I-55/Crump work skirts French Fort
Historic neighborhood quiet, secluded
Marvin Housley lives in an enclave so tranquil and close-knit he can venture out to ride his bike at 4 a.m., cruising under the streetlights past neighbors he’s known for decades, with few worries about crime or traffic.
“The only thing I worry about (running into) is the paper man,” he said.
Housley, a 50-year-old building engineer, doesn’t reside in a gated community in the suburbs. His home is barely a mile from Downtown Memphis, in the historic French Fort neighborhood.
Like many other residents in the subdivision, he says he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. “There’s a seclusion here that we want to keep.”
After several years of discussions with the Tennessee Department of Transportation over its plans to rebuild Interstate 55 at Crump Boulevard, Housley and residents in the other 140 or so homes in French Fort are getting their wish. Although TDOT’s original plans would have run a six-lane interstate through the northeastern corner of the neighborhood, taking as many as nine homes, the department has revamped the project to avoid it entirely.
The $57 million project, which will require the nine-month closure of the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge in 2017, is designed to eliminate the hazards and congestion created when vehicles negotiate the tight, outmoded cloverleaf interchange just east of the bridge. It replaces the cloverleaf with a sweeping curve between the bridge and the nearby alignment of I-55 though Southwest Memphis, while also separating city street traffic from the interstate. Construction will begin next year and last three years.
TDOT was able to spare the neighborhood by changing the geometry of the curve, swinging it farther east while also avoiding
the Hershey plant on the west side of the interstate, said project manager Steve Chipman. To further protect the neighborhood, noise-abatement walls will be installed between I-55 and homes on the eastern edge of French Fort.
The modifications that will preserve French Fort, Chipman said, are not the cause of the planned bridge closure, which generated intense criticism in public meetings last week.
Protecting French Fort was a goal of not just neighborhood residents, but the city officials and planners who consulted with TDOT.
“That was an important consideration, and TDOT listened to the citizens,” said Memphis City Engineer John Cameron.
Josh Whitehead, planning director for the Office of Planning and Development, said French Fort is the type of stable, wellmaintained neighborhood that local officials should do their best to save from highway projects.
“It’s bad enough to bulldoze neighborhoods that are struggling,” Whitehead said. “But neighborhoods that are doing well, we need to do everything we can” to preserve.
Named for Fort Assumption, built on a nearby site by the French in 1739, French Fort is bounded on the east and north by I-55, on the south by railroad tracks near McLemore, and on the west by Riverside Boulevard and two parks along the Mississippi River.
From its origins as an urban renewal project undertaken by Memphis Housing Authority more than 50 years ago, French Fort grew into one of the city’s first middle-class African-American neighborhoods.
“It was developed at a time when there were limited options” for black homebuyers, Whitehead said.
The 1963 covenants for the subdivision — using the kind of language that would be employed five years later in the Fair Housing Act — expressly prohibited restricting sales or leases based on race, religion, color or national origin.
Residents of French Fort include such prominent Memphians as Fred Jones, founder of the Southern Heritage Classic football game, and Sara Lewis, a former teacher, assistant superintendent and school board president with the old Memphis City Schools. Several school principals also live there.
The suburban-style homes, most of them built between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, typically have between 1,200 and 2,800 square feet and are valued at anywhere from $55,000 to $100,000 or more. Of the more than 140 homes, only a few are vacant, residents say.
“It’s the best-kept secret in this city,” said Lewis, 78, an owner whose home would have been taken under the initial TDOT plans. “It’s a little bit of heaven.”
Many of the homes remain occupied by the original buyers, including Lewis, who moved into hers in 1969. Many others were purchased by people who grew up in the neighborhood.
Crime is relatively rare, Lewis said, and neighbors look out for one another. “If you can see a car over here and you don’t recognize the person, what we do is just follow them,” she said.
Access has been both a benefit and bane to French Fort. With just three main ways in — along Riverside, Wisconsin Avenue and the Metal Museum Drive underpass beneath I-55 — the neighborhood enjoys a degree of seclusion. But one of the main ways of getting out — directly onto I-55 from Alston Avenue — often is negotiated “at risk to life and limb,” Lewis said.
The TDOT project will do away with the direct I-55 exit, while providing easy access to French Fort from a traffic roundabout to be built on the site of the cloverleaf.
Lewis and other French Fort residents worked with Chipman over a period of several years to ensure the neighborhood would be spared from the I-55-Crump project. They credit him and other TDOT officials for their flexibility and willingness to modify the plans.
“We wanted to preserve the integrity of our community,” Lewis said. “We’re not belligerent. We’re just protective of our homes.”