Justin Fox Burks
Donna Palmer, who works as a dining room attendant at Mama Gaia, lives nearby.
Donna Palmer’s children are all flown and grown, as she says. But before they left home, she repeated advice she thought valuable: First, make a difference six feet around you.
In retirement, Palmer ended up taking her own advice.
The small house she shares with her two cats and two dogs sits on Forrest Avenue, close to Crosstown Concourse, the giant Sears warehouse-turned-vertical-village. Her house is 324 steps away from the development’s main entrance.
Palmer walks these steps a few times a week to her part-time job at Mama Gaia, the first restaurant opened in Crosstown last March. Sticking to the health-conscious Crosstown mission, Mama Gaia serves vegan and vegetarian dishes.
At Mama Gaia, Palmer works as a dining room attendant, where she serves food and squeezes juice for the restaurant’s signature ginger green tea lemonade, orange juice, and other organic drinks. But more accurately, Palmer is an ambassador for Mama Gaia and its menu. If you look lost trying to read the restaurant’s vegan dishes, it’s Palmer who will break it down for you.
Palmer’s Crosstown employment didn’t happen by chance. It was part of a larger plan by the developers.
“Part of the initial vision of Crosstown Concourse was definitely to bring life back to the neighborhood in various ways, including by providing job opportunities for people who live near Concourse,” says Ginger Spickler, project director at Crosstown.
Palmer’s relationship with the building she used to call the “big, scary dark monster” in its empty state began when Crosstown representatives came knocking on her door. Ultimately, Crosstown ended up using about one-third of Palmer’s yard for the redeveloped property.
“I was approached by the co-developers, maybe five or six years ago,” she says. “I went to the city of Memphis with them in support as a neighbor for the building to happen. I was truly supportive. I was the most directly affected neighbor.”
Other neighbors were not so enthused. Whispers of disapproval followed the Crosstown Concourse announcement, and Palmer knows it. She thinks it’s absurd; she cites community negotiations with developers and paid relocations for residents to better homes.
“So, yeah, some people may say it was ‘get out the poor folks,’ but they treated them so well,” she says. “One woman told me she had a house with a fenced-in yard for the first time because of them.”
And, at that point, Palmer was retired and had no intention of working anywhere ever again, let alone at Crosstown Concourse.
During the early stages of construction, she would sit on the curb and watch workers throw decades of accumulated debris out of the building’s windows.
“It sounded like war of the worlds at my house,” Palmer says. “Literally, the house would shake sometimes. But you know, I’m going to miss it. I’m going to miss the construction.”
Over time, employment in some capacity at this new vertical village started tugging at Palmer’s curiosity. So, when Crosstown held a job fair in December, she was there. It was at the fair that she met and interviewed with Philipp Von Holtzendorff-Fehling, Mama Gaia’s CEO.
“Donna is an absolutely wonderful person who has a big heart and loves to interact with people,” Von Holtzendorff-Fehling says. “She also understands the problems we’re trying to solve with Mama Gaia, which are all around people’s health, the environment, and animal welfare.”
Now, as Mama Gaia’s dining room attendant, Crosstown is engrained into Palmer’s life more than she ever expected. In late November, she held a baby shower for her daughter at the restaurant. “Mama Gaia catered,” Palmer says. “Lucy J’s Bakery, a few shops down, made cupcakes. I had a tab open at Mempops for the kids. I wanted a Concourse experience.”
For Palmer, the Concourse experience includes her favorite Mama Gaia dish: a smokehouse veggie burger served with smoked onions, garlic aioli, and a four-cheese blend (vegan cheese, of course).
Palmer recalls an earlier Crosstown event sponsored by MEMFix, a community revitalization group, that showcased Crosstown’s services and facilities to come. “I cried,” she says. “I was like, look at my neighborhood! Look at my neighborhood; it’s coming alive.”
(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, including an interview Todd Richardson. Up next: Restauranteur Kimbal Musk.)
