One of our favorite things about this community is its lack of pretension and snobbiness.
Perhaps, it comes from the fact that the character of the city was shaped fundamentally by the people from the edge, the rivermen and the African-Americans, the outsiders who gave us our most famous international export – our music, and people with crazy ideas like the one that gave birth to FedEx.
As Carol Coletta has said, Memphis is a city of second chances. We give people another chance – whether they are playing basketball for University of Memphis or the Grizzlies or whether they have moved here from another city after a business failure or whether they were scandalized and looking for a new start.
Perhaps we’re being a little Pollyannish, but we like to think that being judgmental or acting superior is just not a part of our civic makeup, because most of us know people facing lives with challenges, people from different races and places, people from all socio-economic backgrounds, and people with all kinds of lifestyles.
Roots
Yes, there are the occasional bursts of geographic pride that lead people from a section of Memphis to be dismissive about the suburban choices of others. And vice versa. But most of us ignore the petty back and forth and they quickly fade.
All of this is why we were surprised when someone who had recently visited Memphis as he explored what cities are doing to compete and succeed telephoned us to ask about the state of the city, particularly the redevelopment of The Pyramid. He said some people told him that they didn’t support it because it would bring so many rednecks to Memphis.
So, we stand to defend the rural residents of our 100-county market area and beyond. The suggestion that they are rednecks when so many of us here are from those areas is simply silly. It was a surprise that the comment even affected me since it’s been decades since I left Haynes, Arkansas for Memphis (population in 2000 was 214; Census doesn’t keep up with its population anymore).
It is a rare day that passes that I don’t also meet another Arkansan who made a similar journey. The same goes for Mississippi and West Tennessee. Memphis is what it is because it is an amalgam of the rural influx of people to Memphis. Just think of all the blues artists, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker from North Mississippi; Elvis Presley from Tupelo; Sam Phillips from Florence, Alabama; rockabilly artists like Cordell Jackson; musicians like Ace Cannon, and soul artists like Rufus Thomas, and the list goes on and on. We won’t even get into all the civic, political, and business leaders that moved into Memphis, but here are a few: Bill Morris, Ned Cook, Bill Tanner, Kemmons Wilson, and dozens more.
Huntin’ and Fishin’
It continues even today. Between 2008-2010, 1,570 people moved into Shelby County from Eastern Arkansas; 2,376 people moved into Shelby County from West Tennessee; and 3,544 people moved into Shelby County from Northern Mississippi.
Those 7,690 people represent the most significant source of new residents for this county, and that has been the case for as long as we can remember. That’s why it’s next to impossible in a meeting to not find someone who doesn’t have roots that trace back to West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, or Northern Mississippi within a generation or two.
In other words, to dismiss these emigrants as rednecks is to dismiss ourselves. We are them, and hunting and fishing hardly makes someone a redneck. After all, in an inspired bit of fundraising, Susan Schadt at ArtsMemphis has used hunting to raise substantial money for the arts in Memphis with some high-quality books, First Shooting Light, Wild Abundance or A Million Wings,“ which celebrate and preserve the unique culture and tradition of American sportsmen and their intense devotion to land and wildlife.” They spotlight some of Memphis’s leading families, including major supporters for our arts and culture.
Outdoors Pays
Most of my relatives in Arkansas are hunters and fishermen and they are anything but rubes or rednecks, a word whose derivation refers to a rural poor white person of the South. Anyone who is serious about hunting and fishing knows that the gear and equipment are anything but cheap, but more to the point, Bass Pro Shops is about outdoors recreation and nature, also including hiking, camping, and boating.
In addition, Memphis prides itself on being the world headquarters for Ducks Unlimited, which has 600,000 members, 40,000 volunteers, and $180 million yearly revenues devoted to conserving wetlands and associated upland habitats for waterfowl, other wildlife, and people. So much for redneck hunters.
