Strip Commercial You can run but you can't hide. by Jim Hanas usiness was booming from the start. Crowds lined the sidewalks even before the 9 a.m. opening, lured to the new shopping center by sales, specials, entertainment, and simple curiosity. It was huge. The largest yet. Set in a triangle formed by two busy thoroughfares and a highway, it served a particularly large area and promised to draw customers from a wide swath of the city. The crowds grew as opening day wore on, but the center's massive parking lot proved adequate. Traffic snarls were feared but averted by special police details assigned to direct cars around the festivities. It's a by-now-familiar scene, undatable perhaps, but one that originates on September 9, 1954, and the gala grand opening of the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center. The center, tucked into a triangle formed by Park, Airways, and Lamar Avenue (Highway 78), was, at the time, the largest of its kind. Anchored by a Katz Drug Store, it included a Kroger, a Pic-Pac, and several clothing and shoe stores. Its opening was blessed by Chief Wishackchihumma of the Choctaw Indians, and its emblem was a 28-foot paper-and-plastic Indian chief, in homage to Lamar Avenue's past as a Chickasaw trail. "New recording artist" Elvis Presley appeared, and he was so new the Memphis Press-Scimitar misspelled his name. Two S's in Presley. The Lamar-Airways opening was arguably the beginning of a new era of commercial development in Memphis. By 1956, $50 million had been invested in suburban shopping centers already built or under construction -- twice what had been invested in downtown developments since World War II. Lamar-Airways was outdone by Poplar Plaza in 1957, which was outdone by the enclosed Southland and Raleigh Springs malls a decade later, which were in turn outdone by the openings of the Mall of Memphis and Hickory Ridge Mall in 1981, and so on, until the opening of Wolfchase Galleria, likewise set at the center of three bustling thoroughfares, a little over two years ago. Poplar Plaza cost $5 million to build, twice the $2.5 million price tag of the Lamar-Airways center. Wolfchase, four decades later, cost a hundred times that much. A look at a list of the shopping centers built during the 1950s development boom reveals a recurrence of streets that Memphians now think of as the most blighted and unattractive in the city. Summer Avenue appears three times. Lamar Avenue appears twice. It gives one pause while driving down Germantown Parkway, where the development is at least as frantic and heady today as it was 40 years ago within the city limits. Will it some day join Summer, Lamar, and others on the list of roads principally known for clutter and decline? "My concern now is what kind of legacy are we going to leave our great-grandkids," says city councilman John Vergos. "A hundred years from now they'll look back and see the Germantown slabways and the Winchesters and the Mt. Moriahs. My real concern is that Memphis is growing in a really ugly manner." "The whole key for any street as to the survival of retail there is how stable the neighborhoods are around it," says Gene Pearson, director of the city and regional planning department at the University of Memphis. "Along Germantown Parkway it looks like stable neighborhoods are being built. Then again, along Lamar around 1909 it looked like stable neighborhoods were being built. At the time, no one could foresee that they would eventually decline as neighborhoods." Stoy Bailey can still see what stable neighborhoods looked like near the intersection of Rozelle and Lamar. "That was a grocery store. There on the corner was an Easy Way grocery store," he says, pointing out blank storefronts on the south side of Lamar as traffic howls by. "Next to it was another barber shop, Bailey's Barber Shop -- no kin to us -- my dad got his hair cut there, though. And then in between, right next to this building, there was a cafe." Bailey, 65, lives in the Rozelle-Annesdale area in the house he grew up in, around the corner from the long-dilapidated Lamar Theatre. The house itself was built in 1910, when the area was a burgeoning blue-collar suburb. This part of Lamar wasn't even Lamar until 1906, when its name was changed from Pidgeon Roost Road. And until an even century ago, 1899, it wasn't even part of the city. "In my mind, I can almost run a movie to see these things changing," he says. The all-but-abandoned commercial strips he points out -- former shoe stores, drugstores, and beauty parlors -- reveal their age in ways other than vacancy and disrepair. Their storefronts sit right on the sidewalk, dating them to a time when bus lines, rather than highways, fueled the eastward suburbanizing drive. "The transportation made the areas, and you would develop little bubbles of commercial activity and they would cover an area that was walkable," Bailey recalls. "People could walk down to Lamar or other areas and do their shopping. And there was a similarity to all of them. Usually there was a theatre, there would be at least two or three grocery stores, and a couple or three drugstores. There would be a very thriving little community, but it generally served that area of people who could walk there or who used that bus line." Such "bubbles," as Bailey calls them, appear sporadically heading southeast on Lamar, in rows of three or four shops adjacent to the Glenview neighborhood. Across South Parkway, the landscape changes radically. Park splits from Lamar and the latter takes on the look of the federal highway that it is. Always a busy