Brandon Dill
Finding the offices of Memphis magazine has always been a challenge. When the magazine’s founders moved in December of 1982 from Brooks Road in Whitehaven into an empty warehouse on Tennessee Street, staffers found themselves pioneers in the neglected and largely abandoned area of downtown Memphis known as South Main. Photos from that time depict what looks like the main street of a sleepy Mississippi town — a roughly paved road, with tumble-down brick buildings here and there.
From the outside, 460 Tennessee Street was beige brick, no ornaments other than a few glass-brick windows. Once inside, however, visitors discovered, on the first and second floors, a modern workplace, a blend of old and new. In the early 1900s, the building had housed the Maury-Cole Company, distributors of coffee beans, roasters, spices, extracts, and soda fountain supplies. Keith Kays, the architect/renovator, divided the three-story warehouse in 1982 into a warren of cubicles, hallways, and offices. But he wisely left alone the most striking feature of the interior — the skeleton of massive wooden beams that braced the rough brick walls. Many of these beams were 12 x 12 inches thick, some of them 12 feet long, fitted to cast-iron brackets.
We joked that if anyplace could survive an earthquake, it would be 460 Tennessee. Then we noticed that many beams weren’t attached to those brackets. They simply rested on them, or were held in place with old nails. That was also when our managing editor became concerned about splits along some beams. He actually wrote dates at the end of these cracks, so he could monitor their progress. (We recently found his scribbled numbers from 20 years ago, and the splits hadn’t grown at all.)
For years, an old cable-operated freight elevator stood in the middle of the building, and stairs led to the third floor, which had remained empty for decades. Sometimes we would venture up there, and for those with nerves of steel, rickety wooden steps led to a hatch that opened onto the roof.
These old features weren’t always charming. The heating system was balky, and the air-conditioning? Well, in the summers, when the interior temperature reached 90 degrees, employees were often sent home — not because it was too hot to work, but because our state-of-the-art Compu-Graphic typesetting machines simply couldn’t operate in that heat.
In the 1980s, nobody “worked remotely” because ... how was that possible? Without emails or the internet, photographers brought in their photos and slides, and we gathered around light tables to study the best images. Freelancers drove here and sat down with editors to go over stories. There was a great sense of camaraderie — we were all part of a machine pulling together a product, and on some days, when the whole staff was present, and the building was jammed with freelancers, visitors, and interns, it seemed like a three-ring circus, everything happening all at once.
That sense (and noise level) was enhanced, in those early days on Tennessee, because the printing plant was on the ground floor, and the building thrummed with the sound of the mighty presses. But as time passed, it was more efficient to have our products — magazines, newspapers, books — printed elsewhere, so the presses came out, and as the internet and emails made a journey to our offices unnecessary, the building grew quieter, the main sounds the clicking of computer keys.
Meanwhile, the world outside our doors began changing, but at first gradually. As late as 1991, when I first started scribbling “Ask Vance,” dense woods survived across from our building, the warehouses around us still stood empty, and a building next door housed a woodworking company, with a vent that spewed sawdust over our cars. Around the turn of the century, Hustle and Flow, Craig Brewer’s Oscar-winning film about the Memphis underclass, was shot almost entirely within walking distance of our building.
Then, as more people moved into the South Main district, Tennessee Street quickly was transformed. The woods came down, providing us (for a time) with a sweeping view of the Mississippi River. Developers constructed grand bluff-top homes along Tennessee Street, each owner seemingly trying to outdo his neighbor in style and size. MATA ran a trolley down the street, condos sprang up all around us, and seemingly overnight, we “pioneers” found ourselves surrounded by construction teams, parking garages, and more and more millenials.
Maybe all this was a sign that Contemporary Media needed to move on. When you read this, our company will be ensconced in new offices in the Cotton Exchange Building, downtown at Front and Union. Hopefully, the “hustle and flow” in our new digs will be enough to keep Memphis magazine chugging right along for another three decades.
