Mud Island River Park begins right here, a five-block-long peninsula that juts into the Wolf River Harbor just north of downtown Memphis. The island itself is an accident of history — it formed in the early twentieth century when a U.S. Navy gunboat dropped anchor and the silt began accumulating around it. The park that opened here in 1982 contains one of the most remarkable features of any American city park: the River Walk, a scale model of the entire lower Mississippi River, from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico, reproduced in concrete at a scale of one inch per mile horizontally and one inch per foot vertically.
You can walk the entire 2,000 miles of river in about half a mile. Every major city along the river is labeled. Every bend, every tributary, every floodplain is represented.
At the end, the model empties into a one-acre pool representing the Gulf of Mexico, where you can wade in on a hot day. The Mississippi River Museum on the island tells the full story of the river's ecology, its steamboat era, and its floods. This is a city that knows it was made by a river.