Ducks and Drakes ...
and all that Jazz!
Neil Fraser
May 5, 2003
LEARNT a couple of lessons that weren't on the programme of this year's International Downtown Association (IDA) Spring workshop which was held last weekend in Memphis, Tennessee.
Two of these were that powerful marketing opportunities can grow out of the silliest incidents if their potential is recognised and nurtured and, secondly, that great urban stories that lead to successful urban revitalisation don't necessarily have to be based totally on hard fact.
The redevelopment of Memphis' famous Beale Street, the "crossroads of American music" exemplifies the latter. What is fascinating about Beale Street today is that whilst the reconstruction of this previously blighted area is certainly not based on fable it is equally not altogether as a result of only hard fact.
Rather it is the result of the merging of one story of PLACE, Beale Street itself, with another story, that of many PEOPLE and their music - jazz, blues and rock 'n roll - but many of whom and whose music didn't have their genesis in Beale Street itself.
The street was evidently named after an unknown military hero in 1841 and became the main street of South Memphis. It was a major thoroughfare which, at its southernmost end where it met with the Mississippi River, became a loading dock for barges servicing the burgeoning cotton industry.
To its east were the mansions occupied by the local gentry. By 1900 the street boasted an opera house, hotel, a girls finishing school and one of the biggest commercial buildings in Memphis.
It was a place where Jewish, Italian, Greek and Chinese immigrants lived and worked. But it also progressively became the place where African-American cotton workers visited while their plantation bosses had their cotton graded and sold in Memphis' Cotton Exchange. And with them came some of the music from the cotton fields and also via the great Mississippi.
By 1920 Beale Street had become the "capital" of black Memphis and of the mid-South. It "took on a carnival atmosphere and gambling, drinking, prostitution, murder and voodoo thrived alongside the booming nightclubs, theatres, restaurants, stores, pawnshops, bordellos and hot music.
One club, The Monarch, was known as the Castle Of Missing Men due to the fact that its gunshot victims and dead gamblers could be easily disposed of at the undertaker's place that shared the back alley."
An observer's description of night life on the street - "By mid-evening, the street would be packed and a one-block walk could take forever, especially if one had to detour around the medicine show set up in the little hole in the wall, or if one stopped and listened to the wandering bluesmen playing for pennies and nickels.
There was the sight of Machine Gun Kelly peddling bottled whisky from a clothes basket back before he moved into the ranks of big-time crime. There were numerous gamblers setting a box next to the card table and sliding a share of the take into it for the church down the street.
There were big vaudeville shows at the Palace and the Daisy, hot snoot sandwiches at the corner café, jug bands playing down at the park and one block over on Gayoso there was a red-light district to rival New Orleans' Storyville."
But by the 1960s, Beale Street was dead, a victim of the changing economic climate but also because of the hardening of discrimination in the face of the civil rights movement. In a similar scenario to Fietas (Citichats 11 to 13) it eventually became the unwilling recipient of "urban renewal" - many of the buildings were destroyed or gutted leaving the street pockmarked with all that was left standing, the facades.
In the late 1970s the City Council bought nearly all the properties along three blocks of the original street. They set up the Beale Street Management Corporation whose objective was to create an entertainment district in the blighted area. But it wasn't until 1982 that a developer, John Elkington, became involved.
His company leased the street and the skeleton properties from the Council for a dollar a year over a forty-odd year period and started weaving together the stories of the emergence of jazz, blues and rock 'n roll with the rich history of the street.
Carefully selecting tenants that would reinforce the music theme, blending the music with appropriate retail and with the unique southern food of the area, clubs and businesses started to move back into appropriately renovated buildings. Alfred's; B.B.King's Blues Club; Elvis Presley's Memphis; Beale Street Blues and Barbeque; Memphis Music; Silky O'Sullivans; Wet Willies; Tater Red, the names conjure up a rich tapestry of music and musicians interwoven with southern cuisine.
The emergence of the revitalised street also resulted in the building of the "Rock 'n Soul" Museum, an interactive museum which provides a brilliant visual and aural commentary on the emergence of American music. The Stax record company is about to open a major new facility celebrating its part in the history of the American music industry.