Here’s the thing: We don’t particularly care about the color or sizes of the necks of any of the more than two million people who will be drawn to the Bass Pro store at The Pyramid – 40% of them from beyond 50 miles. Their spending will revitalize the Pinch Historic District into a retail district known for the preservation of its existing building, they will spend money all over downtown, and they will pay for the improvements to The Pyramid without any money from city budgets.
We all value the basketball and baseball games that bring people to downtown, but if you add them all together, and multiply them by two, then you have the conservative estimate for the number of people who will come to downtown Memphis and spend money because of Bass Pro Shops.
Fact-Finding
The only store comparable to it is the headquarters for the destination retailer in Springfield, Missouri, and it is the #1 tourism attraction in that state with four million visitors a year.
When the recent visitor to Memphis asked how we had become such advocates for the retailer, we said that back when we questioned what the best use of the former arena was, and because there were many negative comments made about the selection and recruitment of Bass Pro by the citizens committee headed by business leader Scott Ledbetter, we did two things.
One, we visited Big Cedar Lodge, the Bass Pro-owned resort in the Missouri Ozarks, and we visited the mother ship in Springfield, Missouri. We came face-to-face with the realization that all the dismissive “bait shop” comments were not just inaccurate. They were stupid. The attention to detail, the artisans employed to work on the Lodge and who were keeping Ozark crafts alive, and the vast conservation exhibits that take up 40 percent of every store impressed every one of us.
Most of all, we were reminded that while our kneejerk reaction might be to see Bass Pro as someone else’s store, we realized that it was in truth a byproduct of our traditions in the Mid-South and its key location on the Mississippi Alluvial Valley flyway. Already, we are told that the store is developing outreach programs to introduce Memphis youth to outdoor recreation and conservation, and in that way, like all of us, they apply their rural ethos to an urban setting in ways that can make the city better.
At a time when everyone from Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to TV star Lisa Kudrow to CNN are sponsoring shows to track down ancestry of well-known celebrities, we apologize for our defensiveness about criticisms based on stereotypes about rural Mid-Southerners. Clearly, some of us take them personally.
“He said some people told him that they didn’t support it because it would bring so many rednecks to Memphis”.
Seriously?
I circulate socially in a very artsy, LGBTQ-friendly, cosmopolitan (relatively – it is just Memphis, after all) milieu (as well as in an extremely conservative professional one) and I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to that sentiment regarding BassPro.
I have heard many other objections from locals, mostly pertaining to use of public funds being diverted for private for-profit development interests, at the expense of investment in enhancing infrastructure, supporting neighborhoods, and mitigating blight. But the alleged objection on “redneck attraction” grounds seems baseless to me.
Do you have specific citations to support this anecdote?
The person who called us was a national reporter and he named the precise people who brought it up to him. We did not repeat them because it was irrelevant to our point. Also, if you go back to the days when the project was first proposed, you’ll see many comments along the same lines. If you didn’t see them at the time, you were fortunate because this was a recurrent theme in Facebook and CA comments. It was usually made in tandem with people calling Bass Pro Shops a “bait shop.”
As for using the money for enhancing infrastructure, supporting neighborhoods and mitigating blight, none of the money being spent at the Pyramid can be legally spent for their purposes. We’ve written about this previously: http://www.smartcitymemphis.com/2014/08/complex-tdz-complicates-factual-debate/
As we have written several times, the source of funding is the State of Tennessee Tourism Development Zone and it allows the capture of sales taxes generated at the site to pay for the improvements. There is no money being taken from the budget of city government or being redirected for this purpose. The money from Tourism Development Zones can only be spent on projects identified in the state law as expanding the tourism industry in Tennessee.
Thanks for the clarifying remarks.
I regret that my distaste for “social media” (Facebook and CA online comments) made me miss out on some meaningful and compelling public discourse. There must have been some unusually enlightening entries there. Regrettably, I’ll have to take your word on that.
I hope my skepticism about stewardship of Memphis public funds will be forgiven. I’m just asking questions. Here’s why:
As a nation over the past several years, we’ve experienced a deliberate transfer of public wealth (tax-paying dollars) into private hands that ends up benefiting contractors, financiers, and real estate developers – and pretty much no one else (except stockholders and, arguably, politicians serving as facilitators/brokers). Taxpayers are often left on the hook.
