Tag: Sears Crosstown

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Crosstown Concourse: The Vertical Village Comes to Life

Saturday will be a crazy Memphis moment. At least, that’s how Todd Richardson sees it.

Richardson is a co-founder of Crosstown Arts, the group that spurred the redevelopment of the massive, empty Sears Crosstown building.

Since 2010, Richardson’s mind has been focused on recruiting partners, signing tenants, finding funding, construction schedules, paperwork, designs, plans, and meetings, meetings, meetings. But at its core, Richardson still calls Crosstown a “miracle.”

“Yeah, at the end of the day, what a crazy Memphis moment?” Richardson says with a laugh. “It was the middle of the recession, and it couldn’t be done. It’s a completely unique redevelopment; there’s not another one like these in the country. So, we’re really celebrating the tenacity of the city for this miracle to happen. To me, that’s what August 19th is all about.”

Saturday is the Crosstown Concourse Opening Celebration, a moment eight years (or, nearly 90) in the making. The celebration starts at 3 p.m. with a dedication ceremony in the Central Atrium. The day continues with tenant open houses, live music, and a screening of a feature-length documentary about the Crosstown project.

Much of the building is already alive with residential and commercial tenants. But loose ends will be tied up as the year goes on — more apartments will be filled, programs will be started, and office workers will soon move into now-empty floors.

At full tilt, nearly 3,000 people will come and go there each day, according to Crosstown officials. That impact (economic and otherwise) will hit the area like an “atom bomb,” at least, in the words of a city official years ago. That energy will flow from a long-neglected “big empty” and revitalize a neighborhood that’s already feeling positive effects, with the potential for transforming a whole section of the city.

The (Way) Backstory

Company men from Sears, Roebuck & Co. quietly arrived in Memphis in the late 1920s, seeking sites for a retail center and catalog order plant. They knew if local property owners thought Sears was interested in their property, their prices would skyrocket. So, the Sears officials drove around town, pointing to sites from their car windows, while, behind them, real estate brokers followed in another car and took notes.

The company eventually settled on Crosstown, a then-suburban neighborhood about two miles from downtown. One hundred and eighty days after construction began, on August 27, 1927, Memphis Mayor Rowlett Paine cut the ribbon on a 640,000 square-foot facility that would employ more than 1,000 people.

That first day, almost 30,000 shoppers came to visit the 53,000-square-foot retail center. At its peak, nearly 45,000 catalog orders left Sears Crosstown each day.

The building also had a small hospital, cafeteria, ladies recreation area, administrative offices, a credit union, board rooms, and “The Cypress Room,” for executive dining.

Forty years later, Crosstown had grown to a mammoth 1.5 million square feet on 19 acres. Unfortunately, like the original mammoth, it had become outdated. Shoppers had headed east and elsewhere. Sears closed the Crosstown retail store in 1983.

The site remained a regional distribution center for Sears. But less than 30 years later, due to the decline in the company’s mail-order business, Sears closed many of its warehouses across the country, including Crosstown. The building was left vacant in 1993 and remained an iconic emtpy tower for more than 20 years.

The (Recent) Backstory

Richardson can tell the story of Crosstown’s recent history in about a minute. He’s an art historian, a professor at the University of Memphis, but he knew the Crosstown property owner. Richardson asked about the building, and that started a “wouldn’t-it-be-cool conversation,” he says, which hasn’t stopped.

“The biggest challenge we had was to get people to see beyond what they see,” Richardson says. “This was a building the size of the Empire State Building that had been empty for 20 years in Memphis. It was in the middle of the recession, so, where do you start and could [anything] ever happen?”

Richardson and Christopher Miner formed Crosstown Arts in 2010 as a nonprofit arts organization that would serve as the building’s developer and would one day also be building tenant.

Two years later, the two had commitments from eight local tenants willing to lease a total of 600,000 square feet, nearly half of the building. By the time Crosstown officials asked the Memphis City Council for $15 million (the project’s final piece of funding) a year later, the building’s tenants included Church Health, Methodist Healthcare, Gestalt Community Schools, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, ALSAC, Memphis Teacher Residency, Rhodes College, and, of course, Crosstown Arts.

So, What Is It?

The Crosstown website now calls its facility a “vertical urban village,” and some variation of that term has been used to describe it from the beginning. The website also tries to invoke Crosstown’s spirit by calling it “a local heart for the cultivation of well-being, shifting focus from products to people, from commodity to quality of life,” adding that Crosstown will build “on three of Memphis’ strongest community assets — arts, education, and health care. Concourse is now a mixed-use vertical urban village with a purposeful collective of uses and partners.”

So, what’s in the village?

The building will include Crosstown Arts, Crosstown High School, and numerous health-care agencies. It’ll also be home to the Curb Market grocery store, numerous restaurants, a pharmacy, a nail shop, a FedEx Office store, apartments, and more. To anyone in commercial real estate, it looks like a classic mixed-use development, a mix of residential, commercial, and retail spaces. Many of the tenants, including Curb Market, FedEx, Farm Burger, Mama Gaia’s, and others, are already doing business in Crosstown.

But Richardson says it’s more than that and that it “can’t be managed like any other building in Memphis.” He said the building and the tenants who fill it have a deliberate tone, personality, and a spirit of inclusivity. They all “are intimately related, interconnected, and interdependent and, as a result, better because they are together.”

The building was designed for tenant interaction. Those tenants who have have chosen to locate in Crosstown did so because their individual missions will be lifted through those interactions, a Crosstown official says. All of the tenants, whether in arts, education, food, or health care, intersect at wellness, an idea that Ginger Spickler, Crosstown’s director of strategic partnerships and projects, said serves as an overall ethos for Crosstown Concourse.

“We’ve all been to office parks, where you’ve got lots of people in different buildings, none of whom interact with each other,” Spickler says on a recent tour. “So we knew even if we put people in this building, they would not necessarily interact unless we create spaces and experience for them to share together.”

So, Spickler says, the design of the building deliberately includes common spaces — a small open theater, large balconies, a massive central atrium — “where those unexpected connections and intersections can happen.”

That’s precisely why Gary Shorb, the new executive director of the Urban Child Institute, says he wanted to move his organization there, noting they’ll “be right next door to Pyramid Peak Foundation and the Poplar Foundation.”

“Geography always helps with collaboration,” Shorb says. “The closer you are, the better it will be.”