thoroughfare as an entryway into Memphis from Mississippi and Alabama, today it is lined with pawnshops, run-down car dealerships, a few spanking-new chain stores, an occasional motor inn, and strip malls of various vintages. For the most part, businesses are set back far from the road, and, as in the case of the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center, include large parking lots, marks of a new era that included the decline of a previous one. "They began spacing them with the transportation in mind," observes Bailey of the development farther up Lamar that ultimately eclipsed his own neighborhood. "I'd say the decade of the Fifties was when the mindset changed and people left these strips and really started settling into the malls." "As you move away from any downtown along a radial corridor, you ought to be able to mark slices of the city's history," observes Pearson. And while this works on a street like Lamar, where one can read the rise of the shopping center and of highway commercial development like the rings of a tree, it is useless on Germantown Parkway. The latter's rapid development seems to exist without regard to history and can only be measured by what it has yet to gobble up, a plain yellow frame house, for example, next to a field of soybeans. The pace is so fast that some of the pictures in the accompanying photo essay, taken this spring, are already out of date as partial developments have been completed and bare, brown clay has begun to sprout construction. It is as different from the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center as the latter was from the neighborhood storefronts near Rozelle. When Lamar-Airways was built, the area around it was already well-developed. Expensive but aging homes stood to the west on South Parkway. Orange Mound to the east had been developed decades before, and there was already some strip development in place to accommodate through traffic in and out of Memphis. "But Germantown Parkway is completely different," says Pearson. "It is a major road that is the spine of a major eastern Shelby County development pattern, with all income ranges, and it is the neighborhood shopping center." And then some. Rather than a center tailored to a community, it's a center that, as we speak, conjures community around it. Wolfchase Galleria cost five times as much as all the shopping center development in Memphis from the World War II to 1956, and the string of centers it anchors along Germantown Parkway looks to rival the development of the same period, as if the whole history of suburban shopping was happening all over again, all at the same time. "That looks exactly like what we saw on Lamar; there's a group of maybe six or seven storefronts," says Pearson as we pass by one of a dozen or so strip malls between Wolfchase and Shelby Farms. "On Lamar they were closer because there weren't the zoning requirements or the recognition of the automobile traffic as it is here, but it's the same kind of storefront." Wolfcreek, Parkway Plaza, The Cordova Center, The Cordova Collection at Dexter, The Market at Cordova, Dexter Ridge, The Commons at Dexter Lake, The Dexter Lake Plaza, The Club Center, Cordova Village, The Cordova Towne Center, The Shops of Cordova Station, Trinity Commons, Trinity Place, The Trinity Collection. And that's just a list of the strips along Germantown Parkway that have names. "To me the analogy is in our society's propensity in the 20th century to try to put commercial retail shopping development on the first parcel off of every major road," says Pearson on the similarity of Germantown Parkway and well-worn commercial drags within the city. "Where the early 20th-century pattern was more nodal commercial, like Cooper-Young; that was a neighborhood with neighborhood shopping." "That looks nice, doesn't it?" asks Albert Crawford, pointing to a new Amoco station at the corner of South Parkway and Lamar. "A definite improvement from that, isn't it?" he says, pointing across the street at a broken-down auto shop. Crawford is the president and CEO of the Airways Lamar Business Association (ALBA), an alliance of business and community leaders dedicated to revitalizing the neighborhood by luring industry and new businesses to the area. His office, in the Union Planters Bank on Democrat Road, is packed with future plans, including renderings of decorative gateways planned for key intersections in the area. "If you look at this corner, there's a Walgreen's there, an Exxon there. That's really the only distraction," Crawford says, pointing to a dilapidated building and billboard at the corner of Lamar and Airways which he soon hopes to have replaced with a landscaped gateway, thanks to $160,000 in state and city grants for the Airways Boulevard Enhancement Project. There are several reasons behind the decline of Lamar Avenue. According to Pearson, part of it had to do with the introduction of the interstate highway system in the Sixties. "The Interstate Act was in 1956 and it took another 10 to 15 years to fully complete them," he says. "But essentially there was a gradual loss of business along these federal-aid primary roads, so what we see, we see these used-car lots here. These marginal businesses simply are latter-day businesses trying to take advantage of whatever's left. But as far as the heydey of a Lamar Avenue, it's gone, because the heyday was when it was a combination of a major city street with neighborhoods that was carrying traffic up from Alabama and Mississippi into Memphis." There was also massive white flight out of neighborhoods