photograph by anna traverse fogle
In May, Stuart Harris with Constellation Properties — the new owner of the Sterick Building — offered our staff a private tour of the long-dormant building. It would be quite an adventure. The 29-story building has been sealed off for more than 30 years, and has no electricity — so that meant no lights, and no elevators. More than 2,000 windows provided plenty of light, as long as we were wandering about the outside offices of the structure. Once deeper inside inside the massive building, a maze of hallways and windowless offices, it wasn't quite so easy to find your way around (as one of our colleagues discovered, when he ventured into one of the many inside stairwells and discovered his iPhone flashlight wasn't working).
But we spent an hour or so inside the former “Queen of Memphis” and discovered a time capsule: some offices that looked like they had been abandoned yesterday, but other areas that hadn't seen activity for decades — and had the ugly carpet and bizarre wallpaper to show for it. We found oddities — a lovely turquoise-blue water fountain in a hallway, an ancient wash basin in an office, and even an office with a "Dutch door" with the doorknob only a foot off the ground.
We thought about trying to identify everything you see here, but we think the photos — most of them taken by Anna Traverse Fogle with a few by Michael Finger — speak for themselves. They show that the Sterick Building still shows considerable evidence of its former glory as “The Queen of Memphis” — while also presenting some of the challenges faced by the new developers who intend to bring it back to life.
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