“If 2020 was the year of despair, 2021 appears to be the year of hope.” So we began our annual “look ahead” cover story this time last year.
Nice try, Nostradamus.
Okay, we’ll admit it; we might have misread the tea leaves on that prediction. In our defense, the hope in the air was palpable this time last year. The first few vaccines had been administered. The hotly contested presidential election was over. And a new year was beginning.
That was before — well, in short, it was before this roller coaster of a year. In which many things happened — record-breaking tornadoes and record-breaking Grizzlies scoring leads. It was another year of highs and lows, of times to mourn and to celebrate. We shared tragedies and successes as a city, and as individuals, but we do that every year.
So this time, as we say goodbye to 2021 and look ahead to a new year, we’re striving to be grounded. There will be more good and more bad; there always is. Few things in life constrain themselves to the border of a calendar year. That isn’t to say there’s nothing to look forward to.
Without further ado, here are a few of the things — in business and development, music, film, and politics — we’re looking forward to in ’22.
Looking Ahead at Business and Development
Construction crews work all over Memphis on a host of projects that will continue the transformation of the city. Some of those projects are slated to be finished next year, while others will get underway. One project, the proposed Loews Hotel, remains a question mark.
Tom Lee Park/Memphis in May
Work will continue on Tom Lee Park’s $60-million renovation next year, but the park is not slated to open until spring 2023.
Spearheaded by the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP), the project will completely transform the now-flat and wide-open riverside park with small hills, paths through forests, a cafe with a porch, a covered space for recreation, a new entry plaza, a canopy walk, and more. Memphis in May events, traditionally held in the park, will call Liberty Park (the Mid-South Fairgrounds) home next year.
Liberty Park
Bones of the Memphis Sports and Events Center (MSEC) now rise from the ground at Liberty Park, the new name for the Mid-South Fairgrounds. The 227,000-square-foot youth sports facility is expected to open in 2022. The building is the centerpiece for hotels, entertainment space, office space, restaurants, retail, and apartments in the $126-million redevelopment of the Fairgrounds.
Memphis International Airport
Memphis air travelers will have a brand-new airport experience in 2022. Memphis International Airport (MEM) officials hoped to open the new, modern Concourse B sometime in 2021. Covid-related supply chain interruptions and shortages delayed the opening until sometime in early 2022.
The project began in 2014 at a cost of $245 million, though no local tax dollars have been used to fund it. The new concourse promises new food and retail options, higher ceilings, larger gates, moving walkways, a children’s play area, and more.
University of Memphis (U of M) Scheidt Family Music Center
The new Scheidt Family Music Center and Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music will open on the U of M campus next year. The state-of-the-art, $35-million project will feature 82,000 square feet for a 900+ seat concert hall, stage space, rehearsal spaces, classrooms, and modern music laboratories.
Hotels
Developers can’t seem to build hotels in Memphis fast enough. Next year, a 178-room Dream Hotel will open in the former Royal Furniture space on Main Street. Work will begin on two hotels — a Tempo and an Embassy Suites — next year in the $367-million first phase of the $1-billion The Walk development Downtown.
Forward motion has seemed to halt, though, on the proposed Loews Hotel on Civic Square Plaza as developers look for financing.
Construction on the $200-million, 350-room Grand Hyatt is slated to begin in October for the fourth and final phase of the One Beale project. However, the Caption by Hyatt Memphis, a 136-room tower built over the historic Wm. C. Ellis & Sons Iron Works & Machine Shop, is expected to open in 2022.
