illustration courtesy special collections, university of memphis libraries
Tom Lee Park and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art — or "Brooks on the Bluff" — are both in the news lately, two major projects that will revitalize our waterfront.
But, as grand as these are, they perhaps pale in comparison to a massive urban renewal project proposed in 1959, with construction scheduled throughout the early 1960s, that would have completely transformed most of Downtown between the Mississippi River bridges and Tom Lee Park. It was called the Riverview Development Project.
And it never left the drawing board.
Then as now, various city leaders decided that one problem (out of many) with Memphis was that our "front door" basically needed a fresh coat of paint. The riverfront area was dormant, for various reasons, so the Memphis Housing Authority was called in — or maybe they barged in without being asked — and submitted a massive development shown here. It seems to me that other groups should have been involved, and maybe they were, but all the news articles I found pretty much gave credit to MHA.
Describing it as "a thing of beauty to be created along the river," the 136-acre complex would include a grouping of three high-rise apartment buildings just north of the old bridges, a 35,000-square-foot shopping center, pedestrian walkways, parks, and other bits and pieces that were never fully explained. Not to me, anyway.
illustration courtesy special collections, university of memphis libraries
One of the most unusual features was to be a circular restaurant, not just overlooking the river, but actually overhanging it — cantilevered waaaaay out from the riverbluffs. The whole thing looks rather precarious to me. And ugly, too.
The Riverview Project would be a "parklike development." Now that sounds nice, but the main problem was that it would require a huge amount of space, and unfortunately this space was already occupied — by more than 530 buildings, which would have to be purchased one by one. Just the purchase cost alone was estimated at $30 million (which seems absurdly cheap today, but was a pretty hefty price back in the 1960s), and many of those property owners, as you might imagine, weren't that eager to move.
The other problem was that, even while this was being planned and fine-tuned, the new I-240 expressway was being pushed through, to tie in with the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and Riverside Drive, which forced a complete re-design of most of the streets in the area.
The Riverview Project never came to pass. In fact, today it's difficult to tell where, exactly, it would have been. Where, for instance, were they going to build the apartment towers shown here? I found a 1959 Press-Scimitar article about this whole plan, and though I frowned and squinted, I couldn't make sense of the poorly drawn map of the proposed site. And the description didn't help in the least: "At the south end, Harbor Street will be extended in a southeasterly direction to join with McLemore, which will be extended from its present terminal point near Kansas."
What? Where?
As I said, the new expressway changed everything, and if you take the time to compare then-and-now maps of the area — meaning pre-1960 and current-day maps — it's hard to match up the streets and roads. It's just as well. Something tells me the Riverview Project, if it ever was completed, wouldn't have looked anything like the plan shown here.
