Bass Pro Shops and the Redevelopment of the Memphis Pyramid

• In Event: States of Embodiment: Animality, Racialization, and Environmental Justice

Abstract

On the banks of the Mississippi River in Memphis, Tennessee sits the world’s tenth largest pyramid. This paper examines the funding and creation of the Memphis Pyramid Bass Pro Shops. Opened in 1991, the Pyramid hosted the University of Memphis basketball teams and the Memphis Grizzlies NBA basketball team before sitting empty for over a decade after the 2004 opening of Fedex Arena. In 2015, the Memphis Pyramid reopened as the site of a massive Bass Pro Shop that attracted over a million visitors in its first year. Inside the redesigned space are two hotels, a bowling alley, and multiple restaurants along with merchandise. In addition, replica swamps hold live alligators while aquariums in the space total over 600,000 gallons in volume. To add to the verisimilitude of the outdoors experience, plastic trees and hundreds of taxidermied animals complete the space.
In order to draw Bass Pro Shops into the empty space, the City of Memphis contributed $30 million to the conversion project. By redeveloping the Pyramid, the city hoped that the new superstore would serve as the anchor for the redeveloping the city’s heavily African American Pinch District into a commercial corridor linking St. Jude Children’s Hospital with the Bass Pro Shops. By examining these linkages, this paper seeks to understand the intersections of urban history, consumerism, and gentrification.

Author

• Sherri Sheu, University of Colorado-Boulder