The distinctive red half-shell facade of the Old Daisy theater has presided over more than a century of life on Beale Street.

Now known formally as the Historical Daisy, it’s frequently confused with the younger New Daisy Theatre across Beale Street.

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But the Old Daisy is part of the street’s lore, at times venturing close to the mythic.

In 1929, W.C. Handy and Bessie Smith stepped out of a limousine and walked into the Old Daisy for the premiere of the short film “St. Louis Blues.” It was the backdrop for Carroll Cloar’s 1964 painting “Historic Encounter Between E.H. Crump and W.C. Handy on Beale Street” — an encounter that would have been historic had it been real. 

The Old Daisy has also been a symbol of the skirmish for control of the Beale Street Entertainment District throughout its second act, which started with a physical renovation in the early 1980s after a prolonged decline throughout the 1960s. The tiled entryway bearing the word “Daisy” in an art deco motif beneath the red half shell bears witness in its cracks to decades of neglect as well as the struggle to bring Beale back.

Back to when it was an ethnically diverse business district bordered by mansions to the east and a bustling riverfront to the west. Back to its heyday as a center of Black culture starting in the post-Civil War era, when those emancipated from slavery were coming to the city from plantations across the South.

The circa-1917 Old Daisy has been home to the Beale Street Development Corp., an integral and controversial part of the entertainment district’s second life.

The city claimed a decade ago that it had settled the BSDC’s role in Beale Street’s future, but the settlement unraveled dramatically in another set of legal motions and claims.

Several weeks ago, Memphis Mayor Paul Young’s administration began talks with current BSDC director Lucille Catron about resolving whether her late husband Randle Catron really signed a settlement with the city in 2015.

Lucille Catron, along with Young and City Chief Legal Officer Tannera Gibson took a new proposed settlement to City Council members Tuesday, July 8.

Among terms of the deal that the council will vote on July 22 is that BSDC will lease the Old Daisy from the city for 50 years. It also will give up its claim to the master lease that controls the entire three-block district between Ida B. Wells Street to the east and Second Street to the west.

Gibson said the agreement is a first step toward a better use for the structure than as a rented-out banquet hall and outdoor bar.

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Young talked of the Daisy as an interpretive center to tell the story of the street’s culture and history. He also said there could be city funding for some improvements to the building including a build-out of a kitchen.

The resolution specifically directs the city’s real estate department to “prepare and arrange for the execution of the lease and the Mayor of the City of Memphis is hereby authorized to execute said lease or any other documents necessary to complete the lease.”

Tracing the history of Beale Street’s oversight 

The Beale Street Development Corp. is one of four entities formed since the mid-1970s to control the district’s master lease. It’s the longest running by far.

The BSDC’s purpose was to guide redevelopment with an emphasis on inclusion of Black viewpoints and influence in both the presentation of the street’s history and culture and in the representation of businesses.

The first group was Beale Street USA, a Chicago-based development firm the Memphis Housing Authority selected in 1973 when the city decided to stop the urban renewal policy of demolition and decay and move toward redevelopment. They picked the out-of-town firm over a group of Memphis investors.

Beale Street USA never survived the controversy and enmity, lasting 13 months. It gave way to the Beale Street Historical Foundation, a local group with Black representation on its board.

The foundation folded when it couldn’t secure private financing to go with public money toward a proposed reopening of the street in the mid-1970s.

Meanwhile, George Miller, a Black entrepreneur, set up shop in the new Muhammad Ali Towne II Cinema in 1975 on the other side of the district’s eastern border, across what was then Fourth Street and is now Ida B. Wells Street.

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With the legendary boxer having a partial ownership of the two-screen movie theater at the outset, Miller was banking on the entertainment district coming to life sometime close to when he opened the doors.

When that didn’t happen, Miller got involved in the district itself — specifically the BSDC — at the urging of the BSDC’s powerful board chairman, Rev. James E. Smith.

Smith became head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — the largest labor union representing city employees — in 1976.

The endorsement of the union that represented striking sanitation workers in 1968 carried a lot of political weight into the 1970s.

It was an era when most of the city’s political leadership was white and didn’t want to be seen as too friendly with the vanguard of new and existing Black political leaders. Smith was a shifting middle ground in that vanguard.

