Things to do in Memphis

Culture · Downtown, at the Lorraine Motel

Built into and around the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, with room 306 preserved and a long chronological exhibition leading to it.

Local tip: Allow three hours and go on a weekday. The final approach to the balcony is deliberately quiet and unhurried; the boarding house across the street, where the shot was fired, is part of the same ticket and most visitors skip it.

Culture · Soulsville, south Memphis

A reconstruction of the studio at 926 East McLemore where Otis Redding, Booker T. & the M.G.s and Isaac Hayes recorded, on the original site.

Local tip: The Stax Music Academy next door teaches local teenagers on the same block, and their public performances are the best live music in the city that nobody outside Memphis knows about. Check the schedule before you book the museum.

Nature · East Memphis, inside the I-240 loop's eastern edge

One of the largest urban parks in the United States at around 4,500 acres — roughly five times Central Park — with a lake, a buffalo herd and the Greenline trail running back into Midtown.

Local tip: The Shelby Farms Greenline is a rail-trail that connects the park to Midtown with no road crossings for most of its length. It is the one genuinely good piece of active-travel infrastructure in the city, and it is how locals get to the park without driving.

Neighborhood · Midtown

Two adjoining Midtown districts — Cooper-Young's bungalow grid and independent restaurants, Overton Square's restored 1970s entertainment block with theatres and a courtyard.

Local tip: The Cooper-Young trestle sculpture spanning the railway is made from the names of the neighbourhood's streets in steel. Go on the second Saturday of the month when the night market runs, and eat in Cooper-Young rather than on Beale.

Landmark · Harahan Bridge, downtown riverfront

A boardwalk bolted to the side of a 1916 railway bridge, carrying pedestrians and cyclists a mile across the Mississippi into Arkansas — the longest public pedestrian bridge over the river.

Local tip: Free, open until 10pm, and lit at night. Walk it at sunset with the river on one side and freight trains passing a metre away on the other; from the Arkansas end the Memphis skyline is the best view of the city there is.

Landmark · South Memphis

An 1852 garden cemetery of eighty acres holding Memphis's yellow fever dead, Confederate and Union soldiers in the same ground, madams, mayors and blues musicians, under enormous old trees.

Local tip: Almost no visitor goes and few residents have. The cottage at the gate lends an audio tour for a few dollars; the 1873 yellow fever section explains more about why Memphis is shaped the way it is than anything else in the city.