Last month, in a three-part Memphis coffee-shop guide, I had to decide how to divide things up geographically. 

In putting Cafè Eclectic (on McLean Boulevard just past North Parkway) and a couple of Broad Avenue Arts District shops (beyond East Parkway) in the “Midtown” section of the guide, I suggested that Midtown was once contained within the so-called Parkways, but that the practical definition now extends beyond them. 

What, then, do we now call “Midtown,” an editor wondered? And so this column was conceived. 

Memphis Coffee Shop Guide: Midtown

The answer partly is that there isn’t a firm one.

Maps vary, and no one has full dominion over what the borders are, much less how Memphians today put the word into everyday use. 

But defining Midtown is perhaps the key question of Memphis geography, in part because it helps define the rest of the core city. If Midtown is encased by Downtown, South Memphis, East Memphis and North Memphis — and maybe that’s debatable, too — then defining Midtown partly defines the rest. 

Those five general terms are how many people, myself included, broadly conceive non-suburban Memphis: As five major sections, each made up of individual neighborhoods and districts. 

Perhaps even that’s too broad. 

Setting aside the suburbs, the Wikipedia page for Memphis breaks the city down into eight sections, those five along with Northeast Memphis, Southeast Memphis and the University District.

Transforming the University District through streetscapes and walkability

That’s no official source, but it’s one that will be widely used.

Northeast Memphis and Southeast Memphis aren’t as conversationally common as North Memphis, South Memphis and East Memphis, but including them better accounts for the city’s vast eastward growth, separating out and roping in parts of the city too lost in conversation. (University District? More on that in a bit.)

Along those lines, the Memphis 3.0 plan divides the city into 14 “planning districts,” of which the Core (including Downtown, Midtown and the Fairgrounds) is only one. This obviously isn’t how most conceive of the city, or how it operates in terms of visitation, investment or focus, but that seems to be the point. This division attempts to bring the rest of the city to the same level, subtracting “Northeast” from the Wikipedia categories and adding Whitehaven, Oakhaven, Westwood, Jackson, Lamar, Frayser and Raleigh as separate districts.

Defining broader areas apart from the neighborhoods that compose them can be tricky.

There’s one Memphis neighborhood map you can buy around town and put on your wall that lists “East Memphis” and “Sea Isle” as separate neighborhoods. The same with “Central Gardens” and “Midtown.” That puts “North Memphis” south of “New Chicago,” which is definitely a North Memphis neighborhood. (Here it is; look close.)

A plan for Washington Bottoms — with plenty of bees and butterflies

Those are all obviously wrong. But what’s right?

These things can be fussed over endlessly, but let’s scale back to Midtown, and what defining its contours says about what surrounds it. 

The classical definition of Midtown is that it’s encased by the Parkways on three sides: South Parkway separates Midtown from South Memphis, East Parkway separates it from East Memphis and North Parkway separates it from North Memphis. 

It’s an elegant, tidy definition. Maybe even the correct one. But it’s not universally practiced, and all of these borders are both transitional and contested. 

And it’s hard to insist on the Parkways if not even Jerome Wright agrees.

Wright was a longtime reporter and editor at the Commercial Appeal who went on to be the director of communications at LeMoyne-Owen College and is now a part-time editor at the New Tri-State Defender. 

Longtime Memphis journalists venerate Wright for his knowledge and care about the city, for remembering all of the city’s neighborhoods and how they’ve been shaped, even as this knowledge has faded.

But Wright is only firm about one of the three Parkways as a Midtown border.

“Midtown is Memphis,” a familiar bumper sticker proclaims. But what is Midtown?

Krosstown Kleaners building could be reborn

Midtown, on three sides

The western border of Midtown?

Opinions vary but are closely grouped. Cleveland Street? Bellevue Boulevard? 

I agree with both Wright and Wikipedia: It’s the I-40 Interstate loop, just west of those streets, a natural — or, I guess, quite unnatural — separator. 

Wright disagrees about South Parkway as the dividing line between Midtown and South Memphis, choosing instead Southern Avenue, a little to the north, as multiple respondents did on social media when I put up a few related polls last week that stirred conversation.

He remembers editing stories about the Glenview neighborhood, along the south side of Southern, and getting complaints that he described it as South Memphis. 

“When they applied to become a historic district, it was suddenly Midtown,” Wright said. “But it was always South Memphis.”

This disagreement is perhaps small compared to the north side, where Wright does believe North Parkway is the border. 

