Place
For decades, the Sears Crosstown building was one of Memphis’s great engines of commerce.
Opened in 1927, the enormous distribution center and retail store helped fulfill catalog orders across the region. It eventually grew to 1.5 million square feet, becoming a landmark of the city’s industrial and commercial history.
Then Sears left.
The building stood vacant from 1993 until a group of Memphians began imagining a different future for it. Rather than demolishing the structure or finding a single replacement tenant, they proposed something much more ambitious: turning the former distribution center into a place where people could live, work, learn, receive healthcare, make art, and spend time together.
Crosstown Concourse reopened in 2017 after a roughly $200 million redevelopment.
Today, the building contains apartments, restaurants, shops, healthcare facilities, educational institutions, arts organizations, offices, and public gathering spaces. Its enormous former industrial floors have become a collection of destinations connected by atriums, corridors, and shared spaces.
You can come for a meal, visit a gallery, see a performance, attend school, go to a medical appointment, or simply spend time in the building.
That mix is what makes Crosstown Concourse more than an impressive adaptive-reuse project.
It has become a piece of Memphis that people can inhabit in many different ways.
Crosstown’s transformation began with an unusual coalition.
Crosstown Arts, founded in 2010, helped organize the redevelopment alongside private partners and institutions in healthcare, education, and the arts. The project eventually brought together nearly 40 founding tenants and roughly 30 funding sources, making the redevelopment possible through a combination of institutional commitments and complex financing.
That coalition matters because a building this large could not easily be saved by simply finding another retailer.
Its next life required several different kinds of demand to come together.
Healthcare brought patients, staff, and long-term institutional use. Education brought students and teachers. Housing brought residents. Arts and cultural programming brought visitors. Restaurants and shops gave people reasons to stay and return.
The result is a place with activity across different hours and different parts of everyday life.
Crosstown also preserves a substantial piece of Memphis’s inherited physical fabric. The redevelopment retained the historic structure while adapting it for contemporary uses, including major work to its windows, brickwork, mechanical systems, and interior circulation. The project achieved LEED Platinum certification.
For Building America, Crosstown is a reminder that a building’s original purpose does not have to determine its future.
The old Sears building was designed to distribute goods. Its second life is organized around people.
The question is no longer how many catalog orders can move through it, but how many different parts of civic life can find a home inside it.
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