Sam Cooper Boulevard comes in from the east and stops at East Parkway, because a citizens' lawsuit halted Interstate 40 at the edge of Overton Park. The road was meant to continue straight through the park, a 342-acre Memphis landmark with its zoo, golf course and forest of 170 acres. Federal highway officials approved the route in 1956 and again in 1966: a six-lane expressway on a right-of-way up to 450 feet wide, taking about 26 acres and cutting the zoo off from the rest of the park. The state paid the city $2 million for the land and cleared houses on both sides. Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, founded in 1957 by neighbors including Anona Stoner, fought it for years, and by the 1960s downtown business and the newspapers were against them. In Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, decided March 2, 1971, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the Court that federal money could go to a road through a park only if there was no feasible and prudent alternative. The Court sent the case back for review, and it remains a standard case in American administrative law. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe then declined to approve the route in January 1973, and an appeals court upheld him in 1974. Tunnel and trench schemes lingered until the state gave up in 1981 and I-40 took over the northern half of the I-240 loop. West of the park the cleared strip, nearly a mile long, filled with new houses from the 1990s. In 2011 the state protected 126 acres of the park as the Old Forest State Natural Area.
Getting there
35.1486, -89.9815
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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