                                ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996                 TAG: 9603220100
SECTION: EDITORIAL                PAGE: F-3  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: EDMUND C. ARNOLD

THE MEMPHIS CONNECTION LESSONS FROM BEALE STREET FOR ROANOKE'S HENRY STREET

DECADES AGO, the historic street on the edge of downtown wasn't simply an entertainment district, though music was played there. It was, for a segregated Southern city, a center of black commerce and community.

In the 1960s, urban decay and urban renewal reduced the street to a bombed-out wasteland.

Since then, revival efforts have been hampered by lingering racism, official neglect, the daunting difficulty and expense of redevelopment, and the black community's continuing distrust of the white establishment.

This is what I learned last weekend . . . about Beale Street in Memphis.

With a couple of friends, my wife and I went on a pilgrimage to that city on the Mississippi. For all the differences between Memphis and Roanoke, and they are considerable, it wasn't hard to observe parallels between Beale Street's ongoing comeback and a Roanoke group's effort to resurrect an entertainment district on Henry Street.

Beale Street is not, of course, the only or even the main reason to visit Memphis.

We stood in the very Sun recording studio where Howlin' Wolf howled, where the King was discovered and the Killer banged an old upright, where rock music was ushered kicking and screaming into a world ripe for pop-culture revolution.

We visited Memphis' fine civil-rights museum converted from the old Lorraine Motel, where the murder of Martin Luther King - our century's greatest political leader - also changed the world.

We drifted through the audio-guided tour of maxi-Graceland, taking in the jungle room, sequined stage costumes, gold-record trophies and other fantasies realized by the idol who popularized a black-charged musical idiom for white America.

We also drove an hour and a half to Oxford, Miss., to stroll through the old house, surrounded by cedars and magnolias and oaks, where William Faulkner dreamed of fallen aristocracy and crafted perhaps the century's finest prose.

Even so, because of the Henry Street connection, we gave special attention to Beale Street.

We spent an afternoon walking up and down it. We spent an evening in one of its blues clubs, listening to the profound art form that emerged from the Mississippi delta around the turn of the century, later to be electrified and appropriated.

A collection of destinations on this scale marks one of the big differences, of course, between Memphis and Roanoke. Our tourism pickings always will be slimmer. And Henry Street itself is, to be sure, no Beale Street.

Roanoke, though, is in most respects a nicer place than the bigger Memphis. We also have advantages to work with, including a good location for attracting visitors, less racial animosity in our past, more life in our downtown.

And just because Henry Street lacks the place in America's cultural history that Beale, cradle of the blues, enjoys doesn't mean that the Memphis revitalization effort can teach us nothing. Indeed, the development company credited with turning around Beale is interested in working in Roanoke, and could well bid on the Henry Street project should it ever get off the ground.

While in Memphis, I spent an afternoon with John Elkington, the Beale Street developer recruited to visit Roanoke by Bruce Brenner, a businessman and longtime member of the Henry Street Revitalization Committee. The first lesson I picked up from Elkington: This sort of effort isn't for the timid or the impatient.

When Elkington in 1983 accepted a long-term lease on Beale Street properties from the city of Memphis, most buildings in the district had been abandoned and boarded up, some for more than a decade.

For 10 years, he struggled. Tenants came and went; many failed. Twice, his company nearly went bankrupt. He says the "obsession" cost him his marriage.

But the former Vanderbilt linebacker was persistent. To attract investors, he seized on the idea of persuading an aging big-name musician to attach his name to a club. It took seven years to convince bluesman B.B. King to open what is now Beale Street's most successful nightspot.

To generate traffic, his company pushed for bus and trolley service, and used any excuse to launch an event or festival. To find use for second-story space above the clubs, office facilities were developed and rented out. To help allay fears of crime, a free-admission Memphis Police Museum was started, doubling as a working police station.

The gritty Beale Street I saw last weekend has a way to go. It still needs an infusion of people downtown, a critical mass slow to emerge. The once-thriving black commercial center will never be re-created.

But no one expects that. Today, three blocks of Beale Street are lined with restaurants and music joints, from B.B. King's to Rum Boogie Cafe, from which all manner of throbbing rhythms pour into the night. The street boasts a quirky department store that sells dry goods and voodoo powders; a park named after W.C. Handy, who published the first blues song in 1909; a restored theater; souvenir shops; a blues museum, a Center for Southern Folklore.

Life has returned to Beale Street, at least in the form of entertainment and economic development.

Elkington said he began with three goals: (1) to return commerce to a disaster area; (2) to make sure the redevelopment built on and reflected the street's unique cultural heritage; (3) to maximize minority participation - in the businesses and jobs created, and also in the customer base, to build bridges across Memphis' racial divide.

Last year, the street attracted 3.5 million visitors. You won't see any chain restaurants there. And black ownership of clubs is approaching 40 percent and rising.

Elkington admitted that recruiting minority-owned businesses has been difficult, at times frustrating. But an impressive 100 percent of the street's retail shops are black-owned, and 55 percent of the business managers are black.

Cultural appropriation did seem a constant theme during our visits to various Memphis sites. But at least on Beale Street, as Elkington observed, "on any night, you'll see blacks from Mississippi enjoying themselves beside whites from Tennessee." That doesn't happen in a lot of places nowadays.

In the 1960s, urban decay and urban renewal reduced the street to a bombed-out wasteland.

This is what I learned last weekend . . . about Beale Street in Memphis.

Beale Street is not, of course, the only or even the main reason to visit Memphis.

We stood in the very Sun studio where Howlin' Wolf howled, where the King was discovered and the Killer banged an old upright, where rock music was ushered kicking and screaming into a world ripe for pop-culture revolution.

We visited Memphis' fine civil-rights museum converted from the old Lorraine Motel, where the murder of Martin Luther King - our century's greatest political leader - also changed the world.

Even so, because of the Henry Street connection, we gave particular attention to Beale Street.

We spent an afternoon walking up and down it. We spent an evening in one of its blues clubs, listening to a profound art form that emerged from the Mississippi delta around the turn of the century, later to be electrified and appropriated.

Roanoke, however, is in most respects a nicer place than the bigger Memphis. We also have advantages to work with, including a good location for attracting visitors, less racial animosity in our past, more life in our downtown.

When Elkington in 1983 accepted a long-term lease from the city of Memphis on the Beale Street properties, most buildings in the district had been abandoned and boarded up, some for more than a decade.

For 10 years, he struggled. Tenants came and went; many failed. Twice, his company nearly went bankrupt. He says the "obsession" cost him his marriage.

The gritty Beale Street I saw last weekend has a way to go. It still needs an infusion of people downtown, a critical mass slow to emerge. The once-thriving black commercial center never will be re-created.

But no one expects that. Today, three blocks of Beale Street are lined with restaurants and music joints, from B.B. King's to Rum Boogie Cafe, from which all manner of throbbing rhythms pour into the night. The street boasts a quirky department store, founded in 1876, that sells dry goods and voodoo powders; a park named after W.C. Handy, who published the first blues song in 1909; a restored theater; restaurants and souvenir shops; a blues museum, a Center for Southern Folklore.

Life has returned to Beale Street, at least in the form of entertainment and economic development.

Last year, the street attracted 3.5 million visitors. You won't see any chain restaurants there. And black ownership of clubs is approaching 40 percent and rising.

Meantime on Beale Street, says Elkington, "on any night, you'll see blacks from Mississippi enjoying themselves beside whites from Tennessee." That doesn't happen in a lot of places nowadays.

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