Southland Casino Racing
Construction is on track to open Southland’s new $250-million casino complex by early spring with the hotel to follow later in the year. The 113,000-square-foot casino complex will have 2,400 slot machines, 60 live table games, restaurants, bars, a parking garage, and a VIP lounge. The 300-room hotel will have 60 to 70 suites and 12 executive-level presidential suites. — Toby Sells
Live Music on the Horizon
If 2021 was the year when live concerts became live again, if somewhat tentatively, the new year promises to double down on the necessity of in-person music even more. Most of the classic venues in town have their seasons in full swing, and right out of the gate, look to the Buckman Arts Center for Bill Frisell on January 23rd and Matsuriza Taiko Drummers on January 28th. Many other artists follow in the season, culminating with Ailey II, Alvin Ailey’s junior performing company, in April. Meanwhile, the Iris Orchestra revs back to life at GPAC on January 29th, with pianist Jeffrey Kahane guest-conducting. The next afternoon finds Kahane playing a series of trios at the Brooks Museum of Art.
Even now, don’t sleep on spring: Tickets just went on sale for Melissa Etheridge’s show at Graceland on May 6th. But before that, Elvis’ empire will present such stunners as Robert Cray (February 3rd), Drive-By Truckers (February 4th), Incubus (March 21st), Tower of Power (April 23rd), and Henry Rollins (April 28th).
The Orpheum Theatre and the Halloran Centre have two of the city’s finest stages, and between the pair of them, look for national acts mixed with much local flavor: The Memphis Symphony Orchestra’s Robert Moody will present his popular Orchestra Unplugged series with Hallelujah Handel! (January 27th-28th), The Secrets of Strings (April 7th-8th), and Considering Matthew Shepard (May 5th-6th). Mark Edgar Stuart returns with his Memphis Songwriters in February-March, and another great Memphian, Garry Goin, presents A Tribute to Gospel Music Featuring Danny Cosby & Ephie Johnson (March 5th). Deadheads rejoice! Bobby Weir will appear with Don Was and Jay Lane (March 10th) before OG hometown heroes Larry Raspberry & The Highsteppers make a rare appearance (March 25th) and hometown heroine Wendy Moten leads an all-Memphis band (April 2nd). And then there are the mega-stars: Look for Bonnie Raitt (May 21st) and none other than Willie Nelson (to be announced).
Meanwhile, the Crosstown Arts nonprofit continues its stellar track record of shows, with January alone boasting jazz guitarist Peter Bernstein (January 11th), Reba Russell (January 14th), flautist Adam Sadberry (January 15th) contemplating the relationship between writing and music, Rhodes alum Raneem Imam (January 20th) with her original songs, the Joshua Espinoza Trio jazz group (January 21st), and the up-and-coming Bailey Bigger (January 28th). Beyond that, the must-see show will be singer/songwriter Todd Snider (February 4th). — Alex Greene
Films to Look Forward To
At this point, anyone who says they know what’s going to happen in 2022 is selling something. Movie release schedules have been little more than suggestions and wishful thinking for two years now, and that probably won’t change in the short term. Nevertheless, there are some big and interesting films slated for the new year.
January 28th through 30th, the Sundance Film Festival partners with Indie Memphis for the second year in a row to bring a selection of the cutting edge of independent and art films to Crosstown Theater. It’s a can’t-miss event for Bluff City cinephiles.
Later this winter, there’s Cyrano starring Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage as the star-crossed poetic lover boy. Morbius stars Jared Leto as Marvel’s “Living Vampire,” and produced by Sony Pictures, it promises a grittier take than the usual candy-colored super-fantasy. Kenneth Branagh’s take on the Agatha Christie classic Death on the Nile promises to be some middle-brow fun.
The spring starts with The Batman, in which Robert Pattinson dons the cape and cowl to track down The Riddler (Paul Dano). Maybe this will be the film where we finally find out how Batman’s parents died!
The new Downton Abbey installment, titled A New Era, introduces a new cast to the beloved TV franchise. The Lost City, an action comedy with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, looks like fun. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a new A-24 sci-fi comedy by directing duo The Daniels starring Michelle Yeoh as a reluctant extra-dimensional traveler. The Harry Potter franchise belabors the point with Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Nicolas Cage plays himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
May brings back-to-back blockbusters, with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick, Legally Blonde 3, and John Wick: Chapter 4, but if you’re like me, you’re most excited about The Bob’s Burgers Movie. Then in June, the big guns continue to fire with Jurassic World: Dominion and Lightyear with Chris Evans voicing the beloved Toy Story character. Baz Luhrmann will unveil his Elvis biopic, which was shot in Australia for some reason and stars Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker and Austin Butler as the Big E.
