Thinking out of the shell: Overton Park's Shell on Wheels debuts at Westwood block party
Music carried over a crowd of people huddled in the shade from a worn-down building in the center of the old Southwest Twins drive-in theater Saturday afternoon.
The normally empty Westwood location was buzzing with conversation and laughter. Friends and families sat in shaded chairs, eating cold treats and sipping beverages coated in condensation to combat the triple-digit heat index.
About 50 yards away from the shade, a band was performing on stage bearing a near identical façade to the Overton Park Shell, but this stage was half the size.
In actuality, according to the man who helped create the structure, Jeff Phelps, the stage is 48% the size of the one in Overton Park.
And it's supported by wheels.
Saturday's event was the miniature shell's debut, which was about a year in the making, Phelps said.
"We're trying to bring the community together," Phelps said from the protection of a tent behind the stage. "By making this mobile, people don't have to go out to Overton Park and worry about traffic. We can just come to them."
The idea to create a mobile stage, called The Shell on Wheels, came from the desire to give everyone in Memphis access to concerts at the Overton Park Shell, which Natalie Wilson, the executive director of the Overton Park Shell, said can be difficult.
"We truly wanted to, in the lens of accessibility, create access for all areas of our city and county," Wilson said. "Some people can't get to the Shell. There are transit issues, it's in the middle of a park with no parking lot."
Now that the nonprofit can traverse the city and have pop-up concerts, Wilson said she hopes it will bring people together and start to transform the way not only people outside of Memphis talk about the city, but also how Memphians talk about it.
"Our mission — inspiring positivity, unity and collaboration — and transformations with placemaking is what this is about," she said. "It's about taking in the best of life, like you do at the Shell, and bringing people together through the power of music."
The first performances to take place at the Shell on Wheels were from DJ Chuuuch and Jerome Chism, but many more performances are in the works. The Shell on Wheels will be inside Mary Elizabeth Malone Park for its Occupy the Park event.
The 900-square-foot stage took two hours to set up Saturday, with Phelps saying the quick set-up time is because the stage opens like a children's pop-up book.
"Remember those picture books you had as a kid, where you open it up and the castle popped out at you?" Phelps said. "It literally pops up like that."
Saturday's event was the first to be hosted in the lot of the Southwest Twin space in over two decades. The space was vacant after the drive-in shut down in 2001, but South Memphis residents began cleaning the space in hopes to turn what was a lot devoid of Memphians to a colorful, multi-use space.
Southwest Twin was, in fact, full of color and life Saturday, with hundreds of residents coming and going, kids climbing on a rock wall and bouncing in two rainbow-colored inflatable bounce houses, a number of food trucks and a line of tricked-out cars on display.
City, county and state officials made appearances, along with city council and mayoral candidates. With Saturday's heat, however, most blended in with the crowds in casual clothes.