Tennessee Roads - Sam Cooper Blvd./former I-40

Sam Cooper Boulevard (former I-40)



As I said on the I-40 page, this is the former I-40 into Memphis, abandoned to city maintenance when TDOT was unable to push through Overton Park and connect to the rest of I-40 across the Mississippi River. There's still clear land on the east side of the western I-40/240 interchange where this would have tied in. So use your imagination to stick I-40 shields in the blank spaces here, as old as you'd like them to be. In the second photo, I'm assuming the gantry was meant to be WEST 40 on the left, then an Exit 6 advance sign in the middle, except Exit 6 never happened. What did happen instead is the extension of the highway westward by another mile from Tillman St. to US 64/70/79 as a boulevard, so the only thing that ends in 1/2 mile is the freeway. That extension only happened in this millennium, and I'm sure the signs are older than that.


Graham St. NB at Sam Cooper Exit 8. I wonder why the exit numbers still exist when the highway does not - my guess is the city replaced old button copy signs with identical ones, right down to the space left by the I-40 shield.


The new end of the boulevard, with accurate but strange junction signage.

Current I-40

Onto US 70
Onto US 79
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