At Home With the King
The former housing project where Elvis once lived can now be rented by the night. Just beware of the lipstick.
By Wayne Curtis | From Preservation | November/December 2007
Fans have left their marks on Elvis' walls.
Credit: Alexandra Mobley, The Uptown Partnership
On October 15, 1949, the Memphis Housing Appeal reported that 17 families had recently moved into Lauderdale Courts, a low-income housing project just north of the city's downtown. Among the new residents: Lucille Erwin, Betty Payne, Vernon Presley, Ernest Guy. The old newspaper is displayed in an exhibit in the basement of the Winchester, a three-story brick building and one of dozens that make up the project. I stood and marveled as I read it. Not because there really was somebody named "Ernest Guy," or even because here, in black and white, was the name of Vernon Presley, a struggling truck driver who had moved here a few years after World War II with his seamstress wife, Gladys, and a teenage son named Elvis. I marveled that the Memphis housing projects actually had their own newspaper. ("Lamar Canteen Gets Jukebox," reported another front-page article.)
Of course, I hadn't come to Memphis to learn about postwar public housing. I had come to commune with Elvis. A few years ago, Lauderdale Courts was converted into a rental complex called Uptown Square, and I was actually staying upstairs, in Winchester 328—where Elvis lived during his high school years. The apartment can be rented by the night (for up to four people), and since it opened in 2004, it has emerged as a popular destination.
To Book a Room
It may be the anti-Graceland—small, humble, nondescript—but Apartment 328 in the former Lauderdale Courts complex (now the renovated and hip Uptown Square) is no less a part of Elvis' vast lore. That's where the King lived as a teenager, from September 1949 to January 1953, along with parents Gladys and Vernon. You can stay in the Elvis Suite for a maximum of six nights; the rate is about $250 per night. Call (901) 523-8662 to book, or go to lauderdalecourts.com.
"By the time the Presleys moved here after World War II, this was really the first rung up the ladder of success," said Judith Johnson, who had stopped by to give me the history of the complex. Johnson once headed Memphis Heritage, the local preservation group, and was on the staff of the city's housing and community development division in 1996, when Lauderdale Courts was listed in the National Register. "It was very close knit—the residents were all of the same income level, and there were divorcées, so it was kind of interesting how they felt part of a family."
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