(Memphis News File/Andrew J. Breig)

2016: On the cover of The Memphis News, the opening of the $52 million “Heart of the Park” project at Shelby Farms Park turns a lot of heads and prompts a lot of new traffic on land that was once a prison farm and had been slated in the 1970s for residential construction. “I feel like it’s a city that’s reinvented itself,” Shelby Farms Park Conservancy director Jen Andrews says in the cover story. “It didn’t change who it was, but it reinvented itself – a sprawling city that chose to reconnect itself. … Memphis has become a city that believes in making things better for the public realm.”

1983: Memphis elections are topped by the second race for Memphis mayor in a year. Dick Hackett, who won the 1982 special election for mayor in a runoff over City Council chairman J.O. Patterson Jr., wins the second mayor’s race without a runoff over state Sen. John Ford and six other rivals.

1973: The divorce of Elvis Presley from Priscilla Presley is finalized in Los Angeles Superior Court in Santa Monica, California.

1903: The National Audit Co. issues a report on city government finances critical of the administration of then-Memphis Mayor John Joseph Williams, concluding “a general lack of system in the accounting methods of the city, each department apparently being managed according to the opinion of the officer in charge.” The report also finds that Williams’ 14-year-old son is on the city’s payroll as a sewer inspector. The Memphis Morning News editorialized that the investigation shows “methods of conducting the public business such as would bankrupt any private concern on Earth in the course of a few years.”

Source: “Memphis During The Progressive Era” by William Miller.