Late summer should see Taika Waititi returning to the MCU with Thor: Love and Thunder and Jordan Peele’s latest mind-bender Nope, which reunites the director with Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya. Then Dwayne Johnson enters the Shazam-verse as DC’s Black Adam.
Fall is scheduled to begin with an adaptation of Stephen King’s vampires in New England chiller Salem’s Lot and Tom Cruise stuntin’ with Mission: Impossible 7. The sequel to a modern animated classic, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, opens October with a bang. And in November, the long-awaited Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is scheduled for liftoff, although I wouldn’t be surprised if that one slipped due to production chaos. Finally, the year will end with James Cameron’s Avatar 2, which returns to Pandora after more than a decade of false starts. — Chris McCoy
The Political Outlook
Surely the most anticipated development in the political sphere for the election year of 2022 is the ultimate reconfiguration of district lines for legislative and congressional offices in Tennessee, due to be completed in January. There is not much mystery about the guiding principles of the effort. The Republican supermajority in the General Assembly, which is in charge as a result of its numbers, will ultimately resort to some version of the time-tested gerrymander to get what the GOP wants.
And what they want, among other things, is to diminish the number of guaranteed Democratic congressional districts from two (Memphis and Nashville) to one. Memphis’ 9th District, which is most of the core city, has long been held by Democrat Steve Cohen and, for demographic reasons, is hard to modify. But the 5th District in Nashville, represented for some time by Jim Cooper, brother of the city’s current mayor, is certain to be sectioned off — its parts scattered among at least four currently surrounding rural or suburban districts that have large Republican-leaning populations.
The GOP game plan involves as well the task of folding together and combining into a single district as many legislative seats now held by Democrats as possible, so that their incumbents will have to run against each other. The end result will be a further diminution of the Democratic minorities in the 99-member state House (26) and 33-member state Senate (5). This process will be especially notable in western Tennessee, including Shelby County, where population has stagnated or diminished relative to the fast-growing region of Middle Tennessee. Districts in the west will be expanded in size or combined or, in some cases, eliminated altogether.
The state’s two Republican senators won’t need to run again until 2024, in the case of Marsha Blackburn, or 2026, in that of Bill Hagerty. GOP Governor Bill Lee will be running for a second term in 2022, however, and, though polls show his level of acceptability with Democrats to be far lower than that achieved by his Republican predecessor, Bill Haslam, Lee has enough robust support from his fellow Republicans to easily win the general election against any Democrat now on the horizon.
Unpopular or questionable actions by the governor and his party on gun availability (for) and concerted responses to Covid-19 (against) will count for relatively little against Lee’s success in attracting Ford Motor Company to the West Tennessee Megasite near Memphis.
At the local level, the partisan imbalance will be otherwise. Democrats have such a majority in Shelby County that the newly reapportioned 13-member County Commission will have a probable nine Democratic-leaning seats, as against the current number of eight. Because of retirements (either voluntary or due to term limits), roughly half of the commissioners elected in 2022 could be brand-new. Democratic County Mayor Lee Harris will be heavily favored for reelection over City Councilman Worth Morgan, the probable Republican nominee. The 2022 county ballot will be chock-full of other choices to be made, for sheriff, for various county clerkships, and for innumerable judgeships, both civil and criminal. A heated race is expected for district attorney general.
In the course of the year, the holdover legislature in Nashville is virtually certain to have convulsive debates in the wake of a pending U.S. Supreme Court decision on the status of legal abortion, though the General Assembly has already passed and had signed into law by Lee a “trigger” bill that would declare abortion illegal if and as soon as the High Court does.
As of now, 2022 is definitely a wait-and-see year in politics.