He was also later a Shelby County Election Commissioner and the perfect inside political man to Miller’s role as a racial lightning rod.

“You’re looking at a fox running across a clearing with the hounds on his tail,” Miller told The Commercial Appeal reporter Joseph Shapiro in a 1979 article chronicling the lack of any development in the district.

Miller was frequently at odds with then-Mayor Wyeth Chandler who exerted tight control over Beale Street’s rebuilding. 

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Chandler and his administration also viewed Miller as a fox they had put in charge of a financial hen house. BSDC’s nonprofit status made it the agency to handle public money in what would have to be a public-private partnership for development to start.

Shapiro counted 10 local government departments and/or committees, along with eight federal agencies, that had to sign off on every move made toward Beale’s redevelopment.

Smith, as chairman of the BSDC board, and Wallace Madewell, interim mayor following the resignation of Chandler earlier that year, signed the 27-page agreement giving BSDC the master lease in November 1982.

Clashes over the vision of a reborn Beale Street

At City Hall, the idea of a new Beale Street remained as either a Downtown version of Overton Square — which was booming by the mid-1970s, fueled by the legalization of liquor by the drink — or an east-west extension of the Mid-America Mall.

The north-south pedestrian mall opened in 1976 along Main Street between Exchange and McCall (now Peabody Place) Avenues.

Miller and other critics argued those visions of the revived district ignored the street’s history and culture as a haven for Black business and artistic expression.

They wanted a reborn Beale to reflect that culture and include Black business owners as well as Black patrons in a city still wrestling with its diversity as the population neared majority-Black status.

Meanwhile, BSDC had subleased the district to Beale Street Properties Ltd., led by developer Gene Carlisle.

Carlisle’s Beale Street Landing multi-use development on the southwest corner of Riverside Drive and Beale Street included the One Beale restaurant as its anchor as well as the Captain Bilbo restaurant just off the corner.

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Carlisle would soon leave the Beale Street project farther east to focus on One Beale. The BSDC would move to a partnership with John Elkington, a homebuilder with some commercial development experience who had served on the board of the Beale Street Historic Foundation.

“Beale Street is a microcosm of our city. We have faced all the issues — crime, racism, cultural diversity and city indecision,” Elkington wrote in his 2008 book “Beale Street: Resurrecting the Home of the Blues.”

“After the (October 1983) opening, we were left with the unempowered Beale Street Development Corporation, which was created without a mission and was put into place by a city administration that had a cooperating ally in Beale Street Development Corporation Chairman Rev. James E. Smith, who needed the cooperation of city government to protect his main employer, AFSCME,” he wrote. “Second, no one thought that the redevelopment of Beale Street would succeed — except us.”

Elkington said the key to finally getting construction and renovation started under his watch was $3 million in state funds through the 1979 Memphis Jobs Conference. It was an undertaking by then-Governor Lamar Alexander that included Beale Street redevelopment as a pillar of creating an intentional tourism industry in Memphis.

But Elkington said the state balked at giving the money to the BSDC and wanted a developer involved.

The district’s reopening came two days after the 1983 city elections that saw Dick Hackett win a full four-year term a year after he ran in a special election to fill the vacancy left by Chandler’s resignation in 1982.

Hackett was front and center at the ceremony in Handy Park as his chief rival in the race, State Sen. John Ford, was close by. Ford had played a key role in securing the state funding that got restoration work underway.

Miller had recently been removed as executive director of the BSDC and threatened to picket the opening ceremony before settling into an exile in the movie theater just beyond the district’s eastern borner that he later turned into a nightclub.

Smith operated on all of his political fronts out of his AFSCME headquarters just east of the district at Beale and Danny Thomas Boulevard.

The Old Daisy became the first Beale Street home of the Center for Southern Folklore.

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It was part of an opening day that featured some restored but empty storefronts. It also featured a video of the “St. Louis Blues” short film that had its 1929 premiere at the Old Daisy.

The Center would have several other locations over the years including the old Lansky Brothers building at the northwest corner of Second and Beale and then back into the district at Hernando and Beale before moving to the Peabody Place development.

