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.