Klondike revival
This story was produced in partnership with WKNO-FM public radio.
The last time a major development came to the Klondike area, it cut the community in half.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Interstate 40 flattened hundreds of homes. Randall Garrett, housing director for the Klondike Smokey City Community Development Corporation, said the concrete divide changed lives and futures.
“It was middle class. And when you knock these people’s houses down and don’t give them adequate money for knocking them down due to eminent domain, it’s only certain places they can go,” he said. “It takes away from their wealth.”
When Klondike was founded in 1899, all of the homes were Black-owned. The neighborhood was structured for foot traffic within close proximity to local businesses.
“That’s what a planner would create. If he was to create a dream community, he would create Jim Crow Klondike,” Garrett said before making a quip. “And so that’s what we want to recreate — without the racism.”
Today, the Klondike Smokey City CDC estimates about half of the neighborhood is owned by Black residents or affordable housing nonprofits, higher than the countywide rate of 40%. But in majority-Black Shelby County, Garrett wants that number to grow.
On a recent tour, he points to white X’s painted on the sidewalk marking houses owned by the Moving Klondike Forward partnership. Most had been foreclosed on or abandoned.
The Klondike Smokey City CDC plans to renovate, then sell as many of them as they can to neighborhood residents at below-market prices.
We ran into one new owner, Phyllis Duckett. She grew up here, moved away, and wanted to come back. She now lives across the street from her childhood home.
“It means a lot to me. And now as an adult I … can give back to the community and I can teach them and tell them about this community and it’s going to be even better once they’re done with the Northside Square,” she said.
That’s the Northside Square development project on Vollintine. A local housing nonprofit called The Works is converting historic Northside High School into a huge community hub.
When it opens in March 2026, the neighborhood will have new affordable apartments, a theater, health clinic, arts programs, job training, restaurants, offices, and a gym. Garrett says getting houses deeded to locals ahead of a potential spike in property values was strategic.
“Us being here and acquiring these properties beforehand, it leads to us being able to have a permanent affordable housing component to this community,” he said.
But there’s another component as well — adding historic value to property value.
At a block party last September, the Klondike Smokey City CDC reminded locals just how many notable Memphians — activists, musicians, and civic heroes — have called Klondike home.
Attendees listened to oral histories, reminisced about people they knew from high school memorabilia, and placed sticky notes with memories on a map of the neighborhood.
Margaret Haltom, an urban planning PhD student, is working with the group to document the neighborhood’s history. She says Klondike has always been a cradle of Black progress in Memphis.
“As soon as residents got here in the late 1890s, they were immediately organizing to improve, like, the city’s sanitation in the neighborhood, to get street lights hung in the neighborhood,” she said.
Klondike was named after the Alaskan gold rush, which had just happened a few years prior. The neighborhood developer likened the new community to a wealth-building opportunity for Black Memphians.
The neighborhood became home to civil rights leaders like Charlie Morris and Katie Sexton. Juicy J wrote his first raps as a student at Northside High School. And Tom Lee Park’s namesake settled in Klondike after he heroically saved 32 people from drowning in the Mississippi River.
The community’s ancestors, Haltom says, are still essential to its future development.
“If you create a planning process, that’s rooted in the memories of who lives there and what those people care about, it’s a totally different process that’s not going to try to erase, you know, who they are in the community they’re from,” she said.
The block party’s pop-up museum was part of a larger effort funded by Philadelphia-based Monument Lab. That group has given $100,000 to turn the historic home once owned by Tom Lee into a community museum.
During a visit to Klondike, Monument Lab’s research director, Sue Mobley, said funding for the project is partly a response to states like Tennessee that have passed education laws equating Black history to “divisive concepts.”
“We wanted to lift up the people who were fighting to tell stories about accurate American history with nuance, with depth, with grace, and with community involvement in places that were trying to stop them,” she said.
If any Memphis neighborhood is qualified to teach divisive concepts, it’s Klondike. After all, there’s a highway right through the middle of its history. But various community groups are paving a new way forward — this one, a road to recovery.
This story is a part of Civil Wrongs, an ongoing project from WKNO and the Institute for Public Service Reporting, which explores historic injustice and today’s efforts to right them.
