Blues Note Hotel

A Memphis developer wants to put a 15-story, 191-room luxury hotel with a guitar-shaped rooftop pool across the street from FedExForum. More than two years after the project's planned-development permit was filed, and with a zoning variance still unresolved, there is no public evidence the project has advanced — or that it has been abandoned.

The place

The proposed site sits at the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in downtown Memphis, on a former parking lot directly across from FedExForum, home of the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies. The location places the project inside the Beale Street Entertainment District, within walking distance of Beale Street's music clubs and the AutoZone Park baseball stadium.

The concept

As proposed, the Blues Note Hotel would anchor a larger mixed-use campus developed by Blues Note Hotel Development LLC, which purchased the 2.2-acre site for $3 million in August 2022. Renderings released in May 2024 show a 15-story luxury tower with 191 rooms, paired on the same campus with a smaller boutique hotel, a nine-story condominium building, restaurant and retail space, and a rooftop pool shaped like an electric guitar — a nod to the site's proximity to Beale Street's blues heritage. The project is a second attempt at the concept. An earlier, smaller Blues Note Hotel — a 100-room property planned for 463 N. Front St. in the Pinch District — was announced in 2021 as part of a roughly $50 million mixed-use proposal and never proceeded. The current FedExForum-area version relocates and substantially enlarges that original idea, but carries the same developer group and the same unresolved financing picture.

Dining & wellness

No restaurant or bar concept has been named. Public renderings show ground-floor retail and dining space as part of the broader mixed-use campus, but no operator, brand, or menu concept has been disclosed.