Midtown Neighbors Are Building A Better Memphis To Parent In

Some Saturday mornings in August start at 6:30 with two toddlers already awake, three hours before anything opens for them, and a forecast headed for 105 degrees ☀️ Andrew Mathewes lived that morning on repeat in Midtown, then built the answer four blocks from his own front door!

Stomping Grounds opened on 901 Day in the old Railgarten space at Cooper and Central. The path there runs through two front yards and a lot of text messages that all started the same way: you should do this.

Two Neighbors, One Sidewalk

Andrew and his wife moved to Midtown in January 2020 with one hard requirement on the house hunt: walking distance to Railgarten. Lindsey Shanmugasundaram lived next door. Their kids played outside together, he talked through the idea in his head, and Lindsey, who spent more than a decade teaching young children, could not let it go 💬

“Of course I couldn't keep my mouth shut, because I'm a former teacher. I would find myself texting him, random, I think you should do this. And then he asked me if I wanted to be his partner.” Lindsey Shanmugasundaram

Open Breakfast To Bedtime

Most places built for kids open around lunch and close before dinner. Stomping Grounds runs 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week, because the hardest hours of parenting are the early ones and the late ones 🕐

The room is just as deliberate. Sight lines run clean across the floor, the playground has one way in and out, and those wall panels are sound dampening, which is the reason a parent can sit down and stay seated. Idlewild Elementary's PTO has already made the place its headquarters!

A Membership Shaped Like A Village

One household pays one rate, and that rate does not climb with each additional kid. Membership belongs to the child rather than to one parent, so grandparents, an aunt, or a best friend's mom can bring them with no extra card. Foster families get their own version tied to the adults in the household 💛

“The number one way to make parenting less hard is to rebuild a village around them. People don't live as close to their family as they used to. So how can we create physical spaces that do that?” Andrew Mathewes

Why Memphis

The mission is six words: being a parent shouldn't be so hard. The vision is bigger, that Memphis becomes the best place in the world to raise a family. Andrew comes at it from the civic side, with time at the city staffed to North Memphis, Whitehaven and Super District 9, plus ALSAC and the National Civil Rights Museum. A room where a family from Midtown and a family from Whitehaven land at the same picnic table is the entire point 🤝🏾

The city showed up for them, too. Lindsey keeps a running list of business owners who called to ask how they could help, and Andrew names the women running Cafe 127 and Little Lemon Art Studio as cheerleaders rather than competition 💙

“I feel like I've found the path that I'm on for the rest of my life. Making Memphis the best place in the world to raise a family, Stomping Grounds is step one of maybe a thousand.” Andrew Mathewes