About Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid
Memphis has a 32-story steel pyramid on the Mississippi River, which would already be enough for an oddity. Then someone filled it with an outdoor store, a hotel, an artificial cypress swamp, restaurants, an underwater-themed bowling alley, a museum, enormous water features, and a freestanding elevator that carries visitors toward a glass-floored observation deck near the top.
The Memphis Pyramid originally opened as an arena in 1991. Bass Pro Shops transformed the enormous structure and reopened it in 2015 as one of the strangest retail environments in America. The company says the interior contains more than 22 million cubic feet of space, enough room to build an indoor landscape rather than merely decorate a store.
At ground level, shoppers move through a recreated delta environment with huge trees and nearly 600,000 gallons of water features. Above them is Big Cypress Lodge, a 105-room hotel built inside the pyramid. Higher still, an elevator climbs roughly 300 feet toward the observation areas, where glass sections of floor let visitors look downward while the Mississippi River and downtown Memphis spread out beyond the walls.
Calling the place a sporting goods store is technically accurate and almost useless. It is a former arena shaped like an Egyptian monument containing a fake swamp, live-in hotel guests, bowling lanes, restaurants, retail departments, and a vertical ride to the roof. Very few buildings require that many nouns to explain what is happening inside them.