Crosstown Now

Bowties and sport coats mingled easily with hard hats and work boots during an early afternoon last month. The smells of electrical work pierced the aroma of roasting vegetables close to Curb Market. The mid-tempo thump of chilled-out EDM at Mama Gaia was often overcome by the scraping whine of power tools. It was easy to see how far the building had come — and that it still had a little way to go. Richardson says the building is mostly full: About 98 percent of the office space is leased. The apartments are around 80 percent occupied. Retail spaces were about 60 percent leased. The next step will be getting everyone moved in.

Curb Market

The celebration will be gratifying, Richardson says, but Crosstown Concourse’s true success won’t be realized Saturday.

“Success for us will be five or 10 years down the road,” he says, “when people are still here and enjoying it, and Crosstown is still the vibrant vertical village we all hoped and dreamed it would be.”

A Closer Look

Some of the tenants that will be based in Crosstown Concourse

Church Health

One of the founding tenants of Crosstown, Church Health spans 150,000 square feet over three floors in the building’s West Atrium. According to its mission, Church Health strives to provide affordable health care to Memphis’ working, uninsured population and their families. It’s served some 70,000 people since its inception in 1987.

But after the move to Crosstown, for the first time in those 30 years, all of Church Health’s services are in the same building. At its former location, 120,000 square feet of clinics, exam rooms, and offices were spread over 13 buildings on Peabody, Bellevue, and Union, says communications director for Church Health, Marvin Stockwell.

Church Health

The move to a space 30,000 square feet larger, yet still all under one roof, he says, will enable the center to “serve more people and serve them better.”

Stockwell says Church Health now has 62 medical rooms, compared to 34 in its previous locations. This increase, as well as more than twice the number of dental, eye, and counseling rooms, Stockwell says will vastly increase the amount of patients Church Health is able to treat.

In step with Crosstown’s “better together” vision of cross-organizational collaboration, Stockwell says the move has already paved the way for partnerships with other organizations, like the YMCA. Together they formed the Church Health YMCA for Church Health patients and others in the community to utilize.

He says when leadership from both organizations discussed their programming and missions, much of it overlapped, like fitness and “creative movement” classes, such as Zumba, yoga, and pilates. “The organization has grown because of partnerships now that we’re tucked into an urban village,” Stockwell says.

Church Health CEO Scott Morris says partnerships with more tenants such as Southern College of Optometry, Teach for America, Crosstown Arts, and others are also in the works. All of the partnerships, Morris says, will help Church Health be more effective at caring for its patients, adding, “We truly are better together for all of Memphis.”

Morris says the move has also made it possible for expansions into “new, vibrant areas such as culinary medicine — or food as medicine,” which he says will enrich Church Health’s overall work.

Church Health’s new teaching kitchen, located on the first floor, is more than twice the size of the former kitchen, says Stockwell. A larger, new, modern kitchen allows Church Health to offer coursework for a culinary medicine certificate from Tulane University, as well as community nutrition and cooking classes on how to prepare healthy food.

A notable part of the new kitchen is the commercial section, where Stockwell says Church Health is ramping up its own bread line, Whole Heart Bread.

He says after speaking with some local restaurant owners around the city, Church Health staff realized there was a need for locally-sourced bread in Memphis.

Stockwell says the bread line will be a way for the kitchen to do mission-type work while bringing in revenue to fund Church Health’s efforts to serve the community.

Another goal for the kitchen is to eventually partner with Memphis Tilth, which plans to hire someone to manage the kitchen full-time, and work with local food entrepreneurs who need access to commercial equipment.

Other spaces of Church Health’s operation include a chapel, community meeting room, child-care center, and “control room,” which will eventually be a broadcast workspace, producing health- and faith-related podcasts, Stockwell says.

The Parcels at Concourse

Creating something new from something old — that’s how Laura Anna Hatchett, senior community manager for LEDIC, describes the process of the realty company’s newest project: The Parcels at Concourse.

The Parcels are comprised of 265 apartments on floors seven through 10 at Crosstown. The unique interior of the building and the infrastructure of those top floors — once a Sears warehouse — shaped how the Parcels were designed, says Hatchett.

In order to fit 265 units on the top four floors of the building, 38 unit layouts were created, which are available in studio and one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments.

Hatchett says the renovation focused on “maintaining the integrity of what the building used to be” by keeping the historical elements intact, such as the exposed brick walls and wood floors.

The Parcels

“Better together,” the idea behind Crosstown, inspired the various gathering spaces and community seating areas throughout the Parcels, including the leasing office itself, which protrudes from the seventh floor of the central atrium and will serve as a “living room” for residents, Hatchett says.

Another design element meant to foster community building, she says, are the indoor front porches that several of the units have and that residents are able to personalize.

“It’s a true live, work, play environment,” Hatchett says. “Residents can participate in numerous activities that are only an elevator ride away.”

The apartments — between 1,000 and 1,100 square feet per unit, run about $1.40 a square foot per month. Hatchett says an affordable housing grant allows 20 percent of the units to be rented at affordable market rate.

Of the 265 units, about 103 will house Memphis Teacher Residency residents, families of St. Jude patients, along with scientists working at the hospital, Church Health Scholars, Crosstown Arts residents, and Iris Orchestra Artist fellows. Residents began moving into the units in January and, as of press time, the Parcels were 82 percent occupied.

Madison Pharmacy

Though Madison Pharmacy’s old location is less than two miles down the road from its new home at Crosstown, owner Rende Bechtel says, and the biggest challenge in relocating is the logistics of moving and setting up the new space.

“It’s very scary,” Bechtel says, “But it’s a risk that could lead to a lot of opportunities.”

The privately owned pharmacy has stood on Madison near Auburndale for about 13 years, and Bechtel says they were happy there. But when she heard that Crosstown was looking for a resident pharmacy, it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

“It was like fate,” she says, explaining that her parents both worked in the old Sears Tower and that that was where they first met.

Bechtel, who’s owned the pharmacy since 2012, says they have about 300 regular customers now and after the move are hoping to expand by taking advantage of the other health-care services housed in Crosstown, perhaps partnering with Church Health to serve some of its patients.

Madison Pharmacy

“Once we get there, I’m sure we’ll be right at home,” Bechtel says.

The new pharmacy will not only be larger than the old one, it will also become a convenience store, offering an expanded dollar section, essential oils, dog food, household products, makeup, and “a little bit of everything you might need.”

The hope, Bechtel says, is that “people who live and work here will come in on a regular basis and we’ll get to know them, while providing them with what they need.”

Area 51 Ice Cream

Area 51 Ice Cream, a family-owned ice cream shop out of Hernando, Mississippi, will make Crosstown its second location.

