the Gulch – Memphis Flyer

A few short years ago, once you got south of Earnestine & Hazel’s on South Main, you entered a barren urbanscape of abandoned warehouses, dusty railyards, and weedy, empty lots. Now the streets are lined with row after row of apartment buildings. Hip restaurants like Loflin Yard and Carolina Watershed are repurposing old industrial spaces in creative ways. South of South Main is booming, inhabited by thousands of mostly young Memphians who live, work, and play Downtown.

Will it last? Can a neighborhood built on young folks wanting to live Downtown sustain itself? Well, it can, but only if there is a steady stream of fresh young folks wanting to live there in the coming years. Here’s hoping there is. Otherwise, well, that’s a lot of apartments to fill.

That’s because as those young Memphians grow older, they’ll form relationships and maybe — as tends to happen — decide to have children. At that point, they’ll usually want the customary accoutrements of family living: a house, a yard, a mutt.

The closest neighborhoods to Downtown are already feeling the pressure of the influx — from Downtown and from older suburbanites moving in. If you want to buy a home in Midtown, East Memphis, Cooper-Young, etc., you’d better be pre-approved for your loan and be ready to pounce when a house you like comes on the market. Memphis’ core is a hot housing market right now.

In recognition of that, developers are moving in, buying distressed properties, doing teardowns, and putting up two or more new houses on what were once single-family lots. These new homes are often what are called “tall skinnies,” because, well, that’s what they are. Another name for them is “infill homes,” and they are going up all over Cooper-Young and elsewhere in Midtown. (The Flyer‘s Toby Sells has done numerous stories on infill housing, with more to come soon.)

On the plus side, more housing is being created in core city neighborhoods, meaning a bunch of fresh residents, bringing more businesses, new restaurants and retail, and, hopefully, new students for neighborhood schools. On the down side, there is a danger our old neighborhoods will lose their historic charm as older homes get torn down, trees get removed, and residential parking gets more difficult. Try finding a parking spot around the new Nashville export, Hattie B’s, on Cooper.

In fact, if you want to see where all this could be going, drive up to East Nashville and behold the glut of tall skinnies on street after street. Behold the young hipsters with strollers. Behold the bicyclists and coffee shops. Behold the new urbania. It’s coming, for better and for worse.

In Memphis, all the attendant paraphernalia of an “It City” — the bike lanes, the bike-share program, the Bird scooters, the moving of musicians here from Austin and Nashville, the booming South Main, Overton Square, Crosstown, Broad Avenue, and Cooper-Young entertainment/restaurant districts, the Railgartens and Urban Outfitters and Hattie B’s — it’s all developing under our very noses. Something’s happening here, Mr. Jones, and we’d better pay attention.

Case in point: We’re increasingly seeing plans for new apartment buildings springing up in Midtown, with the city offering the usual PILOT plans to “encourage” developers by allowing them to avoid taxes for an agreed-upon period of time. Whether or not those deals make sense is an open question. What shouldn’t be in question is a requirement that in order to get a PILOT, developers should have to build structures that reflect the character of the surrounding neighborhood.

Traditional Midtown apartment buildings — the Gilmore, the Kimbrough, the Knickerbocker, the apartment buildings along Poplar near Overton Park — seamlessly integrate with the cityscape and their neighborhoods. In contrast, many of the new apartment designs being given PILOTs are stark, cheap-looking boxes, seemingly built only to take advantage of the housing boom with no consideration of the visual impact on the character of our historic streetscapes.

Again, go visit Nashville — specifically, the Gulch, just south of Downtown — if you want to see how quickly these cheap-looking boxes can redefine the character of a neighborhood. Memphis needs to put serious design restrictions and guidelines in place before giving out tax breaks to developers.

If we don’t do it, “It” is going to do us.

So, I went away for a week of rest and relaxation and I missed the most Memphis thing ever: After being out of commission for four years(!), one of the newly refurbished downtown trolleys smashed into a Sprock n’ Roll pedal-party bike on the Main Street Mall. I was happy to learn no one was hurt — and no drinks were spilled — since the whoo!-party had just disembarked to have a couple pops at a Main Street pub.

Oh, and I also missed the news about the city being included as a charter member of the new professional football league, the American Alliance for Football, or AAF. The Memphis franchise even has a coach already, former Chicago Bears great, Mike Singletary. There’s no team name yet, but since Showboats, Pharaohs, Southmen, Mad Dogs, Maniax, and Xplorers have already been used in prior attempts to establish an NFL alternative, I vote we go with something simple: the Memphis AF. And I want in on the “Memphis AF” swag concession business.

Also, if I may, I suggest that instead of playing the National Anthem before games and risking losing all the MAGA folks if some players kneel, the AAF should instead play “Freebird” and allow players to do whatever they want — play air guitar, do jumping jacks, check text messages, whatever. We’re the AAF, dammit.

But back to the Main Street Mall action …

The Flyer offices were moved downtown at the first of the year, and we staffers for the most part have enjoyed the new digs — and the proximity to all the restaurants and other amenities within walking distance. But when we arrived downtown, it was mid-winter. You could walk down the Main Street Mall like a boss. No cars, no trolleys, no horse-drawn carriages, and no pedal-party pubs — or whatever the official name for those things is — just the occasional guy looking for a handout and that semi-decent street musician who sounds like Tracy Chapman.

Now, not so much. If you’re walking down the mall to grab a lunch or get some exercise, you’d better keep your eyes and ears open. The new trolleys are quieter — stealthy, even — and judging from how far that trolley pushed the pedal-pub after the collision, they are taking no prisoners. Silent but deadly.

The Flyer staff tried out one of the Sprock n’ Roll wagons a couple years ago. We pedaled from Overton Square to Cooper-Young, stopping at various joints along the way — and back — for drinks, so I get the “Look at us drinking and pedaling!” appeal. You get lots of honks and you have to yell “Whoooo!™” in response, but on the whole, I prefer stationary drinking. Pedal taverns are a party thing.

If you want to see where all this could be going if we aren’t careful, spend a night in Nashville in the trendy Gulch area. The capital city’s party wagon game is several notches above ours. There are flat-bed trucks tricked out with giant speakers blasting country music and filled with dancing bachelorette partiers. There are giant-wheeled pickup trucks that will bump you around downtown while you guzzle Bud Lite, listen to Florida-Georgia Line, and yell “whoo!” at the pedestrians below. And there are multitudes of pedal taverns. They’re everywhere. It’s insane.

Frankly, Nashville could use a couple of Memphis’ killer trolleys to calm that shit down.

All this to say, yes, we want tourism in Memphis. Tourism is incredibly important to our economy. But we have to draw the line, and I’m not talking Florida-Georgia. We don’t want loads of drunks being driven around downtown on flatbed trucks. And we need to pass a city ordinance outlawing the blasting of bro-country music anywhere in the 38103 before it’s too late. For all their issues, horse-drawn carriages, our few pedal taverns, and trolleys are greatly to be preferred. They’ll just have to learn to co-exist. Perhaps we should consider pedal-trolleys?