from Glenview to Cherokee, feeding areas like Hickory Hill farther to the southeast. According to Crawford, Lamar's deterioration is a simple matter of economics. "It's the buying power of the people in the community or the lack thereof," he says, which is why ALBA in part focuses on bringing industry to the area, to get people in the community the money that will in turn attract business, the same sort of businesses that Germantown Parkway has in such abundance. "It's pretty clear -- because we've done some retail studies," says Pearson. "It's pretty clear that there is more retail space in Shelby County than there is money to support that retail space. The problem, and it's always been the problem, is that older areas suffer first." "When you talk about the deterioration of areas," says Crawford, "people have to understand to a greater degree that they are the people that determine what their communities are and what their communities are not." Crawford calls it "growing the social capital." But still, redevelopment grows more slowly than development. Building by building, rather than development by development. "We have a new AutoZone there. A Burger King there," he says, as we drive in the shadow of the United Equipment tower, an ALBA member that leases bulldozers, the honorary SUVs of Germantown Parkway. "Before that Burger King there was an adult movie house there, and one here. What we did, we stayed there with cameras and took pictures, snapshots, of other people going in and coming out. They didn't like it but ... "There's some new commercial right there." "I'm impressed with the strip-commercialism we've managed to develop in Memphis," says city councilman Vergos, a longtime critic of what he calls "bad" development. "It's some of the ugliest around." As for good development, Vergos cites the three Parkways built around the city at the turn of the century. "As we approach the year 2000, it's still arguably the prettiest part of Memphis," he says. And what will be the legacy of Germantown Parkway? "America has become a disposable society from everything we do, land being one," says Vergos. "And I suspect that it will continue to be congested, people will probably get tired of it, and they'll move on to some road like Forest Hill and do the same thing with that." "It is extremely hard for me to imagine Germantown Parkway declining to a point we see along Lamar," says Pearson. "But conceivably there can be, and there will be, an erosion of business activity 30 to 40 years from now." And that erosion, Pearson thinks, will not come from a different kind of road, as it did for Lamar in the form of I-240, but in the form of the "next Germantown Parkway," be it Forest Hill-Irene or Houston Levee farther to the east. "Except, we've got this thing called the outer loop," Pearson offers as food for thought before he steps out of the car, referring to the planned loop that will encircle three sides of the city, including Arlington and Collierville, with access to Nonconnah Parkway and Tunica. "Imagine that. And imagine all sorts of people working at Poplar and I-240, working in Collierville, working in downtown Memphis, and they've got this outer loop that's out there and that traffic is out there, and that's where commercial is going to want to go." So much, then, for Germantown Parkway. But as councilman Vergos says: "It can't look any worse." n On the Avenue Lamar connects both to places and to intangibles. by Jackson Baker n the early 1950s, my father and mother operated a shoe store in a modest little Cooper-Young-style shopping area on the northeast corner of Lamar and Pendleton. "Baker Shoes for the Family" it was called, to distinguish it from "Baker's Shoes," a chain that was then centered on Main Street downtown. Lamar is a curious urban artery. Then as now it connected downtown with southeast Memphis and with Mississippi and Alabama beyond. (What we now call "E.H. Crump Boulevard," in honor of Memphis' political numero uno for the first half of the 20th century, was also then part of Lamar.) There was one thing consistent about Lamar for most of its length. Except for a stretch in the Annesdale/University Club area, and another in the vicinity of the aging (and even then demographically changing) manses of the Parkway, it threaded its way among fairly downscale populations, both white and black. (The pattern holds true today, except that most of the whites have disappeared to other locales.) Our family lived on the "avenue" (curious name, that, for such a humdrum thoroughfare) itself, farther in the direction of downtown than the store was and close to Lamar's intersection with Airways Boulevard. Directly to the north was Orange Mound, the sprawling black-inhabited area whose southern rim was then Deadrick Avenue. Just to the south (and technically including our section of Lamar) was Bethel Grove, which had been settled just before, during, and after World War II by itinerant Caucasians, both blue- and white-collar. What was then and is now the site of Bethel Grove School, whose principal once upon a time was current Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, had been an open field in the 1920s and served as a meeting ground for the Ku Klux Klan. Another open field, which was much later in developing, was the one in the triangle bounded by Lamar, Park Avenue, and Trezevant (a street which, going north, would merge with East Parkway). Until 1954 this field was a no-man's-land of sorts, one of the few places where white and black kids from the surrounding areas could encounter each other on a regular basis. