The newsreel footage from the 1950s isn't a hoax: for years, Memphis indeed claimed the title “America’s Cleanest City." More than eight decades after Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump created the Memphis City Beautiful Commission, the current Mayor is overseeing a much larger blight problem. Can beauty be restored?
Filmmaker and historian Willie Bearden says that cleaning up Memphis, even in the 1930s, serves as another example of why Crump is considered the city's most powerful political figure. He got stuff done.
The entire riverfront at the time was a polluted eyesore. Then one day, Bearden says, “(Crump) was standing behind the Cossitt Library on Front Street and looking down there, and saw that Illinois Central train and it probably hit him like a bolt of lightning. What do these people think of us? This is ugly!”
To address the problem, Crump launched the Memphis City Beautiful Commission, the first of its kind in the nation. He also enlisted garden clubs, and arts societies to come up with aesthetic recommendations.
“Everybody took part in these things,” Bearden says.
In 2016, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is having his Crump moment.
“When I go to neighborhood meetings and someone says we need to clean up blight, that’s my responsibility,” Strickland says.
The city’s Blight Elimination Charter is one of the most comprehensive clean-up plans in decades. It also relies on the participation of nonprofit groups, private entities and even other governments.
But Strickland’s task is much larger than Crump’s. The very definition of blight has changed since Keep America Beautiful produced its famous anti-litter advertisement of the tearful Native-American that would induce televised guilt throughout the 1970s.
After the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007, millions of Americans abandoned their homes. Banks couldn’t keep up the properties. Neighborhoods were beset with worsening eyesores, causing neighboring property values to decrease and more residents to walk away.
Cecile Carson, vice president of litter and affiliate relations for Keep America Beautiful, says that the decay and abandonment once associated with inner cities was suddenly everywhere. Like the problem of litter in decades past, she says it finally became “connected to this sense of place where we all live.”
Housing experts like Dan Immerglock of Georgia Tech have underscored the new definition of blight as “vacant, physically distressed buildings.” Numerous studies on the housing blight phenomenon have led cities into aggressive blight reduction campaigns through the use of demolition.
And that complicates the notion of a clean Memphis, because cleaning up some communities could also mean radically changing them.
“I don’t think the answer to fighting blight is destroying buildings,” says Orange Mound resident Mary Mitchell who feels the removal strategy chips away at a neighborhood’s history and identity.
Mitchell says that rediscovering Memphis beauty should start with re-igniting an interest in beauty itself. “Anything ugly with the right creative expression can be transformed into beauty,” she says.
Linda Steele, director for community engagement at ArtsMemphis, came to Orange Mound to connect arts funding to the real stakeholders who benefit from it.
“We really need the community to be a major part of identifying the solutions,” she says.
LueElla Marshall had a simple solution for the litter problem in Orange Mound. Garbage cans. Pedestrians had no place to put trash. She asked ArtsMemphis for a grant. Now, brightly painted garbage cans – or Art Cans, as they’re called – encourage cleaner streets.
But Marshall didn’t foresee the barrier between city and citizen. She and her husband have to empty those garbage cans themselves. On the street, it’s called litter. In the cans it’s called Marshall’s responsibility.
“I gotta do what I have to do,” Marshall says.
Mitchell says that a renaissance of Memphis beauty is possible.
“What LueElla is doing is the evolution of a process that began right here in the 1930s with E.H. Crump,” Mitchell says.
But this time, the city and its people are employing different avenues to get there.
NEXT: City of Grit, Part 3. What is it about all those old, graffiti covered warehouses and mysterious, seemingly forgotten areas of town where only the most adventurous go? Is there something beautiful in the rugged character of Memphis that we’re overlooking?
