It took a group of determined citizens two lawsuits and nearly a decade to play out, but the Battle on the Bluff preserved Memphians’ access to some of the finest views of the Downtown riverfront.

The civic controversy took up most of the 1990s and ended in construction of the Bluff Walk, an eight-foot-wide concrete sidewalk that runs from Union south, reaching heights of 45 feet above Riverside Drive and Tom Lee Park.

The first major section of Bluff Walk opened 20 years ago last year after advocates with the Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy fought a developer, a Memphis mayor and owners of upscale bluff-front homes.

In the mid-1990s, critics viewed the Bluff Walk as a potential intrusion into the privacy of pricey bluff-front homes, a threat to property values and the bluff’s stability, and an obstacle to residential growth.

Today it’s a centerpiece of about 5 miles of riverfront trails stretching from the north end of Mud Island to the Memphis side of the Harahan Bridge. It’s a much-loved, iconic part of Downtown’s outdoor environment, showcased in scene-setting shots of Memphis in the NBC legal drama “Bluff City Law” last fall.

The Bluff Walk began decades earlier as an unimproved dirt path that Boy Scouts walked to earn an award, at a time when Downtown was in decline and perhaps the last place developers wanted to build new housing.

Efforts continue today to wrap up loose ends of the old scout trail.

There are discussions about a gap on the south end, where it used to pass beneath the Harahan and Interstate 55 bridges and connect with city parks south of the bridges.

And the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s planned move to Downtown provides possibilities to connect the walk to the Public Promenade. A founding feature of Memphis, the promenade runs from Fourth Bluff Park past the rear of the University of Memphis law school, but isn’t seamlessly connected to the Bluff Walk at Union Avenue.

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The Battle on the Bluff pitted the conservancy, a group of citizen advocates, against the forces of Downtown revitalization – the leading edge of a wave of residential resettlement that has pushed Downtown’s population to about 26,000 over 30-plus years.

The conservancy was so named because Memphis sits on the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff, a series of bluffs that overlook the Mississippi River in West Tennessee.

“There’s a David and Goliath to this that I think ‘Bluff City Law’ tries to capture,” said landscape architect Ritchie Smith. “If someone wrote a definitive history of the Bluff Walk, which many of us refer to as the Battle on the Bluff, it would be a pretty good history of Memphis in those 10 or 12 years, because everybody was involved, politically, socially, prominent developers, and it’s over an 8-foot path,” said Smith, an early organizer of the conservancy and principal and founder of Ritchie Smith Associates, which designed and re-designed the walk.

“It tells you a lot about the culture and politics of the city, when one or two prominent people have an opinion and they can make a few phone calls and others fall in line, almost blindly, or without any interest or stake,” added Smith.

If David was the conservancy’s mostly graying activists, Goliath came in the person of Downtown’s pioneering developer Henry Turley Jr.

Turley’s 1989 proposal to convert an abandoned railroad yard into the South Bluff development sparked momentum for the Bluff Walk. Turley angered public access advocates by resisting efforts to route the Bluff Walk through the front yards of planned bluff-front homes.

However, Turley asserted that without development of new housing that would bring life, people and eyes to the area, few people would have wanted to walk the informal trail through a derelict former rail yard.

“I knew it couldn’t go in people’s front yards. I knew to get people living there on the bluff, I had to give them some kind of privacy in their front yard,” Turley said. “And it was too intimate to have a public walkway right there in your front yard.”

Turley said he was shocked when Bluff Walk advocates showed up to protest his South Bluff proposal at a zoning board.

“To go from an abandoned freight yard, neglected, to ‘Wait a minute. We don’t want a development here, we want a Boy Scout walk along the top of the bluff,’ I said, ‘You couldn’t be serious,’” Turley recalled.

Turley’s negotiations with Bluff Walk advocates eventually led to a compromise.

The Bluff Walk would be recessed into the bluff from Union to Monteigne, below the bluff-front homeowners’ line of sight; at Monteigne, it would enter South Bluff and proceed on neighborhood sidewalks, without river views, until it reached a pedestrian bridge over Riverside Drive.