Social media voters were torn between North Parkway and Jackson Avenue, and I am, too. 

Some even argue for Chelsea Avenue, making the point that all of the Vollintine-Evergreen neighborhood is Midtown. But that seems to define North Memphis out of existence, at least along McLean. 

A few years ago, there was an attempt to make “North Midtown” a thing. It didn’t take. 

Wikipedia roughly agrees that Vollintine-Evergreen is in Midtown, putting the northern border of Midtown at Vollintine Avenue but making an exception to rope in the rest of Vollintine-Evergreen, which goes further north. This seems more a nod to current usage than any kind of strict definition.

It also notes that “the exact boundaries of Midtown are often disputed.”

I’ll say!

Has East Memphis moved east?

While the “North” question about Midtown is complicated, the East Parkway border seems the least tenable. 

Memphis’ growth — call it sprawl or even flight if you want to cast a more critical eye — has been eastward, so much so that it feels more wrong to label what’s right across East Parkway as “East Memphis” than it does to label what’s right across “North Parkway” as North Memphis. 

Is East High School — nearly three miles east of Overton Park — even in East Memphis anymore?

The people lean no:

But that’s not Midtown either. 

Unlike the relation to North Memphis and South Memphis, the question of where Midtown ends and where East Memphis begins are now separate questions, which brings us back to the question that, in a coffee guide a month ago, started all this: Is the Broad Avenue Arts District, just east of East Parkway, in Midtown?

The people lean yes.

Fairgrounds transformation to Liberty Park has more ground to cover

If you wanted to enforce the notion of East Parkway as the eastern border of Midtown, you’d have to take it up with a series of businesses along Poplar Avenue east of Parkway: Midtown Coin Laundry, Midtown Taekwondo, Midtown Wine & Spirits. 

The best practical definition for Midtown’s eastern border? I co-sign the suggestion that it’s where the major east-west arteries cross and Walnut Grove becomes Union Avenue, Poplar Avenue leaping over this exchange. 

Draw a north-south line at that point — which is basically Scott Street to the north — and it would incorporate both the Broad Avenue Arts District and Liberty Park into Midtown. 

That feels right. 

But does East Memphis begin on the other side?

Wright cites Holmes Street, a few blocks further east, as where he believes East Memphis begins. 

Trash or treasure? Illegally dumped tires become bicycle lane barriers

One responder suggested Perkins Road, which seems too far east.

Highland Street is another potential answer.

If there’s a consensus, it’s Goodlett/Graham, and I think that’s correct. Goodlett Street is where the University of Memphis main campus ends and Audubon Park begins. 

Even if East Memphis has moved further east, Audubon Park is East Memphis. 

But if Midtown ends where Union Avenue does, and East Memphis doesn’t begin until Audubon Park, what’s all that in between?

New compromise may cost Audubon Park golf course redesign one of its holes

“Mesh” neighborhoods and “districts” 

Maybe borders needn’t be so rigid, or can’t be. Maybe contested territory will always be contested. 

One social media responder suggested there’s a difference between “Midtown Proper” and “Liminal Midtown,” transitional spaces that cross a threshold.

Another responder, a residential appraiser, admitted being flummoxed about where Midtown ends and East Memphis begins, describing it as a “mesh” area.

Maybe the space between North Parkway and Jackson is a mesh space. Liminal Midtown, and also Liminal North Memphis, depending on your vantage. And maybe the same can be said about the transitional space between Southern and South Parkway, which meshes Midtown and South Memphis. And the area between East Parkway and the Poplar/Union exchange. 

Memphis seems to have more “districts” than it used to. Some of these are to clusters of businesses what “neighborhoods” are to clusters of residences. (Memphis could use much more mixing of business and residential for more vibrant neighborhoods, but that’s another topic.)

The South Main Arts District and Pinch District are both contained within Downtown. The Broad Avenue Arts District also exists in one space, wherever we decide that space is.

Society Skatepark a ‘collision of culture, of art and music’ in Memphis

Is “Crosstown” — something old new again — a neighborhood or a district within Midtown or a self-contained space? Is it more than just a building now? Once a precursor term to “Midtown,” it’s now more a neighborhood within it. 

The Memphis Medical District, a relatively recent formulation, is perhaps a kind of mesh space between Downtown and Midtown but seems rather a separate overlay, a zone of activity that incorporates elements that are fully each, along with the liminal spaces between.

