The Pinch

The Pinch was never one people's neighborhood. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Russian and Greek immigrants all settled this old business district north of Adams Street, and the nickname Pinch-Gut began as a sneer at thin, hungry Irish arrivals, a label some residents disliked. First-generation shopkeepers built businesses to lift their children. The district's decline came after World War II, when prosperity and G.I. Bill home loans drew families, and then stores, east. Revival began in the late 1980s with projects including the Pyramid and the downtown trolley lines.

What the plaque says

The Pinch In the mid-1800s this twelve-block area became a stepping stone for European immigrants, and is known as Memphis' first commercial district. The name "Pinch" is traced to Irish settlers who fled the great potato famine. Their "pinch-gut" appearance prompted this slang description which became synonymous with the area. In the 1890s Jewish immigrants settled here, transforming the area to a merchant community. Pinch was home and business center to most of Memphis' Jews until the 1930s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 1.0 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 1.2 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.4 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.5 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Fort Adams / Fort Pike — 0.2 mi
• Navy Yard — 0.3 mi
• Josiah T. Settle 1850-1915 — 0.3 mi
• Casey Jones — 0.3 mi