Crosstown Concourse

History of Sears Crosstown and the Crosstown Concourse

In the 1920s, Sears Roebuck & Company, originally created as a mail-order company, established several massive warehouse centers across the United States in an effort to connect rural populations to quality retail goods normally found in large cities. After an impressively brief 180-day building period, Memphis opened its own 650,00 square-foot Sears distribution and retail center situated in the Crosstown neighborhood on August 8, 1927. The building later grew to 1.5 million square feet, becoming a major attraction and catalyst for the development in the Crosstown area.

In the late 1940s, Memphis’ demography began to shift as more and more people began to move eastward, which in turn reduced the number of residents and developments in the Crosstown area. This demographic change eventually forced the company to close its department and retail stores in 1983. The Sears company continued to function as a cataloging and distribution center for ten years, until the company officially closed all catalog sales both locally and nationwide.

As the years changed since the first plants were built, so did the cities in which they were situated. Despite the addition of more stores in the Sears plants in an effort to adapt to new demands, the company failed to keep up with the changing dynamic of cities from Chicago to Kansas City to Memphis. Though these warehouses were built in urban hubs, the surrounding areas began to suffer and the conditions of the neighborhood mirrored the conditions of the plants. While some Sears plants were altogether demolished, the building in Memphis was only vacated and abandoned.

When Sears warehouses across the country began to spiral downhill in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Memphis location was no exception. With the closing of the department store in 1983 and the closing of the distribution center ten years later, the operations once carried out in the Sears plant moved to other facilities throughout Memphis. Sixty-six years after the red ribbon had been cut to open the plant in Memphis, Sears abandoned the building in 1993.

Written by Lila Baer, Class of 2018

1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis TN 38104

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