Diverting the section of walk from the bluff’s edge preserved some of the choicest lots on the highest land in South Bluffs for sale to well-heeled customers, including actress Cybill Shepherd, who has since sold her home there.

The controversy climaxed with former Mayor Willie Herenton’s refusal in February 1996 to sign a construction contract to build the walk, after it had been approved by the City Council. The conservancy sued, and a lower court and an appeals court ordered that the $2.5 million project move forward.

Property owners also made a last-ditch effort to delay construction with a lawsuit claiming the Bluff Walk would undermine the stability of the bluff and bring crime and other problems to their doorsteps.

That lawsuit was dismissed without a trial.

The Battle on the Bluff established the public’s right to walk, jog, bike or scooter along the edge of the bluff overlooking Tom Lee Park and the Mississippi River.

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“It sort of set the tone, I think, for the public’s right and what kind of riverfront people here really want,” said Virginia McLean, president of Friends for Our Riverfront. “Do you want condominiums built right up to the beachfront? Or would you like the public to be able to walk along the beach?”

McLean’s organization absorbed the dormant remains of the Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy in 2013.

The original section of Bluff Walk formed a loop with the River Walk in Tom Lee Park. They’ve since been joined by a Bluff Walk extension from Ashburn-Coppock Park to Martyr’s Park; to Big River Crossing on the Harahan Bridge, a short distance from Martyr’s Park; the Main to Main intermodal project, which improved pedestrian and bicycle access the length of Downtown and into West Memphis, Arkansas; and the westernmost leg of the Wolf River Greenway on Mud Island.

The Memphis River Parks Partnership recast the riverfront trails in 2018 as the River Line.

Partnership president Carol Coletta, who was a Bluff Walk backer in the 1990s, said, “The Bluff Walk gave us the ability to create the River Line, the bike/ped trail that runs from the Wolf River on the north end of Mud Island south to Big River Crossing. It really forms the heart of the entire riverfront trail system.

“It’s the first time Memphians had a chance to enjoy a connected riverfront. It changed the way we think about the riverfront and how we appreciate it,” Coletta said. “It also changed the way we think about Downtown. It was the north-south Downtown connector before South Main became South Main.”

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Roots of the conservancy

The Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1991 to serve as a watch dog on various city agreements for construction of a bluff walk as part of residential development of bluff-front property between Union and Georgia.

Among key members were Patricia and Bert Merrill, Marjorie Raines, Anne Shafer, Susan Jones, Tandy Gilliland, Sue Williams and Jack Tucker.

The Merrills were leaders in the Sea Isle Park Neighborhood Association in East Memphis. Raines was an activist and former teacher. Patricia Merrill and Anne Shafer had been Memphis City Beautiful Commission chairwomen. Gilliland was a nonprofit administrator and daughter of environmentalist Rudolph Jones, and Susan Jones was her sister-in-law. Williams is a Sierra Club activist. Tucker was a Downtown architect.

Women of Achievement saluted two of the women in 2002, three years after the trail opened.

“Through 10 years, two lawsuits, broken promises and compromises, their Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy fought the mayor, a powerful developer and influential blufftop residents. … Through their courage and persistence, Patricia Merrill and Tandy Gilliland preserved for generations public access to the Bluff City’s grandest view.”

Merrill, Raines and Shafer first became interested in preserving bluff-front property access in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Riverbluff and Chickasaw Bluff condominiums were built up to the edge of the bluff.

The condos were the first new residential units built Downtown in generations. Their construction created a break from Vance to Huling in the Boy Scout trail that once ran along the edge of the bluff.

The condos whetted an appetite for more homes in a part of town that had been largely abandoned by business and residents during 1950s and 1960s suburbanization, followed by the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis in 1968.

Ritchie Smith worked with the conservancy on the idea of a Bluff Walk and drew up a riverfront trail master plan, but he didn’t participate in the formal incorporation in 1991 because he planned to seek the city contract to design the Bluff Walk.

Reva Kriegel, the lawyer who represented the conservancy, is among a shrinking number of people directly involved in the lawsuits who are still around. A number of the leaders were in their 60s when the push began in the early 1990s. Kriegel worked with the conservancy from 1991 until the walk was built.

