those spaces for a while, they have to be trained to come back in,” Huston said.

Still, Turner said there is a lot of potential at both park and that Greenspace is working with its community partners — the DMC, Memphis Medical District Collaborative, Memphis River Parks Partnership, Memphis Bloom, and UT Health Sciences — to further activate the parks.

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The nonprofit is also open to suggestions about what should be implemented in the parks, Turner said. Feedback can be submitted on the Greenspace website.

Pop-up playgrounds, more seating, and art installations are all possibilities for the future, he said.

As far as memorializing any one person in the parks, which was an idea floated around by activists after the statues were removed, Turner said he thinks they should be temporary, rotating every several months.

“From a creative standpoint, we don’t want to be stuck in the mud, stuck in history, and get caught flat-footed again,” Turner said. “We want the park to be living, breathing, and fluid, while being able to change and reinvent itself.”

Turner said that’s the direction the city should go in as well, as “Memphis needs to reinvent itself and not be stuck in the past.”

“We need to constantly be evolving and reinterpreting what is already here,” Turner said. “That’s how you grow and how you keep people coming back.”