Karin Cubbage, who owns Area 51 Ice Cream with her husband, says they have been looking for a second location in Memphis for a while now, but no location seemed just right — until they saw the Crosstown space. She says they knew immediately that Crosstown was a good fit for the company and it was a project they wanted to be a part of.

Area 51 has been serving homemade ice cream along with fresh-baked goods at its location in Hernando for about three years. Cubbage says their foods are made with no artificial flavors — only fresh, locally-sourced ingredients.

“We try to do as much by hand as we can,” Cubbage says. “We even hand-make the chocolate chips that go into our mint chip ice cream.” Cubbage says she and her husband have good relationships with local farmers, like those at Cedar Health Farms, where they often buy seasonal berries.

Like its mother shop, the new location at Crosstown, will offer 12 ice cream flavors, as well as a specialty cookie and brownie each day. Since the new space is significantly smaller than the shop in Hernando, Cubbage says the ice cream will be made daily in Mississippi and transported to Crosstown.

After wrapping up the finishing touches on the new shop, including installing sidewalk-style cafe tables, Cubbage says the Crosstown location will open in late August. “We’re excited about exposing our product to another part of town that we haven’t been able to reach yet … and to be a part of the larger project in general.”

Crosstown High School

Around this time next year, 125 ninth-graders will walk through the doors of Crosstown as the inaugural class of Crosstown High School.

Ultimately, it’s expected that 500 students will comprise the student body at the public charter school. Those students, who will be chosen through a lottery, will be part of a learning experience that’s never been tried in Memphis. Instead of a teacher lecturing in front of a class, students will learn with hands-on projects based on student interest or on challenges issued by other tenants inside the Concourse.

Church Health, for example, may ask the students to help them design a wellness campaign for senior citizens in the Klondike neighborhood, says Spickler. “The students might then accomplish some of their math or English standards through creating different signage or something else by actually solving a community-based challenge.”

Students’ interests, talents, and learning pace will be taken into consideration at Crosstown High, and each student will have a personal learning plan.

Spickler says the school plans to have a diverse student body by reaching out to the community to recruit students to the school’s entrance lottery in hopes of making a school “that looks like Memphis.”

All of this will be fueled with a $2.5 million grant from XQ: The Super School Project, an initiative that challenged education officials to rethink the high school model.

For Crosstown’s model, school personnel talked with students, parents, teachers, and employers. Much of the school’s model is based on the design challenge, which Crosstown High began in November 2015.

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Music Music Features

Movin’ On Up

Church Health is unique among Memphis institutions. It was founded three decades ago by Scott Morris as a place to provide help for the working poor who fall through the cracks of our broken health insurance system. Some of those people are Memphis musicians.

“A lot of musicians and artists don’t have access to health care,” says Church Health Communications Director Marvin Stockwell. “This is the music scene itself backing a cause that helps so many of them. That’s been the message of the show for 11 years.”

Stockwell, a founding member of the legendary Memphis punk band Pezz, was one of the driving forces behind starting the Rock for Love benefit concerts. The annual weekend of live music has raised tens of thousands of dollars to help pay for the care of poor Memphians. Three months ago, Church Health moved to an expanded new home in the Crosstown Concourse building.

Stockwell says scheduling Rock for Love for the same weekend as the Concourse’s gala grand opening was a no-brainer. “Why take a weekend-long event, built over a decade, and have it come three weeks after the big hurrah? This is the inaugural, celebratory moment of our brand-new home. It made every sense in the world.”

Near Reaches

This year’s event comes with an added bonus. In the early 2000s, Makeshift Records regularly showcased new Memphis music with a series of sprawling compilation albums. Earlier this year, Memphis musician Crockett Hall found a copy of one of the Makeshift compilations in a used bin at a record store. When he asked his friends on Facebook about it, a discussion ensued in which people told fond stories of the acts they had discovered from Makeshift.

J.D. Reager, an organizer of Rock for Love (and a Flyer contributor) had been involved in the grassroots label. Since a Rock for Love compilation album had been successful a couple of years ago, and since the last Makeshift compilation release had coincided with the first Rock for Love, maybe it would be a good idea to, as Stockwell says, “gin up the old machine.”

The new Makeshift 6 compilation includes 34 songs by contemporary Memphis artists, ranging from Mark Edgar Stuart’s tight singer/songwriter compositions to Glorious Abhor’s noise punk. Select-O-Hits donated their services, helping make the album a reality, and all of the artists donated tracks to the compilation. “When I listen to this broad swath of Memphis music, I think of how proud I am to be a part of this Memphis music scene,” says Stockwell.

The album will get its official release this Friday, August 18th, the first night of Rock for Love. Artists include Jack Oblivian, Cassette Set, Yesse Yavis, Moon Glimmers, Sweaters Together, the Rough Hearts, and Indeed, We Digress. Al Kapone will be deejaying between sets. “Friday is the Makeshift release show,” says Stockwell, “so we wanted to have as many of those bands as humanly possible.”

Saturday, August 19th, amid all of the other Crosstown opening festivities, Rock for Love acts will be providing music all across the site. The main stage is one of the most diverse lineups in recent memory, beginning with beatbox soulsters Artistik Approach, the Rising Star Drum and Fife Band, Latin big band Melina Almodavar, singer Susan Marshall, and finally Memphis hip-hop superstars 8-Ball and MJG, backed up by Winchester and the Ammunition. Reager says drummer and bandleader Graham Winchester is “very excited about backing up both 8-Ball and Susan Marshall.”

In the atrium at Crosstown will be quieter, acoustic sets, led by Reager and featuring Crockett Hall, Juju Bushman, Mystic Light Casino, and Faith Evans Ruch, among others. That night, the party moves back to the Hi-Tone where Chinese Connection Dub Embassy leads an all-star jam party including Kapone, Tonya Dyson, and Lisa Mac.

Stockwell says the new Church Health facility has energized the whole staff. “There’s so much potential here that we have only started to scratch the surface of.”

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Opinion The Last Word

The “G” Word

Sears Crosstown rendering

Last week was a busy one for Midtown news. To recap: Parkway Grill and those delicious chicken pitas are history, hopefully not for good. YoLo is moving west to make room for a restaurant at the southeast corner of Madison and Cooper. Crosstown Concourse’s apartment units, the “Parcels,” are available for pre-lease and will be ready in December. And the Greensward debate might finally be settled? I’ll believe that one when I see it.

More changes are on the way. Some seem exciting, others just “ehhhh.” I’m not sure all of them are good ideas, but I’m willing to wait and see. I’ve heard reactions to the Overton Square and Crosstown news that were far less measured, with terms like “overpriced” and “bullshit” and even the dreaded “G word” bandied about.