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere almost, a shopping center appeared there, one of unusual scale. The young Elvis Presley, then a brand-new Sun Records recording artist, performed at the opening on a flatbed truck in the center's expansive, unprecedentedly large parking lot. (A year later, the Presley family -- Elvis, Vernon, and Gladys -- would move to Lamar Avenue themselves, living as it happens, next door to our family for six months or so. Neither site, each now a storefront, is much to look at today; neither was anything but modest then.) Only weeks before the new Lamar-Airways center opened amid so much ballyhoo, my father had moved the shoe store across Pendleton to a spiffy new (but much smaller) shopping area called the Trippeer Center. He thought he was set for the future. But, ominously from his point of view, the big new center just west of our household and several blocks west of the Trippeer Center was by comparison a megaplex (a word not yet in use, of course), containing in its apparently intended superfluity not one but three shoe stores. Cutting to the chase: My father bailed and, despite my mother's pleadings, sold the store to virtually the first buyer who came around, for much less, probably, than it was worth. It was a demoralizing episode for him and the entire family; it was akin to the dislocation which, some argue, is always caused by these monolith malls when they appear in the middle of (next to, at a distance from -- whatever ) settled communities, with their Mom-and-Pop stores to go with all the bona fide Moms and Pops and rugrats of an established neighborhood. To reverse the proverb, it's a good wind indeed that doesn't blow somebody ill. It would take little more than a decade for Bethel Grove (and Bethel-Labelle, farther east) to depopulate -- rather, to repopulate, since essentially Orange Mound would just expand southward, all the way down to the Frisco railroad yards. Numerous factors caused this -- court rulings, increased affluence, the nomadic American frontier mentality, what-have-you. It was probably a synchronicity. But the new kind of commerce -- larger, more concentrated, and more impersonal -- may have had more than a little to do with it. Understand: Lamar was never anything much. It was always a close cousin to Summer, and not in the same league with Poplar Avenue -- then, as now, a middle-class-to-posh avenue and, in the all-county sense, Big Shelby's true Main Street. North and east of Poplar is where the action is. There is probably more wealth in the Just For Feet store at the sprawling Wolfchase nexus in Cordova than there ever was in the whole of Lamar east of its intersection with Central Avenue. But Lamar Avenue once intersected true neighborhoods; and for all its modesty, it could boast such attractions, at the edge of town and just beyond, as Maywood and Clearpool swimming pools and the Rainbow Lake entertainment complex, which included both a pool and a skating rink. One can debate -- as indeed I have, intensely and in detail, with Jim Hanas, author of this week's cover story -- concerning whether the earlier version of Lamar Avenue was more like Germantown Parkway or dissimilar to it. I take the latter position, since -- among other things -- Lamar was always an east-west connector to an older city, and Germantown Parkway, running north and south, stands (by design) utterly apart from Memphis to the west. And today's Germantown Parkway is so much richer and more bustling. Cushioned from social change by Davies Plantation to the west and Germantown to the south, it can perhaps stave off the fate which has overtaken successive migratory areas on the Lamar Avenue/southeast Memphis axis. Hickory Hill, for example. Not 20 years since it first began to materialize, that southeast Shelby County community (now annexed to Memphis) has already undergone a huge population transfer, even as its commercial face has been forever changing. Maybe that's the point of the megaplexes and the strip malls. They represent the principle of interchangeability. Lose one tenant, gain another. Keep it moving. There will always be another place to go to, another dazzling new shopping area within easy reach of your car. And fear not: If you get attached to this or that establishment which suddenly disappears from your neighborhood, you can fairly easily find where it's moved to from the large posterboard sign which ends up being taped inside the glass wall of the vacated building. Unless it's a Mom-and-Pop store. Then you may not find it again at all. A Road to the Future by John Branston he most expensive public-works project in Shelby County in the last 30 years has three names -- Bill Morris Parkway, Nonconnah Parkway, and Tennessee Highway 385. Whatever you call it, it is the road to our collective future. The right-of-way more or less follows the muddy ditch through southeastern Shelby County known as Nonconnah Creek, hence the original name. Bill Morris was the mayor of Shelby County when the deal was done. Tennessee Highway 387 recognizes the party that is picking up the tab. Given the choice among a ditch, a person, and a number, I say Bill Morris is the right choice. You don't build a $221 million road without some serious politicking. The parkway takes you at a brisk 60 or 70 miles an hour to places many of us Memphians rarely used to go, like Collierville, Hickory Hill, and Southwind, and to big-box stores, movie multiplexes, office parks, and a soccer complex that have replaced, or soon will replace, the smaller versions we used to go to. "Super-size