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The early years of Beale Street’s renaissance

New Beale Street tenants filled in the empty spots, but behind the scenes, Elkington was struggling to keep the district afloat financially in the early years.

There was also the long pursuit of big entertainment names to lend their names to nightspots as district anchors.

B.B. King’s Blues Club opened at the southeast corner of Second Street and Beale Street in May of 1991 as the campaign for Memphis Mayor was underway between Hackett and former Memphis City Schools Superintendent Willie Herenton.

Once again, Beale Street was a political backdrop.

During a press conference on the stage at the new nightclub, Hackett looked out at the group of several dozen reporters and photographers and joked that he hadn’t seen that many people since the African-American People’s Convention at the Mid-South Coliseum.

The April 1991 convention drew several thousand people to select a Black consensus challenger to Hackett. Herenton got the convention’s endorsement.

In October 1991, Herenton upset Hackett by 142 votes.

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Meanwhile, Smith’s fortunes declined rapidly across his many positions. Smith had backed Hackett in the election, causing a splinter group within the union that backed Herenton.

Smith retired from union leadership in early 1992. Five weeks later, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of falsifying union financial records to hide payments of union funds to settle a possible sexual assault lawsuit.

BSDC and city’s legal fights continue

With his exit, the election of a new mayor and the move of Randle Catron into the leadership of the BSDC, there were attempts to change the organization’s relationship with the city and to buy them out, according to Elkington.

Catron was on the defensive for much of his tenure.

By then, the theater was rebranded as the Historical Daisy and served as the BSDC’s headquarters. The district’s eastern end was also struggling to keep tenants.

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Herenton, the city’s longest-serving mayor with a tenure of 17 years, announced in 1995 that the city was eliminating the role of the BSDC. Herenton did not approve the organization’s budget as required by the city’s agreement with BSDC.

The city also sued BSDC in a lawsuit that continued even after Herenton left the mayor’s office in July 2009. The BSDC also sued Elkington’s Performa Entertainment Co. several times in that period.

Mayor A C Wharton, an attorney by trade, took office in late 2009 and won a full four-year term in 2011. During the partial term, he formed a task force on Beale Street’s general direction.

Later, with a full four-year term, he undertook resolving the litigation as the BSDC was in limbo with no budget and negotiations were underway for Elkington’s exit.

On New Year’s Day 2014, the city took day-to-day control of the entertainment district through the Downtown Memphis Commission, in what Wharton intended to be an interim period marking Elkington’s departure. Eleven years later and counting, the DMC remains in the role.

Wharton announced in December 2014 a proposal for a Beale Street Tourism Development Authority but said it would not be a replacement for the BSDC’s role holding the district’s master lease. But he also added that there were separate talks underway.

A month later, Wharton announced a tentative agreement with BSDC to give up the master lease to the tourism authority. The BSDC would keep the Old Daisy, and the city agreed to maintain it. The agreement also included a clause barring the BSDC from renting out or subleasing the theater.

Opera Memphis sets ‘La Bohème’ on Beale Street in 1915

“While there is still time, BSDC will try to preserve the voices of the aging giants of the blues with a series of oral history interviews,” the tentative terms read. And the terms cited examples in which the development corporation would “revive a number of presentation venues and vehicles,” including talent shows, plays and musical performances.

The city announced later that Catron had signed off on the agreement. But his widow, Lucille Catron, who became BSDC’s leader following his death in July 2015, said he was in no condition to sign such an agreement.

The Tourism Development Authority signed the master lease with the city in December 2015. But as Wharton was preparing to leave the mayor’s office following his October 2015 reelection upset by Council member Jim Strickland, the deal was unraveling.

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The Council abolished the Tourism Development Authority in April 2017, citing Catron’s ongoing litigation that contested the end of BSDC’s control.

Young’s tenure as head of the DMC before he was elected mayor in 2023 included discussions with Catron about various matters.

As mayor, Young renewed the discussions toward some kind of resolution.

As those talks were underway in June, the old theater was damaged in an electrical fire.

The fire was caught before it could do more damage to a structure that has outlasted Beale’s underworld, Crump’s political machine, decades of neglect and physical rot and a difficult rebirth.