Whoa there. I had no idea y’all were so passionate about your frozen yogurt. You’d think Pho Binh was being replaced with an artisan mayonnaise boutique or something, the way some people were carrying on. Now THAT would be a crisis.

Let’s not conflate revitalization with gentrification. Not while we’re trying to compensate for a half-century of population loss and alleviate poverty in the poorest metro in the country.

We need Midtown, and Memphis as a whole, to thrive. Yes, authenticity is important. We strive to support and uplift local businesses. We also need safety and good schools and other public goods that cost money. These needs are hard to fulfill in a city that’s full of renters but relies on property taxes. Memphis the metropolitan area spans three states, but Memphis the city only collects sales taxes in one of them (Think about that when you drive to the outlet mall).

I digress. Go to smartcitymemphis.com — they explain this stuff better than I can.

I used to think Midtown was so much more fun when I was in my 20s. Really, my nostalgia was more for the plot of my 20s than the setting. I do miss Square Foods, when it was in the space the Bayou now occupies. I miss the old Hi-Tone. I miss seeing bands at the Deli. I miss the Republic Coffee that was on Madison. Everything else I loved is still around, though. Some things have moved or improved. Some are harder to get to, but that’s because the empty and abandoned places have been replaced by other nice things for all kinds of people to enjoy. Yes, “all kinds” should — and does — include people who live outside of zip code 38104.

Rent was $500, split two ways, for the 2BR/1BA duplex near the Piggly Wiggly (better known to y’all new-to-town folks as “Cash Saver”) where I used to live in the early 2000s. It was much bigger than the entry-level Crosstown Parcel, which is $874. Unlike a Crosstown Parcel, it didn’t include wifi or a washer and dryer or a gym membership or a functioning stove. Like most things that are cheap, it was that way for a reason. The place was falling apart. Literally crumbling. What it lacked in amenities, it made up in “quirks” and experiences that would hopefully inspire a novel or at least an interesting chapter or two in my memoir.

Nearly every element of old-house charm had been painted over or sealed off to exempt the landlord from having to maintain it. I had to screw plywood boards to my window air conditioning unit so it would fit in the one window that opened. The hardwood floors were probably gorgeous at some point, before they were painted black.

The downstairs neighbors were a family of four hearing-impaired insomniacs who hated each other’s guts. Their favorite activities were yelling at each other and watching network television at top volume; often they did both at once. Vonage was running that commercial with The 5.6.7.8‘s “Woo Hoo,” and I swear it aired 100 times a day, double that on my days off. To this day I clench my teeth and fists whenever I hear that song.

The house was boarded up not long after we moved out. It’s still there, probably waiting for a fire or perhaps a strong gust of wind to put it out of its misery.

The character of Midtown hasn’t changed much, but little improvements like “not letting that entertainment district wither away completely” and “finally doing something about that dormant 1.5 million square foot building” seem to be working out OK so far. Housing demand is increasing as more people want to move in than to leave. New apartments are being built for the first time in years, and the market will decide whether the prices are right. Meanwhile, let’s hold off on throwing around words like “gentrification” — at least until the mayonnaise store opens.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and a digital marketing specialist.

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News News Blog

Crosstown Concourse Apartments Now Available for Rent

As of Tuesday morning, 165 apartments inside the revitalized Crosstown Concourse building are available for lease.

The apartments have been named Parcels at Concourse as an homage to the building’s former use as a Sears warehouse and shipping center. In the building’s Sears Crosstown headquarters days, more than 400,000 square feet of the upper floors housed thousands of products that were packaged and shipped to customers.

Four different floor plans are available — the Crafton (a 540-740 square foot studio), the Kismet (a 615-950 square foot one-bedroom), the Americus (a 950-1,465 square foot two-bedroom), and the Greenview (a 1,900 square foot three-bedroom). All of the floor plans boast massive windows overlooking Crosstown and lots of natural light. Prices begin at $854 for a studio and top out at $2,484 for the largest 3-bedroom. Some of the apartments will be ready by January or February. 

Residents will have access to restaurants (The Kitchen Next Door has already signed a lease), retail, art galleries, performance spaces, and the Church Health Center’s fitness and wellness centers (residents get a free fitness membership), which all be located on the lower floors of the building.

They’ll also share space in the building with Crosstown Arts, Memphis Teacher Residency, Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare, City Leadership, Christian Brothers University, and a number of other health, arts, and education organizations to be located inside the building. If all goes as planned, there may also be a public high school located inside the building. 

To inquire about leasing, visit the Parcels website, call 901-435-7796, or visit the leasing office at 430 N. Cleveland.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Parkour: On the Rise

A steady rain was falling from ominous, dark clouds over downtown last Friday, and the occasional thunderclap was so loud, the earth seemed to vibrate. But it was the first-annual We Jump the World Day, a worldwide celebration of parkour and freerunning, and the Memphis Parkour group wasn’t about to let a little bad weather ruin their good times.

A planned parkour meetup outside Bass Pro Shops was moved at the last minute to a dry spot in a covered enclave behind Alfred’s on Beale. It was there that I watched Kevin Hetzler run down a covered alley, scale a flight of stairs, use his hands to propel himself over a concrete wall, and then jump up to grab a stair railing that he proceeded to climb — all the while followed by his buddy Navii Heru filming the sequence with an iPhone camera on a selfie stick.

A few minutes later, 17-year-old Anna Holt, a life-long ballet dancer who told me she just started practicing parkour a couple months ago, hopped a stair railing, lifted herself up onto a wall, and then jumped off the wall into a front flip on the concrete below before landing gracefully on her feet. After the sequence was done, she grinned from ear to ear as her mother, who sat watching from a concrete bench, beamed with pride.

I stayed for more than a hour as Hetzler, Heru, Holt, and University of Memphis student Kenneth Shields took turn after turn demonstrating new ways to jump, swing, run, and vault over the architectural obstacles in their path. When I left to head back to the office, they were still going strong — rain be damned.

What Is It?

Parkour and freerunning — terms that may or may not be interchangeable depending on who you ask — are athletic disciplines that involve running, jumping, climbing, vaulting, swinging, rolling, flipping, or pretty much any movement used to get from one point to another.

Watching its practitioners (called traceurs) in action is akin to watching primates moving around in a jungle — hopping over brush, using their hands to propel them over logs, swinging from branches, doing whatever it takes to move over obstacles with grace and speed.