it" is the way we live, and Bill Morris Parkway is a monument to super-sizing it. Like an interstate, it is built for speed: six lanes, broad shoulders, flying ramps, no traffic lights, no bottlenecks, no environmentalists screaming about wetlands or lawsuits or save the forest. From concept to exceptionally speedy completion, Bill Morris Parkway recognizes the fundamental desire of drivers to get from here to there as quickly and safely as possible. For the last 15 years or so, I've made a point of occasionally riding around southeast Shelby County with various developers and planners. As Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot by watching. The reconnaissance trips were like seeing the future unfold on fast-forward. First the telltale red flags would appear along the side of a two-lane road, signaling a future widening. Then came the bulldozers and surveyers. One year you could see a future subdivision for the farm or plantation it once was. The next year it was as if a movie crew had come in and completely rebuilt the set. To get to this part of the world, you used to have to take Poplar east, then go south on Mt. Moriah, Germantown Extended, Forest Hill-Irene, or Hack's Cross Road. Or you headed southeast on Lamar, then east on Shelby Drive, Raines, Winchester, or Holmes Road. Every one of these two-lane roads was transformed into major four-lane or six-lane connectors. It all seemed to happen, historically speaking, in about 15 minutes. Nonconnah Parkway, as it was then called during the construction phase, was the big one. And God knows there was some money to be made. The stated purpose of the new road was to relieve traffic on Poplar, but that is like saying the purpose of AutoZone Park is baseball. The real story is real estate development. At one time most of the Nonconnah right-of-way was supposed to overlay Winchester. Instead, the Tennessee Department of Transportation was persuaded by Morris, former county commissioner Charles Perkins, and others to chart a new course to the south. Meanwhile, the city and county went ahead and extended and widened Winchester as well. So now there are two new east-west corridors south of Poplar, with twice the intersections and four times as many prime commercial corners. It was a developer's dream. Starting at the western end of Bill Morris Parkway, the Riverdale intersection rivals the north end of Germantown Parkway for sheer density of big-box stores such as Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond. Going east to Winchester, Wal-Mart paid $9.6 million in March for a 23-acre site for a new super-store, which will probably doom existing stores on Shelby Drive and on American Way. Continuing east, Cracker Barrel is paying $750,000 for less than three acres for a new restaurant site on the south side of the parkway. At Bailey Station Road, Hurd Chevrolet paid $5.2 million for 20 acres. Undeveloped land away from the main roads won't sell for a fourth of that. "Price doesn't drive commercial development," says developer Jackie Welch, who sold much of the land along Winchester and the parkway. "The only thing that is going to drive that property to sell is rooftops and the convenience of that intersection. And roads drive rooftops. The ultimate user will pay top dollar once the rooftops are there." In Midtown where I live, and downtown where I work, new rooftops are counted (and celebrated as signs of an urban renaissance) in the dozens or, at most, a few hundred. In southeastern Shelby County there are thousands of them, ranging from densely packed, look-alike houses on treeless landfills criss-crossed by utility poles and power lines, to affluent shaded subdivisions where the utilities are buried underground and the houses are connected by backyard walking paths, to once-remarkable, now-commonplace million-dollar mansions in Southwind, Collierville, and Germantown. A surprisingly large part of this new development is still in Memphis. The city's borders extend more than 25 miles east from the Mississippi River, and city government has been a willing partner in suburban sprawl. As developer Cary Whitehead Jr. likes to say, "He who controls the sanitary sewer rules the world." Memphis built the Nonconnah interceptor sewer to the Hickory Hill area and the Grays Creek sewer to Cordova, opening up a lot of the local world for developers to rule. Under former mayor Dick Hackett, Memphis helped fund the extension of Winchester from Nonconnah Creek east to Hack's Cross Road. On the current city council, only John Vergos can be counted on to consistently vote against suburban projects. By Welch's estimation, all other members, black and white, will go the other way. At a point somewhere around the intersection of Bill Morris Parkway and Forest Hill-Irene Road, the proposed boundaries of Memphis, Collierville, and Germantown converge. The annexation agreement announced earlier this summer by the Memphis and suburban mayors is supposed to resolve all of this, along with the distribution of future tax dollars generated by the new developments. For Memphis to get the most mileage from Bill Morris Parkway, it must become a two-way street connecting the suburbs to downtown. As an interested spectator for more than a decade, I think the only people who really understand this area are the developers and the vested interests, and sometimes their guesses can be wrong, too. But whatever name you choose to call it -- and whoever rules the land it bisects -- Bill Morris Parkway belongs at the top of the list of the most important new roads in greater Memphis.