Evanoff: FedEx move is latest sign of Downtown Memphis' 21st century resurgence

They talked about the cranes.

Every time someone came home from Nashville, they told you about all the construction cranes on the capital city’s skyline.

Cranes were signs of the new boom town.

And Memphis?

No need for cranes here.

The old river city never changed.

That’s what they said.

Memphis never changed.

Well, today is Memphis’ turn.

FedEx Logistics’ decision to relocate Downtown, a move announced Tuesday, and the related Clipper office-hotel project proposed next door are only the latest examples of Memphis’ renaissance.

No, we’re not going to see ourselves jet past Atlanta.

We’re going to see something else.

We’re going to see our old center city polished in a way we’ve never seen it polished before.

Memphis is on the verge of the greatest uplift for Downtown since the city center emptied out half a century ago following the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Downtown Memphis

What is happening isn’t because FedEx Logistics is moving its head offices into an empty guitar factory.

FedEx Logistics will come out of the most prestigious office tower in East Memphis, the Crescent Center, because of what has happened already Downtown.

It’s alive, a pleasant town of lofts and condos, bars and restaurants, hotels and museums, live music and 6 million visitors drawn to Bass Pro, Beale Street, FedExForum and the National Civil Rights Museum.

Yes, this is new life, yet Downtown can still seem rather quiet, shabby in many quarters, oddly barren of street traffic in others.

If you happen to stay close to home in Frayser or Collierville or Southaven or another suburb and venture into Downtown hardly at all, and then see the panhandlers and the vacant art deco towers, it is fair to wonder, what is all the fuss about? It is just an old and faded Downtown. The region’s real commercial heart beats in East Memphis.

Well, I’d say the fuss comes down to this: East Memphis is about the city that grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. Downtown is about the new Memphis that will take shape in the 21st century.

20th Century

Everyone who has lived here any time knows what happened.

Downtown and its art deco towers were built in the 1910 and 1920s cotton boom, neglected through the 1930s Depression and the 1940s and 1950s war years, and overlooked as the suburbs began to grow beyond Midtown in the late 1950s. Just when the old central business area sorely needed fresh paint, Martin Luther King Jr. stood Downtown on the Lorraine's balcony in 1968.

Memphians didn’t kill the civil rights leader. But his death here rattled Memphians. Rather than invest in the turbulent old city, white Memphians chose to move their jobs to the quiet suburbs. Downtown department stores moved out. Shoe stores and dress shops followed. So did the wholesale houses, banks, law firms, accounting agencies, hotels, restaurants and just about everything else.

Of course, the Vergos family kept the Rendezvous open. Across the street, First Tennessee Bank stayed put. And down the block, the Belz family bought and brought back that closed gem, The Peabody hotel. And the old black business district, recast as the Beale Street Historic District, much to almost everyone’s surprise, drew blues fans from around the world, gave the busloads of Graceland museum tourists another sight to take in. And then the founders of the Lorraine Motel museum had the great good sense to name their brainchild the National Civil Rights Museum, a name that told the world what happened here was about more than Memphis. Tourists poured in.

As the visitors enlivened the old center city, the pioneering Henry Turley Jr., now a prominent real estate developer, began to renovate empty office buildings into apartments and turned Mud Island, once a barren sand spit, into a leafy enclave of houses and apartments. People moved in. One by one, other wealthy Memphians followed the example. Warehouses became lofts. A brewery became apartments.

By 2015, more than 12,000 people lived in the central business district and on nearby Mud Island. Memphis didn’t put up cranes. It refurbished what it had. A new city took root in the old without ever marring Memphis’ singular look.  When ServiceMaster Global Holdings decided to uproot its offices from East Memphis and find a location attractive to a new generation of employees, a location beside Beale Street was chosen. After all, men and women in their 20s and 30s crave authentic culture. Beale Street, of course, is all about American music, racial relations and culture. That's authentic America. So is Downtown.

21st century

For a generation, Downtown was not the place you thought of working in. Now that’s changing.

First Tennessee and AutoZone’s headquarters have been office anchors for decades Downtown. ServiceMaster joined in. Now FedEx Logistics is moving in not far from Indigo Ag, a Boston seed tech developer expanding its operations offices. On the edge of Downtown, the medical industry has spent or committed more than $3 billion in recent years at the University of Tennessee health education campus, Methodist Hospital and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

All this will spur medical science in the city and spill over into Downtown. The center city in five years will look far different from what it looks like now. No fewer than eight ideas are taking shape.

Start on north Main Street. St. Jude plans to expand offices into the Pinch District next to Bass Pro. Nearby, the Memphis Cook Convention Center renovation is beginning. On the next block, Loews Hotels is preparing to break ground for a new convention hotel. A block away, the New York owners of empty 100 North Main are planning apartments and offices.

Over on the next block and downstream, plans are taking shape to relocate the Brooks Museum of Art to Front Street from Overton Park. A little farther down, construction has begun on the One Beale apartment tower and related hotel. And over toward Union, South City apartments is taking shape near the monumental Union Row, a $950 million proposal for apartments, offices and stores.

Memphis was once a cotton center, then a banking, hospital and distribution hub.

Now we're seeing 21st century Memphis come into view — ag tech, medical science, tourism, transportation and, of course, FedEx Logistics, which is all about moving goods around the world.

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Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and 901-529-2292.