The City I Didn't Know Was Mine Yet

Downtown Memphis rewards the person who shows up with a plan and a camera. The architecture alone covers a century of ambition, from the ornate Moorish turret of a building on Court Square to the early twentieth century brick tower rising above Madison Avenue to the stainless steel Pyramid sitting at the edge of the river, Bass Pro Shops branding already pressed into its face. The stone steps climbing the green hillside at Confederate Park lead up to a wrought iron fence and a canopy of trees that feels like it belongs to a different, quieter city than the one a few blocks over.

The murals are where Memphis puts its history on the street without apology. The "I Am a Man" mural stretching across a low brick wall near the site of the 1968 sanitation workers strike is impossible to walk past without stopping. The railroad mural on Russell Street, all steam engines and Union Pacific shields and workers with hammers, speaks to the other Memphis, the one built on movement and labor and the intersection of roads and rails.

This was a deliberate tour, a second time through the city with a camera and enough familiarity to know where to point it. What I did not know yet was that by summer it would stop being a city I visited and start being the city I lived in.