The Memphis Pyramid was built in 1991 as a sports and entertainment arena, went dark for a decade after the city lost its NBA and college basketball tenants, and sat empty on the riverfront long enough that locals started calling it the city’s most expensive embarrassment. Then Bass Pro Shops spent $105 million converting it into what is, without question, the strangest retail experience in Tennessee.
I pulled into the parking lot on a Tuesday morning in January, expecting something like a large sporting goods store with a gimmick. What I found instead was a ten-story atrium inside a glass pyramid, with a swamp running through the ground floor, live alligators in a pen near the entrance, and a 100-foot waterfall descending the interior wall. The scale is genuinely disorienting. Standing on the main floor, you have to crane your neck to see the ceiling, and even then you can’t quite make it out.
The ground level operates roughly like a Bass Pro store: fishing rods, camouflage jackets, hunting gear, kayaks hanging from the rafters. But it’s hard to actually shop because the room keeps demanding your attention. There’s a cypress swamp with live fish visible through glass panels in the floor. There’s a bowling alley tucked against one wall. A shooting range runs off to the side. The whole thing is decorated in taxidermy so dense and theatrical it starts to feel like a natural history museum had a fever dream.
The elevator to the top is free, and you should take it. The observation deck sits at 321 feet and looks out over the Mississippi River on one side and the Memphis skyline on the other. On a clear day you can see into Arkansas. It costs nothing beyond the parking, which runs about ten dollars.
If you stay for lunch, Wahlburgers operates a restaurant inside the pyramid, and it’s a solid, unfussy burger — nothing that will change your life, but good enough that I ate there twice. The Uncle Buck’s Fishbowl restaurant adjacent to it, with its bowling lanes and mounted fish the size of compact cars, is worth at least a walk-through. Prices are roughly what you’d expect from a mid-range chain: burgers around twelve to fifteen dollars, a beer for six or seven.
There’s also a hotel inside, Big Cypress Lodge, where the rooms are either actual cabins built into the structure or treehouse units suspended above the swamp floor. Rates start around $200 a night and go up depending on the room type. I haven’t stayed, but I’ve spoken to a few people who have, and the consensus is that the novelty is real — waking up and looking down at an alligator enclosure is not something most hotels offer.
The Pyramid sits at One Bass Pro Drive, just off I-40 near the Wolf River Harbor. It’s open daily, usually 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. or later on weekends. You don’t have to buy anything to walk around, and plenty of people come just to look. For what it is — a former sports arena turned into a monument to American outdoor retail maximalism — it earns the visit. Memphis has a lot of history worth taking seriously. The Pyramid is worth taking seriously too, just for different reasons.