The parkour scene exploded in the U.K. back in the early-2000s, and it caught on in the U.S. soon after. But the parkour scene in Memphis didn’t emerge until a few years ago, mostly as a sort of underground pastime for athletic males in their late teens and mid-20s. But now, thanks to the efforts of a few Memphis parkour enthusiasts, the art is moving to the mainstream, attracting kids as young as 3 and adults of all ages to a series of classes hosted weekly at Co-Motion Studio in Crosstown. Co-Motion parkour coach/Memphis Parkour member Jonathan McCarver has seen such success that he’s planning to open a dedicated parkour gym near the airport this summer.

“I see a big boom for Memphis Parkour this year, at least by the end of the year. Memphis Parkour has been around about seven years, but it’s really just now breaking into the scene,” says Hetzler, a 27-year-old traceur who helps coach both the teen and all-ages classes at Co-Motion.

Hang on — classes at Co-Motion Studio include Parkour for Everyone, Sundays 1-2 p.m.; Low Impact Parkour, Sundays 2:15-3:15 p.m.; and Parkour Skills (13+), Tuesdays 6:30-7:30 p.m. Sign up at comotionmemphis.com.

The French Connection

Parkour’s roots trace back to 1902, when French naval officer Lieutenant Georges Hébert rescued more than 700 people from an erupting volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Hébert was inspired by watching the survivors move — some successfully and some not so much — through obstacles in their path. The experience caused the well-traveled Frenchman to become interested in the physical development and movement skills of the indigenous people he’d seen in Africa and elsewhere.

He drew on those movements to create a military training discipline that using running, climbing, and man-made obstacle courses to recreate a natural environment. He dubbed the discipline “the natural method,” and it eventually became the basis for French military training. French soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam used the style to develop what they called parcours du combattant, meaning “the path of the warrior.”

In the early 1980s, former French special forces soldier Raymond Belle, who had trained under that style, passed it on to his son David, who was already training in gymnastics. David and his best friend Sébastien Foucan used those skills to create the modern discipline of parkour, which, in a nutshell, simply meant getting from point A to point B — over, under, and through obstacles in one’s path —  in the most efficient way possible.

They called its practitioners traceurs and started a parkour group called the Yamakasi. The Yamakasi style was featured in a 2001 French film of the same name, and the movement exploded in Europe.

“It took a long time to make it to the States, but it flourished all over Europe,” McCarver says.

Foucan eventually split from the traditional parkour style by adding flips and wall spins — moves that may not be the most efficient way from one point to another but still look really cool. Remember the famous scene in 2006’s Casino Royale where James Bond chases the bad guy through a construction site — flipping, running, and eventually climbing and balancing on a beam hundreds of feet in the air? That bad guy was played by Foucan.

While it was originally developed as a military tactic, these days, parkour is more about fun than military prowess.

“Historically, you could say that parkour is more tied to functional capabilities, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone is doing it to have fun,” McCarver says. “It encompasses all of the arts of movement that are just moving your body through your environment. It’s broad and it’s vague, and that’s what makes it interesting.”

There are no rules in parkour or freerunning, which sets it apart from traditional gymnastics, an art that utilizes specific equipment in a specific way. And although there are parkour competitions these days, it wasn’t really intended as a competitive sport.

“Competitions are less in the spirit of parkour. People tend to associate it with things like American Ninja Warrior, and it has strong crossover, but that’s not really parkour training,” McCarver says.

There’s a World Freerunning Parkour Federation (WFPF), and they certify coaches, but even that organization’s mission statement is intentionally vague in keeping with the spirit of the art.

From the WFPF mission statement: “We aren’t here to argue or try to regulate what Parkour/Freerunning is or is not, and we certainly don’t have any interest in actions that result negatively for the community. We encourage all individuals to find their own training, to discover new ways of seeing their environment, to be pathfinders for us all as they overcome whatever obstacles seem to be standing between them and where they dream of going.”

People all over town are flipping for parkour at Co-Motion Studio.

Ninja Acrobatics

When attempting to schedule an interview with Heru, I suggested we meet for coffee. His response: “Overton Park is nice. And not a big coffee drinker, sorry.” That’s when it dawned me — of course, you’re supposed meet up with a parkour guy in his natural environment.

We met up at noon in the picnic pavilion near the Rainbow Lake playground, and Heru, a tall and lanky 29-year-old who looks like he was built to flip, pointed out the various spots in the park where he’s sustained minor injuries practicing parkour.

“I sprained all 10 toes right there. I sprained my ankle over there,” Heru says with a chuckle, pointing in different directions.

Heru, who calls parkour “ninja acrobatics,” got his start about six years ago, inspired by a parkour video game called “Mirror’s Edge.” Now, he’s a parkour coach at Co-Motion Studio.

“I was watching the character move, and I was like, man, that stuff is totally doable. I started researching moves and watched a few tutorials, and then I just took off. I practiced by myself for about a year and a half, and then I Googled and found the Memphis Parkour Facebook page and Jonathan McCarver.

“He said he’d meet me one Sunday on the East Parkway side of Overton Park, so I met him there. And all these other guys showed up and started jumping in,” Heru says.

The Facebook page is primarily used to organize spontaneous meetups, sometimes thrown together an hour before meetup time. The traceurs often meet in Overton Park or spots around downtown or the University of Memphis.

“Surprisingly enough, we’ve never been kicked off the [Shelby County] Courthouse lawn. We use those big ole chunky concrete walls and the stairs,” McCarver says. “Beale Street Landing would be good, but they hate us. They made signs to discourage us from training there.”

Heru, who works at Subway by day and as a security guard at night, says parkour has not only given him “monkey strength,” it’s also helped him overcome depression.

“It’s a really good stress reliever. Parkour unwinds me, and it teaches me to overcome life’s obstacles, like being depressed. It’s like a Zen-meditation-type thing. It’s like a vacation inside yourself,” Heru says.

McCarver, 33, who works as a software developer at Lokion and does a little acting in local theater, discovered parkour after watching the action movie District B13 about 10 years ago.

“They used all of these skills, and I looked up parkour and found out what the discipline was. It was like, oh cool, there’s a name for what I’ve done my whole life. I’ve always been a movement person,” McCarver says.

Hetzler, who had previously studied kung fu and admits that he’s “always wanted to be a ninja,” began practicing about a year ago after learning about the Memphis Parkour group. For him, it all started with a magical night run.

“I finally got in touch with Jebediah [a member of Memphis Parkour], and he took me out for a run. I was brand new, fresh, green. We went outside and played on the vault box a little bit, and then he said, ‘Are you ready?’ before he took off running through his apartment complex.

