Memphis: The Bridge at the River's Edge

The bridge you are crossing is the Hernando de Soto Bridge, a steel arch completed in nineteen seventy-three that carries Interstate Forty over the Mississippi River between Tennessee and Arkansas. It is a single bridge that carries Interstate Forty in both directions, and it carries roughly forty-four thousand vehicles a day across a river that is, at this point, about a mile wide. In May of twenty twenty-one, engineers discovered a crack in one of the steel beams of the I-Forty bridge that was severe enough to close both spans for nearly three months.

The crack was attributed to a fabrication flaw from the original construction that had grown slowly for fifty years before becoming visible. Barges on the river do not stop for bridge repairs. The river traffic continued during the closure.

Memphis was a major port before it was a music town. The bluff the city sits on above the Mississippi was a trading site for the Chickasaw, who controlled river commerce in this region when the French arrived in the late seventeenth century. Memphis was founded in eighteen nineteen.

By the Civil War it was the largest city in the mid-South, a cotton market and a river port. Beale Street, the blues corridor that still functions and still draws people, was a Black commercial district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when W.C.

Handy formalized and popularized the blues genre. Sun Records, a few blocks from Beale, recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B.

King in the same building in the same decade. The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight, is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

It is on the other side of downtown from the bridge, and it is not optional.