“Here we had a citizens’ group that claimed to speak for the whole city,” Kriegel said. “Most of the members didn’t live Downtown, but they used Downtown.

“Had it not been for the battle and the persistence of the Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy in seeing this project through, we wouldn’t have it,” Kriegel said.

The opposition “was very much for esthetic reasons: the homeowners wanted an unimpeded view of the river,” she said.

Conservancy leaders showed “incredible persistence and grace” in pushing for the City Council to follow through on the compromise. “They always wrote the council members these gracious notes after the meetings,” Kriegel said. “They came prepared and they did it gracefully. For me, it was a great group to work with.”

While the case was grinding through court, Bluff Walk opponents tried a number of maneuvers including putting forward a plan to reroute the walk away from the bluff’s edge.

A group of architects proposed an alternative route behind Riverbluff and Chickasaw Bluff condominiums, between the condos and the Illinois Central (now CN Railway) tracks, and into the South Bluffs development. Public access would have been provided at points where public streets dead-ended at the bluff’s edge.

“It was just an insulting proposal,” Ritchie Smith said. “You’re on the Bluff Walk and then you’re detouring. It’s like saying, ‘Even though this is public land, we don’t allow our citizens and visitors to enjoy it. We’re going to put you behind these screen walls, behind these developments.’”

The Battle on the Bluff has a tangential connection to one of Memphis’ other great citizen-led battles, when Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP) went to court to keep Interstate 40 from going through Overton Park and Midtown. The landmark case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1971.

Kriegel was assigned to work with the conservancy by the Burch Porter law firm’s Charlie Newman, whom Gilliland approached because he had represented CPOP.

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As much as the conversation today is about providing Downtown with amenities that will attract more people to live, work and visit there, the Bluff Walk was viewed by some more than 20 years ago as a potential haven for crime and mayhem.

One argument was that citizens didn’t need a trail on the bluff’s edge because they already had Tom Lee Park, which had been recently expanded to about 30 acres and furnished with walking paths along the river.

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Among the public critics were Pat Halloran, a former city councilman and then leader of The Orpheum Theatre; lawyer and then-county commissioner Julian Bolton; Memphis Tourism chief Kevin Kane; and Livingston Rodgers, wife of former pro football coach Pepper Rodgers.

When the court battles were over, feelings were raw.

The Memphis Flyer, which had supported the Bluff Walk earlier in the decade, opined: “…when this ultra-white elephant is finally in place, we wonder how long it will take the Riverwalk to win ‘Worst Public Eyesore’ in this publication’s annual Best of Memphis poll.”

The newspaper said the conservancy had “singlehandedly – and ironically – been responsible for the devastation and defacement of one of our finer civic treasures.”

Bolton backtracked a few months after the Bluff Walk opened, calling it “a beautiful amenity to the riverfront” and “a positive addition and attribute to Memphis.”

Kane said, “Let me say, living down there for two decades, I think the Bluff Walk has been a wonderful amenity. It’s widely used. It’s been very positively received. I’m not aware of any issues as far as loitering, if anybody was concerned about public access like that in front of a bunch of private residences.”

Kane said his chief problem was an initial proposal for an elevated wooden boardwalk type structure. It seemed like a potential maintenance problem and eyesore, he said.

The Bluff Walk runs near the back of Turley’s house in South Bluff, and the developer said he likes how it turned out. But he also indicated he’d take the same approach if he had it to do over again.

“The Bluff Walk now is along the back of my house, and I like it, and I like seeing all those people coming by, and I like seeing them enjoy it. I want to see more. I was sorry to see the mayor talking about keeping Riverside as an expressway (as part of Tom Lee Park’s planned overhaul).

Turley said rather than a north-south bluff-top trail, he favored east-west connections, like the flights of stairs that ascend the bluff from Riverside at Vance, Huling and Butler.

“We were building lofts on Main Street. We wanted those people to be able to walk down the bluff, like they can right north of Kevin Kane’s house,” Turley said. “If I had to do it myself, I’d have had more walks going up and down, east and west, as extensions of streets, and I’d have had the whole River Walk on the river. I wouldn’t have had the Bluff Walk,” Turley said.

