1964—Beatles come to America.
1965—Malcolm X shot; American troops sent to Vietnam.
1967—Six-Day War in Israel.
1968—Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated; massacre at My Lai.
1969—Despite designation as National Historic Landmark, Beale Street area demolished and buildings (with exception of Schwab’s Emporium) condemned.
1970s — Bisected by Interstate 40 as part of construction for Hernando DeSoto Bridge, Pinch district becomes target for slum clearance.
It didn’t happen overnight, but against all reasonable expectations Muni’s book struck a chord with the reading public. There was, apparently, still a reading public. The reviews, such as they were, were mixed: the favorable, perhaps influenced by the psychedelic ethos of the day, praised the kaleidoscopic nature of the narrative. Some said it evoked a kind of folk consciousness and even delighted in the book’s refusal to conform to a specific genre. Soberer judgments — and these were in the majority — suggested that The Pinch was the product of a puerile sensibility and dismissed it out of hand. There were those, too, who complained that the surplus of “tribal” content was off-putting and exclusive. But somehow a gradual groundswell of word-of-mouth sentiment began to create a stir in various quarters, and the book — like an awkward dance step that turns out to be liberating — started to catch on. By the time Lenny received the publisher’s biannual statement, The Pinch had made up its advance and begun to generate royalties. By the end of the fiscal year the book had attained a minor cult status, a paperback edition was in the works, and Leonard Sklarew was on his way to becoming solvent.
A few readers, when they discovered that both the Book Asylum and its young proprietor were extant, sought them out. At first Lenny had welcomed the pilgrims; the book’s notoriety (and the capital it generated) had helped to assuage his lingering guilt, and he was willing now to bask a bit in its reflected glory. But for their part the visitors were unable to hide their disappointment on meeting the book dealer in person: an unprepossessing, thickly bespectacled guy growing a paunch and bookish in the extreme, with no hint of the restless miscreant from the text. Ultimately Lenny would have them to know that the letdown was mutual.
Another consequence of the book’s growing popularity was a renewed interest in the geographic Pinch (which few Memphians had ever even heard of) as a historical site. The curious began to visit it, looking for traces of the old ghetto community from Muni’s tales. Most, finding mainly ruins, passed on, but a handful of young artists, imbued with nostalgia for a place they’d known only in print, took advantage of the cheap real estate; they purchased loft space to convert into studios in an old coffee factory that had so far been spared the wrecking ball. Soon after, a coterie of utopian-minded friends, for whom The Pinch had become a kind of holy book, pooled their resources to make a down payment on one of the few remaining tenements on North Main. They lived there as a collective, renovating the apartments upstairs and opening a crafts shop on the ground floor. In the shop, along with feather earrings, macraméé bracelets, and scented candles, they sold — in a nod toward an “oriental” theme — homemade hamantashen and chocolate Hanukkah gelt. Thanks to a growing host of Pinch-inspired tourists, the shop prospered, its success spurring another young entrepreneur to open a tavern in a face-lifted building across the way. In deference to the spirit of place he served draft beer from a samovar.
This vest-pocket commercial revival lured more foot traffic into the area, people milling about the sidewalks as if waiting impatiently for the further transformation of the street. Their presence attracted the notice of a group of progressive local investors, who became interested in redeveloping the district on an enterprising scale. They formed a consortium and submitted an ambitious plan to the city for construction of a number of edifices along both sides of North Main. Included in the plan was a self-imposed provision that the design of the new buildings — which would house an assortment of businesses and apartments — conform to the architecture of the original structures, thus preserving the flavor of the turn-of-the-century neighborhood. Newspapers and city fathers applauded the North Main Street Renaissance, as the development was called, and businesses jockeyed for a spot in what they now perceived as a prime location. When the ribbon was cut at the quarter’s inauguration, the public, like runners at the start of a race, bolted into a street lined with retail attractions. Alongside the boutiques and period cafés (one called unavoidably Catfish Bayou) there were traditional artisans’ shops, where visitors could observe cobblers, cigar rollers, pretzel bakers, and bespoke tailors at work on antique sewing machines. There was even a quality delicatessen with the gilt inscription 
in the window, though there was of course no kosher fare on the menu.
Residents of the luxury apartments above the shops enjoyed a relaxed urban lifestyle in an appealing if somewhat artificial environment, a secure community of like-minded affluent types; this at a time when the rest of the city, as viewed from the rarefied vantage of the Pinch, still wallowed in a swamp of ignorance and rising crime. It’s true that the street’s advance-guard pioneers — the loft dwellers and tchotchke-mongers — were eventually priced out of the gentrified neighborhood; but there remained enough of a bohemian-inflected atmosphere to ensure North Main’s continuance as a fashionable destination for citizens and tourists alike. Nor did the new Pinch forget its debt to the Old World milieu that had fostered its revitalization in the first place. The vestibules of several condominiums were decorated with murals displaying large-scale reproductions of the paintings of Tyrone Pin. (These included mildly sentimentalized versions of the inverted oak, lit like a menorah and hung with fiends and earlocked children in beanies riding rafts like giant afikomens.) The paintings themselves, enhanced by the legend of the mad artist, now fetched princely sums. The proceeds from their sales were placed in a trust established by Leonard Sklarew through the connivance of his attorney, Philly Sacharin. As executive officer of the Tyrone Pin Trust (“Pin money,” its recipients called it), Mr. Sklarew, flush from the thirteenth printing of The Pinch, could allocate the funds as he saw fit. Needless to say, he made certain that the artist, himself unaware of his success and protected from curiosity seekers by the staff at his facility, would be well looked after until his death. Then there were donations to pet charities and causes, plus an endowment (supplemented by a memorial concert) that allowed the B’nai B’rith Home for the Aged to break ground for a lavish new Elder Lincoln Wing.
Perhaps the crowning element of the North Main Street Renaissance was the construction of a streetcar line, which stretched from the Pinch along Main Street proper as far as the refurbished Central Station on South Main. The new trolley had an old-fashioned character, featuring heritage-style wooden cars with reversible mahogany seats and brass handles. Along its route once-vacant commercial premises began to reopen, their tenants including famous-name chain stores, gourmet markets, chic bistros, and wine bars. The mercantile fervor that had infected North Main and its contiguous district also reawakened the dust of Beale Street, which began again, Lazarus-like, to show signs of life. In time its vintage restoration became the hub of the city’s musical nightlife, and downtown Memphis, risen from its longtime repose, flourished like never before.