You Can Stay in Elvis’s Home

Elvis’s bedroom at Lauderdale Courts.

(COURTESY UPTOWN MEMPHIS/MORGAN MUKKARAM)

Seven hundred thousand tourists visit Graceland every year to spend time where Elvis lived, but none get to see his bedroom, much less sleep there. Yet there is one place where Elvis lived where you can actually stay, the apartment complex Lauderdale Courts (www.lauderdalecourts.com, 901-521-8219), the Memphis home he lived in second-longest (after Graceland, of course). Saved from the wrecking ball in the mid-1990s by an unlikely coalition of preservationists and Elvis fans, the downtown complex offers tourists the chance to inhabit Presley’s meticulously restored apartment and sleep in his bedroom.

Thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley moved to Memphis with his parents, Gladys and Vernon, in 1948 to escape what they saw as a dead-end life in Tupelo, Mississippi. Vernon had done construction in Memphis during the war, and now he found a job in a munitions factory and soon after a paint company, while Gladys operated a sewing machine for a curtain manufacturer. The family stayed for a short time in one rooming house, then moved to another, where they paid $9.50 a week for a one—room apartment, shared a bathroom with other tenants, and cooked their meals on a hot plate. After six months of that they applied for public housing.

A Memphis housing official noted their poor living conditions and recommended them for the coveted Lauderdale Courts. Housing projects may carry a stigma today, but the WPA—constructed Lauderdale Courts actually lived up to the ideals of the New Deal. Around the 433 apartments and immaculate grounds was an atmosphere of ambition, aspiration, and optimism. The family-income cap was $2,500 per year, and the place gave many of its residents, who moved there from shacks or slums, their first home ever with plumbing. Some of the residents went on to become doctors, lawyers, and judges, and many were able to own their own homes within a generation.

The Presleys moved in September 20, 1949, paying $35 a month for a two-bedroom apartment complete with kitchen, living room, and bathroom. The shy Elvis quickly made friends in the Courts’ tightly-knit community. He played football with his buddies, practiced guitar in the laundry room, listened to the pioneering local radio stations, and took advantage of the Courts’ central location to explore the shops and music scene of nearby Beale and Main streets.

For $249 per night, visitors today can enjoy the same convenient proximity to Memphis’s landmarks—Beale street is a few blocks over, and Sun Studios is a mile away—and come back to rooms painstakingly restored with period detail such as a working 1951 Frigidaire, ceramic tile in the bathroom, and free-standing sinks. Guests can also enjoy amenities the Presleys didn’t have, like air conditioning and a microwave, and ones that hadn’t been invented yet, like flat-screen high-definition TV (please don’t shoot the TV), a DVD player (with a selection of Elvis movies), a CD player, and free wireless Internet access. The other apartments, now called Uptown Square, have been renovated into upscale units and are available for rent. The complex fell into vacancy and disrepair in the 1980s and 90s and was scheduled for demolition, only to be rescued by the fund-raising and petitioning of the Memphis Heritage preservation organization and Elvis fans all over the country.

The Presleys were evicted from Lauderdale Courts in November 1952, when it was discovered that their income, $4,133, exceeded the limit for public housing. They moved out the following January, five months before Elvis graduated from high school, and boarded in a rooming house until they found an apartment near the Courts, where they could be near their friends. By the end of that summer, Elvis had wandered into Sun Studios and paid $3.98 (plus tax) to record his first record, a cover of the 1948 hit “My Happiness.” The rest of his career, from rock ’n’ roll upstart to cultural phenomenon, is well-documented music history, immortalized at Graceland. Now there’s finally a place to remember the shy adolescent who sat on the washing machine, strumming and dreaming.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.