Memphis Is Learning to Have Fun With Its River Again

The Mississippi River is the reason Memphis exists. Strangely, for much of the city’s modern history, one of the hardest things to do in Memphis was actually get close to it. That’s changing fast.

Stand at the southern end of Tom Lee Park today and you can walk onto something that did not exist a few months ago.

A curving elevated pathway rises into the trees, carries you above wetlands and eventually opens toward the Mississippi.

This is the Memphis Flyway, a new 220-foot accessible canopy boardwalk and observation deck that opened in June.

It cost approximately $10.4 million, but the interesting part isn’t the price.

It’s the view.

For perhaps the first time, Memphis has created a riverfront attraction where the entire point is simply to slow down and experience the ecosystem that has always been sitting beside downtown. The Flyway winds through tree canopy and wetlands along one of North America’s major bird-migration routes before revealing the river itself.

It feels less like another city park amenity and more like the missing final piece of Tom Lee Park.

And it arrives while something much bigger is happening along the Memphis riverfront.

The River Is Becoming a Place Instead of a Backdrop

Memphis has always photographed the Mississippi beautifully.

Actually interacting with it was another matter.

The redesigned Tom Lee Park began changing that relationship with playgrounds, lawns, sports courts, trails, gathering areas and spaces designed to make people stay rather than simply drive down Riverside Drive.

The Flyway takes the idea one step further.

You can bring coffee in the morning, walk above the wetlands, watch birds moving through the Mississippi Flyway and look back toward the skyline. At sunset, it becomes one of the best free views in the city.

That is a remarkably simple experience.

It is also exactly the kind of experience great river cities should have.

Mud Island Is Getting Strange Again

Just upstream, another Memphis institution is being reinvented in a completely different way.

Inside the former Mississippi River Museum on Mud Island, River of Time is being developed as an immersive attraction built around sculptures, projections, light, sound and interactive “portals.”

The concept isn’t another conventional history museum.

It is supposed to feel more like walking into another world.

That is an important shift for Mud Island, which has spent years possessing some of downtown Memphis’s most interesting physical infrastructure without always having enough reasons for people to use it.

River of Time gives the island something experiential again and adds another stop to a riverfront that increasingly works as a sequence rather than a collection of isolated attractions.

You Can Now Go to a Concert Beside the Mississippi Too

The riverfront is also becoming louder.

Grind City Amp opened as a 4,500-person outdoor concert venue at Grind City Brewing, bringing another substantial live-music destination directly into the riverfront environment.

Meanwhile, away from the river, Memphis’s live-music map is getting another major addition this week.

Satellite Music Hall opens September 4 across from Crosstown Concourse. The 1,300-capacity venue plans to host approximately 100 shows annually and is creating more than 150 local jobs, with a Stax Music Academy apprenticeship program built into the operation.

For a city whose global identity is inseparable from music, having more rooms of different sizes matters. Not every artist belongs in FedExForum, and not every show should be in a tiny club.

Memphis is filling in the middle.

Then the Metal Museum Reopens This Week

Another unusually Memphis institution is about to become dramatically bigger.

The Metal Museum’s new Overton Park location celebrates its grand opening on September 5, reopening to the public September 11.

The expanded museum is approximately six times larger than its previous home and adds studios, classrooms, a café, auditorium, rooftop terrace and sculpture grove alongside its exhibitions.

This is the kind of attraction Memphis should have more of: something sufficiently unusual that it doesn’t feel interchangeable with a museum in another city.

A museum devoted entirely to metalwork, with people actually making metal art on site, qualifies.

And the Biggest Riverfront Addition Is Still Coming

Then comes December.

The new Memphis Art Museum is scheduled to open on the downtown riverfront in a 122,000-square-foot building designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

The building will contain expanded galleries, a community courtyard and an enormous 50,000-square-foot rooftop sculpture garden, while wider sidewalks and public spaces are intended to connect downtown more directly with the river.

This may ultimately be one of the most consequential additions to downtown Memphis in years because it isn’t simply an attraction placed near the Mississippi.

The architecture is explicitly designed to make the river part of the experience.

That means the Flyway, Tom Lee Park, Beale Street Landing, Mud Island and the new museum increasingly begin to function as pieces of one riverfront rather than separate destinations.

Memphis Is Finally Building the Lifestyle Around the Thing That Built Memphis

There are still gaps. Mud Island has enormous unrealized potential. Parts of the riverfront remain disconnected. Greenbelt Landing’s $6 million expansion is only now under construction, adding better recreational access and additional docking capacity for passenger riverboats.

But something has clearly changed.

You can now spend a day in Memphis where the Mississippi isn’t merely something you glimpse between activities.

It is the activity.

Walk through Tom Lee Park. Climb onto the Flyway. Watch the river from above the wetlands. Continue toward Beale Street Landing. Take a riverboat onto the Mississippi itself. Explore Mud Island. Catch an outdoor concert beside the water. Soon, finish the day inside a world-class art museum overlooking the same river.

For generations, Memphis built its economy around the Mississippi.

Cotton moved on it. Commerce moved on it. People moved on it. Music grew beside it.

Yet the modern city sometimes seemed strangely separated from the thing that created it.

The newest Memphis is beginning to correct that.

The Mississippi has always been Memphis’s greatest natural attraction. The city is finally starting to treat it that way.