If you grew up in Memphis, or lived here for any time at all, really, and ever passed the Wonder Bread factory, on Monroe, there is little chance you don’t still have stored away, in your mind’s nose, the yeasty puffy wonder-smell that wafted all around the Edge district.
No matter your relationship with carbohydrates or your degree of bread-snobbery: that smell, by God, that smell.
Now out of commission as a commercial bakery and being gutted in preparation for the next phase of its existence, the Wonder Bread factory is still tantalizing, now more for curiosity than odor. During the week, cranes hoist up and hover, and men clamber about; from the street, they appear tiny on its vast, thick slabs. On weekends, when the work breaks, the factory takes on a sort of ruined-cathedral quality, as if a magnificent structure were built long ago to glorify the wonder of bread, and then some Henry VIII arrived to end all that fine-crumbed loafing.
We found ourselves recently somehow past the chainlink fence surrounding the Wonder Bread factory, curious to see the structure in its in-between state, factory to cathedral to construction zone. If you’ve been driving by, too, and wondering what it’s like inside, how the light falls, what unnecessarily gorgeous details remain: come inside. We won’t tell.
