In some buildings in downtown Memphis, offices facing the Great American Pyramid are equipped with automatic shades that lower themselves by mid-afternoon, when the sunlight glinting off the 300-foot-tall structure shifts from glowing to blinding. Drivers heading west in rush hour traffic squint, pulling down their cars’ sun visors and shielding their eyes with their hands.
The glass-and-stainless-steel-skinned building has been the city’s most unique landmark (and an irritant for office workers) since it opened as a sports arena and events venue in 1991. But it’s not the city’s first pyramid. Memphians have long sought to make symbolic connections to their city’s namesake, that ancient Egyptian capital on the Nile. In 1897, nearly a century before the opening of the Great American Pyramid, a 100-foot-tall wooden “Pyramid of Cheops” (another name for the Great Pyramid of Giza) served as Memphis and Shelby County’s contribution to the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville.
Other pyramid schemes emerged after World War II. In the 1950s, a local artist envisioned a trio of them—smaller reproductions of the Giza complex—on the city’s Mississippi riverfront. In the 1970s, a group of local business leaders conjured a plan for a golden pyramid on the bluffs outside of town. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the idea found local backers willing to bet that a one-of-a-kind attraction could bring new life to the city’s riverfront.
In a pamphlet distributed at the Centennial Expo, a photograph of the replica pyramid was accompanied by a quote attributed to Lady Morgan, a 19th-century Irish novelist: “Architecture is the printing press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of society in which it was erected.”
So what was the state of society in Memphis as it produced its many iterations of the Pyramid? A series of disasters and upheavals, mostly: numerous yellow fever epidemics, the end of the Civil War, lynchings, Jim Crow, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., white flight to far-flung suburbs, and the steady demolition of large swaths of black neighborhoods in urban renewal projects that swept the city following World War II.
The history of the Memphis Pyramid, which is now emblazoned with a massive Bass Pro Shops logo on its side, is as bewildering as its appearance, and as reflective of the people who conceived of it.