Beale Street

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Fried grits, down-home blues and a new luxury hotel will be central to the newest development taking shape in the city's famed Beale Street entertainment district.

The $52 million project, called Lee's Landing, will include Beale Street's first hotel -- with a top floor fitted out with oversized rooms for pro basketball players -- and a Ground Zero Blues Club.

"People want to hear the real Delta blues, and we're going to offer that," said Bill Luckett, a co-owner with actor Morgan Freeman of the original Ground Zero in Clarksdale, Miss.

Lee's Landing is named for Lt. George Lee, a black World War I veteran, community leader and reputed political boss of Beale Street in the early 1900s.

Bawdy and bustling in those days, Beale Street was an entertainment and business center frequented by blacks from throughout the Memphis and Mississippi Delta regions.

But by the 1970s, the nightclubs that once hosted entertainers such as W.C. Handy, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and B.B. King were gone. Political and social shifts had turned the strip into a run-down cluster of empty buildings.

The strip began a comeback in the 1980s, however, and now the Beale Street Historic District, with its bars, restaurants and shops, is a major tourist attraction and a key part of the revival of downtown Memphis.

Performa Entertainment, the private company that manages Beale Street for the city, puts the total number of visitors to the strip at 6 million a year. Performa is also a partner in Lee's Landing.

"We think that fully 40 percent of everybody who comes to Beale Street is either an out-of-state visitor or out-of-country visitor," said John Elkington, Performa's chairman.

To accommodate visiting NBA teams, the nine-story hotel is raising the ceilings and doorways of its top floor rooms and putting in longer beds. Shower heads are being raised, too, so the tall NBA players can freshen up without scrunching up.

"And we'll have a special side entrance they can come through as well as going through the lobby," said Dave Jones, a founding partner in the hotel with the Senate Hospitality Group in Brentwood.

The 200-room, $39 million hotel, part of the Westin chain, will have 21 suites and a Daily Grill restaurant providing 24-hour room service. Most hotels its size, Jones said, have three or four suites.

In its heyday, Beale Street had rooms to rent for the musicians, gamblers and prostitutes working the strip, and the remnants of what was called the Clark Hotel are still evident in the small rooms, now used for storage, above the Blues City Cafe, one of the district's current residents.

"There were a lot of rooms, but they weren't really what you'd call a hotel," Elkington said.

The Ground Zero in Clarksdale, famous for its fried catfish and fried grits as well as its music, is in a building that housed a general store and a cotton business before sitting empty for 30 years.

"Most of the time, juke joints popped up in buildings that were abandoned," Luckett said. "This will be the first juke joint ever built new, but we're going to try to make it old immediately, on the inside, anyway."

Ground Zero will bring its menu to Memphis.

"Our favorite thing right now seems to be the fried green tomato sandwich with bacon and cheese," Luckett said. "People go crazy over that one."

And just how do you fry grits?

"They're leftover grits," Luckett said. "You let them cool and they sort of jell and then you fry them. They're delicious."

While Beale Street's revival has been a success, critics sometimes complain that the blues are overpowered today by rock 'n' roll and other newer forms of music.

Luckett said Ground Zero's booking agent, Roger Stolle of Clarksdale, will try to take care of that.

"He's a purist," Luckett said. "And even if some of our bands start to drift off into rock 'n' roll and stuff, he snaps them back into place."

Most Beale Street business owners in the old days were white, but the street holds a special place in the history of black Americans.

"This project was set out to make sure that the majority of the owners were African-American," Elkington said, noting that 70 percent of the investors in the Lee's Landing garage and entertainment project are black.

Putting together a project like Lee's Landing offers a particular challenge on Beale Street since the strip is owned by the city.

Developers have a 99-year lease on the Beale Street site, but they don't own it, and lenders want large cash investments for such projects, Elkington said.

"It took two years to get the hotel done," he said. "It's a complicated process."

Beale Street ended up public property when the poor, mostly black neighborhoods surrounding it were leveled by Urban Renewal, a federally funded program designed to help revitalize American cities.

"It was a misguided program. The money would have been much better used for restoration," said Charles Carpenter, a University of Memphis history professor. "They left it a wasteland."