In the third installment of the High Ground News podcast, the On The Ground team kicks off its coverage of the University District, and learns more about the neighborhood's assets, opportunities, and issues from a community leader working on the area's revitalization.

Next holiday season, the original Corky’s Bar-B-Q restaurant on Poplar in East Memphis will have room to accommodate private parties and events.

Summer Avenue has had many names over the years – Hwy 78, The Bristol Highway, The Broadway of America – and now it's adding international district to the list.

The Memphis Center for Independent Living has just moved from its street-level headquarters in Midtown to the eighth floor of the 34-story Clark Tower in East Memphis.

The Na-Jack Market at 1457 National St., which takes its name from its location sandwiched between National and Jackson Avenue near where they converge, may look like just another convenience store – a place to grab a drink and a snack, some cigarettes, maybe a lottery ticket – but once, somewhere between where the stacks of unrefrigerated sodas and the storeroom are now, music history was made here. 

It’s lunchtime at Treadwell Elementary and the school’s new optional program coordinator, Darlene May, is heading to the cafeteria. Along the way, she’s met by a dozen students shouting, “Hola!” through beaming smiles.

A shopping center in the heart of East Memphis will soon undergo a renovation.

With her “glamtique” Ashley Dean-Parson has flipped the concept of boutique on its head. “A lot of times, being a full-figured woman, we would go into a store that we would really, really love and they wouldn’t have a plus-size section or if they did, it was really, really small,” she said. “So, I took that same concept and did it here and did the reverse.”

Pete & Sam’s celebrates its 70th anniversary this year in a spiffed up restaurant, thanks to the Bomarito brothers taking on local investor partners and a late 2017 fire that caused the place to close for almost five months for cleaning and updating.