The promise has always been that these “investments” will benefit everyone in some manner of trickle-down reward (by way of mostly minimum wage – or slightly better paying – jobs), but all one has to do is look around: the public commons are not gleaning benefits. Still, already wealthy financiers and developers are thriving, and will apparently pay no cost if the enterprise fails.
There is an unfortunate track record: http://public-accountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fishing_for_taxpayer_cash.pdf
SMC seems committed to BassPro. I hope SMC is right, but I can’t figure out how SMC arrived at its conclusions, other than by wishful thinking (a luxury in these economically challenging times).
[I apologize if this has all been covered already. I looked back through your archives and did not find pertinent analysis. Granted, I might not have gone back far enough.]
Here’s the thing: SMC’s post today is predicated on an alleged ad hominem attack on rednecks. Absent specifics about who made these assertions, they look to me like “straw man” arguments. I asked who is making these claims and you tell me that’s not relevant to the point. What am I missing here?
It looks – and smells – like a “Public Relations” narrative. Please prove me wrong.
Again, thanks,
G
Gordo,
When the proposal was first made to transform the Pyramid into a Bass Pro Shop, I thought that the very idea was a massive mistake based in part on my preconceived notion that Bass Pro’s primary market consisted of “rednecks”. I may have even used the term when discussing the project with others. I also know I did not arrive at the idea independently, but heard/read similar opinions elsewhere.
…On the rare occasion that the issue rises in discussion with those from beyond the region, I also remain somewhat embarrassed that this was the highest and best use that could be agreed upon for the former arena.
Gordo: We share your concern about the shift of wealth and the public policies that are deepening inequality in our country. We’ve written about this before too.
This is why this project is different: The improvements to the Pyramid are being paid for with the sales taxes generated by the project itself. If the project did not exist, the taxes would not exist. Best of all, 75% of them are state sales taxes and if they went to Nashville, we would get about 20% of them back in state services, but more to the point, ifwe went to Nashville and asked for this much money to be appropriated by the State Legislature, we would come home empty-handed, but the State of Tennessee Tourism Development Zone allows us to create these jobs and bring two million people to downtown without taking ANY money from the City of Memphis budget. As a result, there are no services that are being affected.
In other cities, destination retailers have gotten direct funding from city and county governments’ budgets (that’s not happening here) and these governments have even issued city and county debt to provide them with incentives (that’s not happening here). That’s the beauty of the project paying for itself.
There is no wishful thinking on our part. We bet that we have read more reports, experts’ analyses, budget projections, revenue projections, destination retail projects in other cities than almost anyone in this community. And we have been doing this for seven years prior to Bass Pro even being selected and back when the process was trying to decide the best use of the Pyramid in the future.
I envy the fact that in your circle, you don’t hear comments that cast people from the areas where many of us were raised as uneducated, rural country bumpkins. You are lucky. We admitted in the post that we perhaps took this personally, and it was indeed public relations for the areas where a significant percentage of our people come from.
Urbanut: What convinced us was the galaxy of ideas that were presented to the special committee deciding on the future of the building. They were either financially unsustainable or non-revenue producing for city (megachurch). But the kicker was that we couldn’t find a former arena of this size that had been successfully converted to another use that produced jobs and economic activity. Way back when, we suggested that it should be torn down since that’s what most cities do, but in retrospect, getting at least two million people downtown makes it attractive to us.
SCM-
After all the time and energy spent on the issue- I agree. The proof of the concept will be in the results, specifically regarding the number of visitors to the store and the sustainability of those numbers after the novelty has worn off.
Exactly my thoughts Urbanut.
I’m hoping it follows the pattern of all the other large Bass Pro stores where that novelty does not wear out, because 40% of the space is used for non-retail exhibits that bring non-hunters like us into the building. Here’s hoping…