The Medical District also subsumes another district, and another that seems a more recent usage: The Edge District. Is this a liminal space or a buffer zone? Does it blend Downtown and Midtown or is it entirely separate from both? 

The Downtown Memphis Commission includes the Edge District as a Downtown neighborhood, but I’d vote self-contained buffer zone, which would make it akin to another, bigger recent coinage: The University District, that space roughly between the Poplar Exchange and Audubon Park. 

I’ve lived in that area — if it exists — twice, both more than 20 years ago, and never heard the term then.

Wright doesn’t like the University District moniker, which he sees as concocted from a development plan rather than part of the city’s historical geographic fabric.

Big, mixed-use development, ‘35 Central’ planned for Central at Highland

That might be a losing battle. And I think I’m on the other side of it. 

“University District” is useful, elevating the University of Memphis to the anchor that it is and accounting for the city’s eastward growth, making the concept of “East Memphis” a more manageable one. 

Sorry, East High.

The troublesome aspect of shifting names

If I find the Midtown/North Memphis question particularly vexing, maybe that’s because I’m living it. 

I’ve lived a little north of Jackson Avenue, in Vollintine-Evergreen, for nearly 15 years, and before that, I lived a little north of North Parkway in the same neighborhood. 

South Main pioneer sees art opportunity on Jackson Avenue

“You live in North Memphis,” Wright says, and he wasn’t the first in these discussions to make that point. 

Wright and others with a grounding in North Memphis history see a refusal of middle-class white residents to claim “North Memphis” when they seem to live there as a kind of denial of place. 

But it can go the other way, too, as a reluctance to overstep, to claim something that doesn’t seem like it should be yours. 

But why shouldn’t it be?

Both impulses are rooted in the same thing: Equating places with the shifting character of its inhabitants or built environments rather than strictly in geographical terms. 

New Rhodes College president kicks off three-year residency requirement, copes with dorm delays

“If more than two houses of Rhodes (College) kids live on your block, I’d call it Midtown,” one social media responder said. 

A less wry, more rueful version of a similar observation came from another: “North Memphis vs. Midtown is really a racial divide. If white folks live there, it’s Midtown. If Black folks live there, it’s North Memphis.”

A plain-spoken truism we all know carries a lot of truth. 

Neighborhoods change. In every city. 

They grow richer or poorer, more white or Black or brown, older or younger. They change in terms of the types of businesses or housing they contain. For better and for worse.

What’s perhaps not unique to Memphis — but in this case specific to it — is the urge to change what we call a place as that place changes. 

How a new single-family subdivision in Frayser came to be

It’s not just that parts of North Memphis — to use only one example — change, but that when and where it changes in certain ways, some of us have an urge to stop calling it North Memphis. 

That’s commonplace, but it also feels insidious.

From the other direction: Has Frayser become “North Memphis” rather than something separate from it only because the racial demographics changed? 

Of these five core areas, Downtown is the only one that hasn’t developed a battery of non-geographic connotations. Downtown Memphis is just Downtown, defined strictly by place. Midtown, North Memphis, South Memphis, East Memphis: They evoke a type of person we think lives there. 

We can argue the parameters of these places, but changing populations shouldn’t determine those parameters. 

A call for specificity

Even though he locates the start of East Memphis well east of it, Wright isn’t so sure about labeling the Broad Avenue Arts District as Midtown. 

He thinks it’s Binghampton (grudgingly with the “p”) and that Binghampton isn’t Midtown or North Memphis or East Memphis. It’s just Binghampton.

Much like Orange Mound isn’t South Memphis or East Memphis. It’s just Orange Mound. 

“Those are their own specific little areas,” he says. “They don’t fit into any of that.” 

Trying to make broader city descriptions just about geography, without being influenced by demographic assumptions, is one takeaway here. 

Another, the one Wright emphasizes, is to be less reliant on those broader descriptions. 

Is Vollintine-Evergreen Midtown or North Memphis? 

There’s disagreement about that. But it’s definitely Vollintine-Evergreen.

“As a neighborhoods editor, I would stress to people to say the neighborhood. East Memphis? That’s a big area. South Memphis? Same thing,” said Wright.

“(To do otherwise) can be a disservice to the people who live in these broad areas, if you say a shooting occurred in South Memphis. To most people, if they’re not Black, you hear South Memphis, and you think it’s all dangerous. Be as specific as possible about neighborhoods, boundaries and where things happen. We’re losing our feel for that.”