The underlying perception that Beale Street provides today is that it is the rediscovered centre of America's blues, jazz and rock 'n roll. Certainly it was one of the centres but so was Chicago and Kansas City, Birmingham and Atlanta, St Louis and of course New Orleans, the heart and soul, from where much of the music of the time was 'exported' up the Mississippi River!
Many years ago Ripley, on his 'Believe it or Not' radio programme, ill-advisedly introduced W.C.Handy (who had made Memphis his base) as the originator of blues and jazz. Jelly Roll Morton, the great New Orleans musician caustically set the record straight; "Mr. Handy", he wrote, "cannot prove that he created any music.
He has possibly taken advantage of some unprotected material that sometimes floats around. I would like to know how a person could be an originator of anything without at least being able to do at least some of what they created."
But let none of that distract from what has been done with Beale Street. It has been reconstructed as a melting pot of black history, culture and commerce and is marketed superbly as the results bear witness.
Today the word vibrant seems to be an understatement as Beale Street has become one of the hottest entertainment districts in the States - the street now attracts six million people a year - from epitome of urban decay to the number one tourist attraction in the State of Tennessee.
The other lesson I learned was how even the silliest of incidents can grow into a powerful marketing opportunity if their potential is recognised and nurtured. The IDA conference was held at Memphis' Peabody Hotel. The original hotel was built in 1869, some seventeen years before gold was discovered in Johannesburg.
The hotel then cost $60.000-00 to build and accommodation cost $4.00 a night including all meals. Following a collapse of part of the building in 1906 a new section was added but the hotel was then completely rebuilt in 1925 when it earned the title of "the grandest hotel in the south".
By the 1950s the hotel was succumbing to the pressure of competition from more modern hotels and eating houses and ownership that was not reacting to the changes. Ironically one progressive change that was made helped its demise, in 1961 it opened its doors to black patrons.
At the time Memphis was highly segregated and socialites of the era were not prepared to accept so radical a change! By 1954 the hotel was in serious financial trouble and was placed on a foreclosure sale by the courts. The hotel evidently changed hands on a number of subsequent occasions and it wasn't until 1981 that its restoration under the current owners, the Belz Investment Company, was undertaken and the hotel re-opened.
The elegant lobby contains a magnificent marble fountain which has been its centrepiece since 1925. In the late 30s the manager of the hotel and a friend were having a couple of drinks in the lobby following a duck hunting trip and as a joke placed the live ducks they had been using as decoys in the fountain.
The event sparked off a great deal of talk giving rise to unexpected publicity and the manager, Frank Schutt, decided that the ducks should become a permanent feature of the Peabody's hotel life.
A young bellman, Edward Pembroke, who had once worked as a trainer in a circus offered to escort the ducks to the and from the fountain in the lobby each day. He was given the title of Duckmaster which title he held from 1940 until his retirement in 1991.
So was born a tradition - every morning at 11 o'clock sharp the ducks, a drake and four hens, are brought from their penthouse home on the roof, down the lift and across a red carpet to the fountain accompanied by the Duckmaster against a background of ceremonial marching music.
At 5 in the evening the reverse occurs. Their home on the roof, the Royal Duck Palace incidentally incorporates a six-foot diameter fountain with a centrally placed statue of a duck with water flowing from its bill. The Palace has a covered bed chamber the walls of which have hand painted murals!
Dozens of people gather in the lobby to witness these unique processions cheering and clapping as the ducks emerge from the lift and across the lobby floor on a red carpet and hop up and down the temporary steps that are placed to assist them getting in and out of the fountain.
This tradition is claimed to be known throughout the States and even earned the ducks a Lifetime Achievement Special Relations Award from the Hospitality, Sales and Marketing Association International.
The ducks travel extensively all over the States promoting the Peabody Hotel and enjoy the same lifestyle when travelling to that to which they are accustomed in their Royal Duck Palace on the roof of the hotel.
While on the road they are escorted by an entourage in charge of their accoutrements which includes a magnificent carrying case, their traditional red carpet and a portable fountain. Their accommodation is always in a suite in the finest local hotels - they are true celebrities.
Ducks and jazz - tradition and folklore - lessons to be learned.
