The mile-long, heavily wooded expanse of Overton Park , three miles from downtown (#50 bus) on Poplar Avenue, holds the wide-ranging Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Tues-Fri 10am-4pm, first Wed of each month free 10am-9pm, Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11.30am-5pm; $5; ), and the recently modernized Memphis Zoo and Aquarium (daily 9am-6pm, last visitors allowed to enter 5pm; $9.50). Overton Square , the city's top suburban entertainment, dining and shopping district, is within walking distance. Just past East Parkway, the Memphis Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium at 3050 Central Ave (Mon-Thurs 9am-4pm, Fri-Sat 9am-9pm, Sun noon-6pm; $7) centers on the pink marble mansion of Clarence Saunders, who founded America's first chain of self-service supermarkets , Piggly-Wiggly, in 1916. Saunders went bankrupt in 1923, and never actually lived here; instead the building has acquired several new wings in the process of becoming an all-embracing museum of Memphis history, holding all kinds of stuffed animals and oddities, including a miniature circus, an IMAX cinema and the Sharpe Planetarium , as well as a walk-through model of the first Piggly-Wiggly store, complete with 2¢ packets of Kellogg's Cornflakes and 8¢ cans of Campbell's Soup.

South of Overton Square, the tiny, hip Cooper-Young intersection is as yet little more than a handful of shops: vintage stores where the city's punks and hippies burrow through secondhand psychedelic Crimplene, and richer arty types muse over retro knickknacks. It's a lively place, quite different from downtown, where you're likely to stumble across poetry readings and yard sales, art exhibits and antique auctions.

Midtown and East Memphis

• Midtown and East Memphis

Tennessee cities


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