Crosstown Concourse towers over you, one of the most ambitious and successful adaptive reuse projects in American urban history. The building began its life in 1927 as the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog distribution center — a massive, fourteen-story Art Deco complex that occupied an entire city block and employed thousands of workers who filled mail-order requests from across the Mid-South. At its peak, 3,000 workers processed 50,000 orders a day here.
When Sears moved its operations out in 1993, the building sat vacant for two decades, becoming one of the most visible symbols of urban decline in Memphis. Then a group of civic visionaries decided to reimagine it. After years of planning and a complex financing arrangement involving historic tax credits, philanthropic investment, and community support, Crosstown Concourse reopened in 2017 as a vertical urban village: 265 apartments, a health clinic, a YMCA, an arts high school, galleries, restaurants, a brewery, and dozens of nonprofits and businesses — all in one building.
It is now home to more than a thousand people and workers. Memphis turned its most famous vacant building into one of its most vibrant addresses.