“I just started following him, jumping over what little I could. We climbed through a hole in the roof of his apartment building, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t turn back. But I made my way up, and the sun was going down. I just smiled and thought, this is it. We ran for about five hours that night.”

It wasn’t long after that McCarver, Heru, and Hetzler began teaching classes together at Co-Motion.

“Parkour is about finding yourself and learning who you can be,” Hetzler says.

Of course, there’s a practical side, too.

“I’ve never had to run for my life, but I have been on my way somewhere in a hurry and used my parkour skills to get me there faster,” he says. “Someday, if someone is burning in a building, I want to be able to run in and save them. I’ve always had a superhero thing.”

And that points to, perhaps, the most important thing about parkour — it’s fun.

“We’re actually in the midst now of putting together some kind of gig where we dress as superheroes and entertain kids,” Hetzler says. “So now I can work on my superhero status.”

Parkour for Everyone

I sat in on a Tuesday night teen and adult parkour class at Co-Motion in early April. Teen boys whizzed past me — flipping, rolling, and vaulting over wooden boxes — as I scribbled notes. At one point, McCarver held a gold-and-purple hula-hoop a few feet off the floor as the five students — mostly teen boys and one 34-year-old man —  took turns bounding off a wooden block, diving through the hoop, landing in a front flip onto a mat, jumping onto a wooden vault box, and then jumping down to a balance beam. A death metal jam by Paranoia blared over the speakers, adding to the high energy in the large cavernous space.

Hetzler was there as well, demonstrating McCarver’s instruction as the boys followed his lead. Hetzler effortlessly sprang from a wooden box on the black-and-white tile floor, glided through the hoop, and managed a front flip before landing smoothly on his feet.

“I love teaching the kids. They’re really my soft spot because they’re still innocent. They don’t understand the hardships of life,” Hetzler told me after class.

Co-Motion Studio in Crosstown is primarily a hula-hoop dance studio, offering classes in hooping, yoga, and, occasionally, belly dance or hip-hop dance. But on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons, it transforms into a parkour gym as McCarver uses mats, wooden vault boxes, old tires, and balance beams to create an obstacle course for students.

The Tuesday night class is for teens and adults, and the skills taught are more advanced. McCarver says it currently attracts mostly teen boys, but a few girls and older adults come from time to time.

He encouraged me to pop by one Sunday afternoon to watch the all-ages class, and it was a completely different scene. Although that class is advertised for all ages, the class has become more of a youth class, attracting lots of little kids and a few tweens. On the Sunday I dropped by in late April, there were about 15 kids ranging in age from 3 to 12. Parents stuck around to watch, and some even helped coach.

During the the warm-up, McCarver instructed the kids to crawl like zombies, using only their arms to propel themselves as they drug their legs on the floor behind them. Hetzler and Heru crawl around with the kids, too. And once the zombie kids made it around the room, a couple of parents gave it a try.

After the warm-up, McCarver, Hetzler, and Heru broke the kids into small groups to work on mastering the cartwheel. Some kids got it immediately, and others, try as they might, landed with plops on the mat over and over again.

One of the parents, Charles Mitchell, watched as his 4-year-old son, a cute blonde kid named Graham, bounded around the room. Mitchell says he enrolled Graham in parkour when he was 3.

“I read about parkour in a book called Natural Born Heroes, and I started researching it and watching videos. I thought my son would enjoy it,” says Mitchell, a local defense attorney. “I can tell it’s really benefitted him in his natural movements and his balance and spacial recognition. Whether he ends up playing traditional sports like soccer or baseball, what he learns here will translate to that.”

While the Sunday class caters to all ages, adults who aren’t parents might feel more comfortable in the Sunday low-impact class, which, while advertised to all ages, tends to attract students well into adulthood. I signed up for a low-impact class to see what it was all about.

The room was set up in a similar fashion to the advanced Tuesday night class, with mats, balance beams, and vault boxes arranged in an obstacle course of sorts, but McCarver assured me that I wouldn’t have to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with. As an injury-prone runner with a half-marathon on the horizon, I told him I’d rather not try flipping in the air.

McCarver led me (I was the only student that day) in an hour of instruction that involved using my arms to lift my body up and over high wooden vaults, doing shoulder rolls on a mat on the floor, and learning to balance on beams a few inches from the floor. Nothing dangerous or out of my comfort zone but certainly things I didn’t realize I was capable of. The next day, pain in my left shoulder was evidence that I’d worked muscle groups that don’t get much action in my day-to-day. I’ve clearly got a long way to go.

Susan Penn, 66, is a regular in the Sunday low-impact class, and she says it’s opened her up to new ways of moving her body. Penn, who also takes hula-hoop classes and yoga, is accustomed to physical activity, but she recently brought a friend who has some mobility issues to class, and McCarver customized the moves for her.

“It’s interesting how you can adapt physical activity to people with a variety of limitations in a way that’s fun and healthy. Old people tend to stop moving, and they shouldn’t,” Penn says. “After going to class a few times, I began to see more possibilities and ways to get around obstacles. Parkour is making me more playful. It’s making me try things that I suddenly feel like I might be able to do.”

For now, Co-Motion is the only place in town offering parkour classes, but McCarver is working on transforming a warehouse space at 2850 Lamb Place near the airport into a dedicated parkour gym. He doesn’t have an exact opening date in mind yet but says he’s aiming for some time after Memorial Day.

“At Co-Motion, we have space constraints, and we have to set up equipment and take it down for every class. We’ll be able to have things set up all the time, and we’ll have taller obstacles,” McCarver says.

He says he’ll keep some of the Co-Motion classes though, for those parents and students who would prefer the Midtown location. Once the gym is up and running, he hopes to expand parkour’s impact in Memphis even further.

“My mission is to show any person at any age and any skill level that, not only can they do parkour, but they can get healthy through fun and movement and play without repetitive, boring exercise,” he says. “I just want to get people moving.”

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Two Trains Running

There’s two, two trains running,

Well, they ain’t never going my way.

One runs at midnight and the other one

Running just ‘fore day. — Muddy Waters

I was sitting in my favorite little neighborhood bar the other night and fell into a conversation with a couple of realtors. They were bemoaning how Midtown was changing. “All we do these days,” one of them said, “is show houses to people from out east — Germantown and Collierville.” The realtors were happy to be selling homes but afraid that the invaders from the east would change the character of Midtown.

“They drive more aggressively. They tear down hedges and put up big security lights,” she said. “Midtown’s a special place, and we don’t want it to become just another ‘burb neighborhood.” But to be honest, for Memphis, that’s a pretty good “problem” to have. And that conversation feeds one of the two central narratives that are driving Memphis these days.