“I think it’s fine. I would still do it my way,” Turley said.

Turley said he regretted an earlier decision that blocked access to the bluff’s edge when Riverbluff condos were developed. Talbot Avenue dead-ends east of the railroad tracks that run along the back side of Riverbluff and Chickasaw Bluff condos.

Benny Lendermon, who was city Public Works Division director in the 1990s and later chief of the Riverfront Development Corp., called the Bluff Walk “perhaps the most controversial project of the decade, in my opinion.”

“I had very close friends who quit talking to me at the time this went forward. After it was built, a year later, several of them came back and told me ‘This is one of the greatest things you’ve ever done.’ They couldn’t visualize it. They were afraid of the unknown,” Lendermon said.

The homeowner lawsuit centered on a claim that construction could weaken the stability of the bluff and jeopardize homes structurally, but Lendermon believes it strengthened the bluff.

He and Ritchie Smith said an earth slide below a home in South Bluffs a few years ago would probably have widened to affect several houses if not for the Bluff Walk. “Truthfully, it strengthened the stability of the bluff,” Lendermon said.

The design used a technique called soldier piles, steel-reinforced concrete piers extending 6-8 feet into the ground and connecting to the retaining wall, every 3-4 linear feet. “You have hundreds of soldier piles, which are like steel anchors. They’re called soldiers because they stand at attention,” Smith said.

Fears of maintenance and vandalism never came to pass, Lendermon said. “There’s been almost no (required) maintenance. I thought there would be more cracking. We were really concerned about graffiti. Everybody was concerned it was going to be a billboard for graffiti. It’s held up extremely well, and it’s well used.”

Some of Herenton’s directors “argued strongly for the mayor not to veto it,” Lendermon said. “That was probably the only time I kind of went behind the scenes, behind the mayor, and talked with a couple of council members. … It was just too important a project for the city in my opinion,” Lendermon said.

After the project had gone through the contracting process, Herenton refused to sign the construction contract, using what was referred to as a pocket veto. He said he had misgivings about notching the walkway into the face of the bluff.

The Tennessee Court of Appeals in March 1997 concluded that because the Bluff Walk construction contract was an extension of a land use contract approved by council ordinance, Herenton was mandated to proceed with construction.

The Bluff Walk was a watershed project for Ritchie Smith Associates and landscape architects Smith and Lissa Thompson.

“This is kind of a big part of our life and career,” Smith said. “We worked on this for 12 years. Not many design firms work on a trail project 1-mile-long or short. Twelve years is Hudson Yards (the Manhattan megadevelopment) in New York City. It’s Union Row (the planned Memphis megadevelopment). It’s not the Bluff Walk.

“It was part of a high-quality, shared-use trail that’s one of the first in the Mid-South. The site just goes back thousands of years. There were always these four bluffs, and this was the simple idea of having a Bluff Walk for the Bluff City. We were so happy to be part of it,” Smith said.

Thompson believes the Bluff Walk was a pacesetter for the greenway movement in Memphis, paving the way for the Shelby Farms Greenline, which opened in 2010, and an ongoing expansion of the Wolf River Greenway. Only the Vollintine-Evergreen Greenline, a rail-to-trail project in Midtown, predated the Bluff Walk.

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“The Bluff Walk really sort of broke loose the (local) movement for greenway development,” Thompson said. “I think there was sort of rising community sentiment advocating for creating the development. I think it’s not uncommon that you have a ‘not in my backyard’ attitude, and especially in that era all around the country, because I think a lot of people didn’t understand what the impact would be. It was the unknown. What finally broke it loose was getting the go-ahead.”

Speaking as a trail user, Thompson said it’s hard to imagine the riverfront without the Bluff Walk.

“I think a lot of people sort of take it for granted, can’t really remember 1999 and 1997 and all of the controversy and hard work and efforts of community volunteers that went into creating that pathway that people enjoy,” Thompson said.

She added, “I see people all over it, of all ages, all physically fitness levels. People from out of town visiting. They probably couldn’t imagine that not being there. Where do you go to look out on the river? Before that time, you really couldn’t get there.”