photography by Justin Fox Burks
History, foresight, and good timing shape a remarkable neighborhood success story.
In August of 1927, a 10-story Sears & Roebuck distribution center — one of 10 in the United States — opened in Memphis. Almost 90 years later, it opened again, this time as a redeveloped vertical urban village with residences, restaurants, and a medical clinic for the working uninsured.
Crosstown Concourse, which celebrated its grand opening August 19th, spans more than one million square feet and houses a diverse group of tenants involved with education, healthcare, and art.
Food plays a large role, too. Already, nine restaurants and vendors embrace the Crosstown mission to promote wellness and sustainability. Three additional restaurants are in the works, including a pizzeria with a wood-fired brick oven, a full-service bakery called Lucy J’s, and a Crosstown Arts café, where a seasonal menu will serve both resident artists and the extended Crosstown community.
“We will have large tables and a communal dining atmosphere, so people can interact and exchange ideas and eat plant-based food,” explains Bianca Phillips, the communications coordinator for Crosstown Arts.
Todd Richardson, co-leader of the Crosstown development team and co-founder of Crosstown Arts, says the building today is 98 percent leased. When Crosstown High School opens to ninth-graders next August, more than 2,600 people will come and go from the building every day.
“It’s almost like a microcosm of the city as a whole, and the reason that’s really cool is because it’s a place to experiment,” Richardson says. “If you have ideas and they’re successful here, there’s a good chance they will be successful on a larger scale.”
During a tour of the building, Richardson, who spearheaded Crosstown Concourse with developer McLean Wilson, explained the building’s history and reimagined mission. Here’s some of what he had to say.
Todd Richardson
Memphis: Are you surprised that Crosstown Concourse has been so immediately successful?
Todd Richardson: Absolutely. It really was a miracle, a perfect storm of things coming together. Number one is the building. People just love this place. It’s iconic. Number two is the vision of creating a vertical urban village anchored in arts, education, and healthcare. There’s a lot of momentum in Memphis for all three of those areas, and we have amazing tenants at the cutting edge of their fields. And finally, there was the timing. We went through the planning process in the middle of the recession. People were hungry for work. If we tried to do the same project today, our pricing would be 20 percent higher.
Tell us a bit about the building’s history.
Back in the day, in early November everyone would get a voluminous Sears catalog in the mail, and many of which were probably printed in this building. Kids like me looked through the catalog, figured out what they wanted for Christmas, and dog-ear the pages. The catalog was your Christmas list for the year. Just imagine Amazon printing a catalog, and that’s what Sears was to people 30 or 40 years ago. The building is 1.2 million square feet – that’s larger than the Chrysler building in New York – and the Crosstown neighborhood grew up around all that activity.
How did distribution work exactly?
If you ordered anything from Sears in the southeast, it came from Crosstown. So if Memphis is America's distribution hub thanks to FedEx today, this building goes a long way toward defining that identity early on. 1,500 employees processed 45,000 orders daily. And that’s back when orders were taken via phone calls, written down by hand, and distributed by runners. Sears chose this location because it was on the L&N Railroad, and a spur went into the building. The retail store was open here until 1983, and the distribution center as a whole closed in 1993. It had been completely empty almost 18 years when we got started in 2010.
You talk about three components: education, healthcare, and art. Can you explain how those impact Crosstown?
The main idea is that these core components don’t just co-locate. For example, Crosstown High, a new public charter school, is located on floors four and five. However, it’s curriculum is project-based, so students learn by completing projects that are often carried out in partnership with other Concourse tenants. Professional experience with our tenants in those areas is woven into the curriculum of the school such that the entire building becomes their campus. Artists in Crosstown Arts’ artist residency program are offered quality healthcare at Church Health. Families with children getting treated at St. Jude are able to live in a vertical village where all their basic needs are taken care of and they can focus on healing. The goal is that these interconnections and discoveries continue to multiply over the coming years by putting such amazing organizations in arts, education, and healthcare next to each other.
And the health component?
If we have an anchor tenant, it’s Church Health, which provides quality healthcare to the working uninsured – primary care, dental, eye care, behavioral health, etc. They’ve also partnered with the YMCA, so they have a beautiful, new 25,000 square foot YMCA in the building. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has both commercial for ALSAC and residential space for families with children receiving treatment and residents in the Ph.D. program. Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare has almost all of their administrative offices on the entire sixth floor.
Can you explain more about Crosstown Arts?
Crosstown Arts is a multi-disciplinary contemporary art center that now has about 40,000 square feet on the second floor. We’ll open in our new Concourse space with 7,000 square feet of new galleries, multiple performance venues, an artist residency program, a plant-based café and bar, and shared labs where professionals and hobbyists have common access to shared arts-making facilities and equipment in digital arts, music, wood/metal working, printmaking and photography. For the past six years, we have been incubating all these components across the street. We’re excited to become our adult selves at Crosstown Concourse in 2018.
With restaurants like Mama Gaia and Next Door Eatery, it seems Crosstown may be leaning toward organic eating and locally sourced food. What do you think?
In terms of mission-oriented restaurants, whether it be organic, plant-based, locally or equitably sourced, or other things like that, we wanted tenants in the building to embrace the wellness vision, so we’ve been very intentional about creating the right mix. I love barbecue, but there’s plenty of other places to get good barbecue in the city.
(Editor's Note: A multi-story package on the restaurants at Crosstown Concourse appeared in the February issue of Memphis magazine. For the online edition, look for individual stories. Up next: Mama Gaia.)
