The Best Hotel in America Is Inside the Memphis Pyramid

"I’m looking up hotels in Memphis," I texted one of my too-many group chats four summers ago, alongside a screenshot of a quote from Time Out: "It even has its very own swamp, complete with live alligators."

My updates about my forthcoming trip that my friends would not be joining, but had to hear about nonetheless, didn’t stop there; I’d learned one could stay in a room with a screened balcony overlooking a large Bass Pro Shops store designed to look and function like a real swamp. "Imagine telling your children they were conceived there!" my friend Caity responded. "Born 2 shop." I cannot be sure this was the moment I became aware of the Big Cypress Lodge, the hotel inside the Memphis Pyramid, a—yes—large stainless-steel pyramid on the Mississippi River in Tennessee. It houses both the hotel and the sprawling store, with for-sale pontoon boats in the water, numerous aquariums, gun and archery ranges, and the tallest freestanding elevator in the U.S., which takes you to a bar and observation deck at The Pyramid’s apex. But it was the moment my fate was sealed. "We might have to stay at the swamp," I wrote. "I think I’m sold."

I am not the first to be perplexed and fascinated by the many seemingly discordant parts of The Pyramid; its status has become an almost mythic part of American architecture, as if the building itself does not exist, or people cannot believe that it does. Its conception is just as hard to fathom: Apocryphally envisioned in the 1950s as three pyramids copied off of those in Giza by Memphis artist Mark C. Hartz (about whom very little information exists), the project ended up as just, finally completed in 1991 to be used as an arena for sports teams and musical acts. It was executed by the now defunct firm Rosser International, which specialized in arena builds, from a design reworked by Hartz’s son. But by the mid-2000s, it went dark after it was deemed too expensive to retrofit for the newly relocated Vancouver—soon-to-be Memphis—Grizzlies NBA team and could not find any occupants after a number of years. The list of its possible, but never finalized, uses is long; it even housed an exhibition of items recovered from the Titanic. It is the kind of space where just one detail of its origin seems more far-fetched than any other you’ve ever heard about a building—at one point there was reportedly a crystal skull placed in the top of The Pyramid.

But it is this, the building’s most recent iteration, that has solidified its legacy. As legend has it, it was Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris who decided to build a store and eventually a four-star hotel inside The Pyramid, and a decade later, it opened. The 2015 revamp was executed by O.T. Marshall Architects, a second-generation Memphis firm that has worked on a number of city projects. On its website, O.T. Marshall calls it "the most dramatic adaptive reuse project in Memphis’s modern history." I’d go as far to say it might be one of the most dramatic adaptive reuse projects in history ever. And in a country full of indulgence and kitsch, its continued existence says more about America than other structures that are far more famous.

I arrived at The Pyramid, located at the renamed 1 Bass Pro Drive, under the cover of darkness, the first night of a two-week road trip through the South with my partner, a southerner who was attempting to show me, a northerner, what this world was all about. Later, I would learn that it’s always dusk somewhere, if that somewhere is The Pyramid. Its design is such that there is no natural light in the main room, save for that streaming in from the front entry, which means that, like at a casino, time passes very strangely. The Big Cypress Lodge is one of several Johnny Morris Nature Resorts located in Tennessee and Missouri, all of them boasting the aesthetic classiness of a rustic Disney World. This is a compliment, to be clear: Like the notoriously clean Disney Parks, Big Cypress was spotless. The Bass Pro store—"store" feels less than worthy of the space, but I suppose it is what it is—is open from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. most days, so when we showed up at close to 2:00 a.m., the parking lot was empty, and there was an eerie quality to the place. The only sound was the white noise of blasting air-conditioning that is omnipresent in the American South. Our room was $683.52 for two nights—taxes and resort fee included—and though we paid with a surplus of credit card points, I can say the price would have been right had we forked over the cash.

The rooms deemed "Premier Rustic Accommodations," as a helpful interactive video on the Big Cypress Lodge website shows, are indeed designed like high-end log cabins, evoking the idea of nature without any of its inconveniences. Most of the rooms are complete with at least one reclaimed, taxidermied animal—ours was a buck—and a large bathroom separated from the main space by a curtained window. The most impressive detail, the one that had me booking this particular room and not an "exterior" one, was the screened-in porch that looks over the swamp store, complete with rocking chairs. In the middle of the night, all the lights were still on, the freestanding elevator glowing in the middle as fish lazily swam around in the waterways. I took a late-night bath in the large tub, staring through the window of my "cabin" at the bed and tall cypress trees beyond it.

The next day, after sightseeing, we carved out time in the afternoon to take ourselves on a tour of the Bass Pro Shops complex, which was lengthy. I procured a teal mesh baseball hat with the logo on the front from a box in the store swamp. We wandered through the Ducks Unlimited Waterfowling Heritage Center, a kind of museum for duck hunting, conveniently located near the Beretta Fine Gun Center—one of very few in America, the O.T. Marshall website notes. We admired the fish-themed restaurant and what the firm calls a "13-lane ocean-themed bowling alley." (The balls come out the mouths of underwater animals such as sharks, octopuses, and alligators, and live fish swim in tanks.) Then, as guests of the hotel, we got to skip the line and fee for the elevator up to the observation deck and bar, which offer sweeping vistas of highways and the muddy Mississippi. The center of the bar holds yet another huge, circular aquarium, its inhabitants likely unaware how significant their home within a home really is.

We left the next morning. One day and two nights in a sensory deprivation tank is just right. As we drove away, I thought of our visit the day before to possibly America’s most famous nonpresidential home, Graceland. Though its aesthetic is notably different from The Pyramid’s—whose isn’t?—there is a sharp contrast in the size and scale of Graceland the house versus its grounds that reminded me of our Pyramid accommodations, looming masses that had so many semi-incongruous ecosystems tucked inside of them, waiting to be discovered.

In the years since I stayed there, The Pyramid has only become more of an object of lore, fascination, obsession. Every so often, someone who knows I care will send me a thread, an Instagram post, an article, a meme, about it. The tone of this coverage, and of the discussions I’ve had about it, is laced with marvel: Can this be real? Is this truly America, as beautiful and slightly disgusting as it is? ("I told your stepfather you were staying in a Bass Pro Shop and he didn’t believe me," my mother texted me when we were there.) There is nothing new about staying in a shoppable theme park, but there is something heightened about this one, the perfect blend of American luxury and fixation on pioneerism.

"It’s going to be a monument like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, a signature for the city," Sidney Shlenker, the businessman who managed the eventual build before being kicked off the project when his company filed for bankruptcy, said of The Pyramid. "The difference is this will have something to do inside it." Now and then, it contains more somethings than Shlenker likely could have imagined. We may not have the pyramids, which have been standing for thousands of years, or anything else with the kind of gravitas that amount of time lends. But we have our Pyramid and the many multitudes it contains. A surprising blend of reverence for the outdoors, obsession with frontiers, and our country’s very special signature—don’t you forget it—excess.

Top image courtesy of Bass Pro Shops

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