Beale Street #3

Around the turn of the century, Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese came to Beale Street to pursue their fortunes and established pawnshops, clothing stores, restaurants, produce stands, theaters, and clubs. After 1920, these businesses served a predominantly Black clientele. Customers from the city and surrounding rural areas crowded Beale Street's sidewalks so heavily that people had to walk in the street to get by. Bernard Lansky recalled, "What store hours? We never had store hours. When we were here, we were here." Frank Liberto Sr. remembered that his father had a shop by the market where Handy Park is now, and that truck farmers came there with vegetables and lined up in their stalls each morning, with four or five hundred people trading produce. Mrs. Nello Pacini recalled that when her father came to this country in 1890, he began as a peddler with nowhere to sleep, hoping someday to have a home of his own, and later opened a produce place at Beale and Mulberry.

Memphis, Tennessee · United States