Here’s one: The city is changing for the better. The reinvestment and reinvigoration of Overton Square, Cooper-Young, Broad Avenue, Sears Crosstown; the downtown and Bass Pro Shops boom; the greenlines, bike lanes, the big trees and old houses of the central city, all are luring people back and fueling a renaissance.

Lots of people believe this to be true. I’m one of them. So are those realtors.

But there’s another narrative that also has a lot of adherents. It’s a simple credo, comprised of just one word: Crime. That’s Crime with a capital C. Crime is the most important thing ever, they say. We have to fix crime, or nobody will ever want to live in this hellhole.

You can point out to the Crime People that crime rates have been falling for eight years. They will respond by telling you that the statistics are rigged. They will tell you that five people got shot last weekend and ask, “How can crime be going down?” They will cite local television news, which will give you all the crime you can handle on a nightly basis. Telling someone whose car has been stolen that crime is going down is like trying to explain to someone who’s freezing that global warming is a problem. It doesn’t matter.

So we have two trains running. Two ways of looking at our city. Two trains that both carry some truth. Crime in Memphis is a big problem, as it is in lots of cities. We need to keep trying to fix it — by improving our education system, by working to bring in more jobs, by using smarter policing. But to focus on crime to the exclusion of the other narrative is wrong and does a disservice to all of us living here and working to keep Memphis vibrant.

I’ve lived here 23 years, and I’ve seen a transformation, especially over the past few years. There is a momentum that’s real right now. We need to keep that train running.

And derail the other one.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Big Empties, Redux

“They dot the Memphis landscape like craters on the moon — old bridges, shut-down factories, and abandoned office buildings. In their day, all these places were humming with activity, helping to spin the wheels of Memphis commerce and industry.”

That was the opening sentence of Michael Finger’s 1997 story in the Flyer called “The Big Empties.” Cited in the piece were the Sears Crosstown Tower, the Tennessee Brewery, and the Harahan Bridge — all now undergoing renovation and reinvention.

Now Bass Pro has brought the Pyramid (the pointiest big empty in the world) back to life in a grand way. And just this week, it was announced that the long-dormant French Quarter Inn near the now-booming Overton Square will be torn down and replaced by the 134-room Hotel Overton. On South Main, the Hotel Chisca is coming back, and numerous other downtown and Midtown properties have gotten or are getting new life — too many to mention here. As I wrote last week, a renaissance is happening. And more big empties are filling up.

Twenty years ago, you would have been hardpressed to find anyone who thought any of those edifices had a future. Remember the huge debate about the wisdom of building AutoZone Park downtown? Lots of folks were insisting that it should be built “out east, where the people are,” instead of in what was perceived by many then as a dying downtown. Now the ballpark is one of the city’s crown jewels.

Visionaries like AutoZone’s Pitt Hyde and forward-thinking developers like Henry Turley and Jack Belz, and precious few others, put their money where their hearts were and invested in the city core when many businesses were fleeing to the hinterlands. Their commitment to Memphis is now bearing fruit for all of us.

And I know this isn’t often said, but we also owe a debt to former Mayor Herenton, who first unleashed Robert Lipscomb on the city’s wretched public housing, almost all of which has now been transformed into livable and attractive multi-income housing. I predict that Lipscomb’s often disparaged role in the city’s redevelopment will be one at which future historians will marvel. He’s gotten a lot of things right.

There are still plenty of big properties lying fallow, of course, still acres of blight in some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, but the conversation has changed from “What can we do about these eyesores?” to “What’s the best way to reinvent this property?” That’s huge.

Looming ahead is the battle over the future of the Fairgrounds and the Mid-South Coliseum, which pits Lipscomb and an as yet unknown developer against a core of Midtown activists who want to save the historic venue. I won’t predict how that will play out, but one thing is certain: The “save the Coliseum” proponents can point to numerous examples where reinvention has paid off handsomely for all of us.

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News The Fly-By

Crosstown Building Project Kicks Off with Block Party

For 17 years, the Sears Crosstown building has sat vacant, casting its gloomy shadow over the historic Midtown neighborhoods surrounding the 1.4-million-square-foot former Sears warehouse and retail store.

But on Saturday, February 21st, a community groundbreaking party will celebrate the construction that officially began on January 1st to transform the former Sears headquarters into a lively “vertical urban village” of medical offices, arts amenities, residential housing, and retail space.

And with a new focus for the building comes a new name. The partners in the Crosstown redevelopment project will be dropping Sears from the building’s name and announcing a new name at the groundbreaking party.

Artist rendering of the Crosstown redevelopment

“Everyone referred to the building as Sears Crosstown, but Sears is long gone,” said Todd Richardson, associate professor at the University of Memphis and co-leader of the redevelopment project. “We wanted the building to have its own identity and branding based on what’s going to be happening there.”

When Richardson and his partners started planning for the building’s redevelopment five years ago, the neighborhood around the building, which was called Crosstown in Sears’ heyday, had all but lost that identity.

“The name Crosstown had fallen off the map for most Memphians, and people didn’t even know where the neighborhood was,” Richardson said. “All of the events [put on by Crosstown Arts] — the lectures, the concerts, the MEMFeasts, the exhibitions — were a way to draw people back to the area and recognize its true potential.”

Since Crosstown Arts launched in 2010, Richardson said it has been successful in rebranding the neighborhood as Crosstown and rebuilding the community.

He says the block party, which will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in and around the triangle park between North Watkins and Cleveland, is intended as a way to thank the Crosstown community and the building’s founding partners and financial backers.

Besides the name-change announcement, the party will include an iron pour by the Metal Museum. They’ll be on-site melting down iron from old radiators taken out of the Crosstown building. Additionally, there will be live music, beer, and food trucks.

The founding partners — Church Health Center, Crosstown Arts, Gestalt Community Schools, Memphis Teacher Residency, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, and ALSAC/St. Jude — are moving all or part of their offices into the building when it’s complete in early 2017.

A mix of 21 different funding sources, including public, private, and philanthropic, totaling more than $200 million have made the project possible.

“I don’t know if the general public knows that the financing is fully secured, and we are well on our way to having this building renovated and revitalized,” said McLean Wilson, principle of Kemmons Wilson, Inc. and co-leader of the Crosstown Development Project. “The ‘if’ question is no longer on the table.”

Since early January, about 300 construction workers have been on-site each day, many of them currently working on replacing the mortar between every brick in the building. Richardson said, when construction reaches its peak in about a year, there will be 900 to 1,000 workers on-site each day.

