When it opened in 1904 on South Main Street, the Memphis Trust Company Building was a stunning addition to our city's skyline.
But a Chicago postcard company apparently thought the image needed a little more pizzazz. So they hand-applied little bands of gold glitter to the building, as well as specks of glitter here and there on the other, smaller buildings along the street. Can you see the glitter here, as a stripe beneath the rows of windows?
The Memphis Trust Company owners did a remarkable thing 10 years after the building you see here (without the glitter, of course) opened. As the authors of Memphis: An Architectural Guide describe it, "the north half was added as a mirror image in 1914."
Yep. They actually removed an entire side of the 15-story building — an enormous undertaking, it seems — and then added a second building that exactly matched the first one.
If you stand directly in front of the double-wide building today, you can barely see the seam in the stone where the buildings were joined.
The building at 12 South Main later became home to the Bank of Commerce and Trust (not to be confused with the National Bank of Commerce — though, let's face it, the names are confusing). Then it became known as the Commerce Title Building.
After years of dormancy, it recently enjoyed a top-to-bottom conversion into nice apartments, with Cafe Keough occupying part of the former lobby on the ground floor. You can still admire the original tile flooring and fancy columns inside that space.
