MEMPHIS — For years, Memphis has been haunted by its Riddle of the Pyramid: What do you do with an empty 32-story glass-and-steel monument that was supposed to be this city’s answer to the Eiffel Tower or the Gateway Arch?

That riddle has now been solved: The Pyramid, once a troubled arena for basketball and concerts, will be reborn as a hunting and fishing superstore hawking duck calls and tackle boxes. The much-maligned building, which once served as the home of the Memphis Grizzlies of the N.B.A. and the University of Memphis basketball program, is scheduled to officially reopen in late April or early May as an outpost of the Bass Pro Shops empire, the self-described “retail mecca for sportsmen,” whose massive hunting and fishing stores are fixtures on many a heartland feeder road.

For Mayor A C Wharton Jr., getting Bass Pro Shops is a blessing that brings closure to one of the nation’s weirdest urban-development misfires. The Pyramid project began in the late 1980s as a nod to the Egyptian roots of Memphis’s name and an investment in the core of a city still trying to recover from the trauma of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. If the new iteration is not quite the game-changing international monument that the original promoters promised, at least Memphians can say that they are moving on.

“Quite frankly,” Mr. Wharton said, “what revenue-producing, tax-producing activities would be well suited to be located in a pyramid?”