Once the building is complete, they expect 3,000 people — medical professionals, teachers, office workers, and residents — coming and going from the building daily. And those people will need places to eat and shop. Richardson said the development team is beginning to turn their attention to filling the retail spaces on the ground floor.

“We have about 60,000 square feet of retail left to lease. We envision a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, maybe a small footprint grocer. We’ve got some pretty special retail space along the loading dock and what will be the main plaza,” Richardson said. “We’re excited to have the creative folks in Memphis come up with much better ideas than we could ever think of.”

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News The Fly-By

Operation Crosstown Seeks To Improve Neighborhood

CREDIT: Kat Franchino

A Crosstown skate park? Or maybe a dog park? Farmer’s market? Or a “banging wall” where people could pound out rhythms using found materials?

Those were just a few of the suggestions thrown out during the idea lab launch of Operation Crosstown during the Church Health Center’s (CHC) “Rock for Love” block party last month. Guests of the event stopped inside the CHC’s new Crosstown Shoppes property to write ideas on sticky notes and pin them to a wall.

After the event, the ideas were narrowed down to the doable (public art, pop-up classes) and the not-so-doable.

“Someone said they wanted a Trader Joe’s in Crosstown, and that would be awesome. But that’s not something the Church Health Center can do,” said Jerica Sandifer, development assistant for CHC.

The ideas that seemed like they might work were then uploaded to ioby.org‘s Create Memphis website (memphis.ioby.org), which allows users to “like” favorites. The CHC is hoping to turn those projects that get the most “likes” into reality.

The CHC is one of the founding partners in the Crosstown Development Project, which is currently underway to transform the vacant, 1.4-million square-foot Sears Crosstown building into a “vertical urban village” of health-care, education, and arts organizations, as well as apartments and retail.

“The CHC was one of the early adapters of our mission [to renovate the Sears building],” said Gayla Burks, director of partnerships and research for the Crosstown Development Project. “And they know this is not just about the building but about helping the community and building up what’s around the building.”

Pre-construction work on the Crosstown building began a couple months ago, and the renovations won’t be complete until 2016. But Sandifer said Operation Crosstown is a way for the CHC to get involved in the neighborhood before they officially relocate all their offices into the building.

For its first project, Operation Crosstown will be installing aluminum trash cans along Cleveland.

“There is a lot of trash in certain parts of Crosstown, especially on North Cleveland. We’re having neighborhood organizations and businesses adopt trash cans, and they’ll be responsible for managing them,” Sandifer said.

Operation Crosstown is currently accepting stencil-design ideas from local artists. Sandifer said they’re really looking for designs that represent Crosstown. Ideas may be submitted to submissions.OC@gmail.com. Five stencils will be chosen, and on November 1st, volunteers will meet up at 420 N. Cleveland to spray-paint the designs onto the cans.

Sandifer said they have a goal of completing one project per month, and they’ll select the projects that get the most support on the ioby website.

“We’re hoping to start small and then do some bigger projects,” Sandifer said. “We may move on to public art or a pop-up health clinic or class. It just depends on what people in Crosstown want based on their input on the ioby site.”

CHC is partnering with various Crosstown-area neighborhood groups such as the Vollintine-Evergreen Community Association and the Klondike-Smokey City Community Development Corporation.

“And we’re trying to get neighborhood businesses involved so this is truly a community effort foreshadowing our presence in the Sears building,” Sandifer said. “We want to collaborate with them so we’re all on the same page about what the neighborhood should look like.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Crosstown Portrait

Years ago, photographers in the Sears portrait studio at Crosstown captured timeless images of happy families. But at a photo shoot inside the Crosstown building last month, shots were of peeling paint on columns in cavernous, leaky warehouse rooms or bathroom floors covered in shattered bits of smashed porcelain sinks.

Around 40 photographers and videographers captured these images in the long-vacant Sears Crosstown building at the end of May. Crosstown Arts video producer Justin Thompson organized the final photo shoot before construction begins on the 1.4-million-square-foot future “vertical urban village” that will be home to a combination of medical, educational, arts, and residential spaces.

“We’ve known for a long time that there would come a time when we couldn’t go in there, and the building would change forever,” Thompson said. “[Crosstown development project leader] Todd [Richardson] said we needed to go ahead and do this, because we are running out of time.”

Photographer Hope Dooner not only shot haunting images of the abandoned building, she also found some closure. Her boyfriend David, whose father managed Sears years ago, died recently, but Dooner said he grew up playing in the building while his dad worked.

“I felt a real presence of him in there. I could imagine him skateboarding through the warehouse,” Dooner said.

Richardson said the development team is waiting on a $15 million new market tax credit allocation from the federal government, which “could happen any day now.” That’s the final piece of funding for the $180 million project, and after that happens, there will be a 60- to 90-day financial closing before construction begins.

Once construction is complete, the Crosstown building will house the Church Health Center, Gestalt Community Schools, Memphis Teacher Residency, Crosstown Arts, and some offices for Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, Rhodes College, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and ALSAC. It will also contain apartments and some retail stores.

Even though construction is a couple months away, Richardson said the building is already changing inside.

“Right now, we’re removing some of the historic items that we want to keep and reuse. Some will be used for Crosstown Arts in their spaces, and some will be used in the building’s common areas and in the landscape,” Richardson said. “There are 80 ladders in the building, and we’ll cut those in half and install them in the apartments as towel racks. Some of the big tanks will be cut up and used as benches for the community garden.”

After the photo shoot event, Thompson asked all the photographers involved to share their pictures for the Crosstown Arts archives. Some may be used in a future art show, and others could wind up in a documentary that Thompson has been working on about the development of the Crosstown building.

“We knew from the beginning that this project would be a long shot, and if it did work, it needed to be documented — from the physical aspect of the building itself to the community-building process and the creative process,” said Richardson, who is also an art history professor at the University of Memphis. “Justin [Thompson] has been documenting our events since the first MemFEAST in our basement in 2010 with 50 people.”

Richardson said the Crosstown Development Team has been sensitive to keeping as much of the building intact as possible. Some areas inside will be demolished to house light wells, but the exterior will look largely the same.

“From the beginning, when we started working with our architects, my message was ‘Look, guys, the building is awesome as it is. We just can’t screw it up,'” Richardson said. “You’d think that renovating and cleaning and making new would automatically equate to improvement, but that’s not necessarily the case. People are very attracted to the building as it is, so we need to make it more attractive not by covering it up but by accentuating what is already there.”