What is this old building? (Memphis, Crump: RV park, real estate, house)

[bjh]

At I-55 and Crump Blvd.

[Jardine8]

BJH,

According to the link below, it was the "W.T. Rawleigh Factory". According to the website, the building was opened on 1912 but it doesn't list when it was closed.

Historic Memphis Buildings ...and notable Businesses

[tigerphan]

Apparently it's some sort of cosmetics factory. It's incredibly creepy looking and appears to have been abandoned for at least a couple of decades. It has potential to be something cool, but it will almost certainly decay until it collapses.

All in all, I'd say it's an accurate representation of Memphis as a whole, and it is probably fitting that it's the very first building you see when traveling southbound on I-55 into the city.



Jardine, thanks for posting that link. It will occupy my curiousity for hours.

[jabogitlu]

It does look creepy. And it doesn't have the same sort cache/community interest that Sears Crosstown or the Brewery have. And if we're going to put political and economic capital into structures down that way... let's save the old soldier's home complex.

[ViolentDisasters]

Jardine is correct, it is the WT Rawleigh building, which was once the manufacturing headquarters of the Rawleigh Mailorder Company, the largest mail order homegoods company in the world.

The company, then based in Rockford IL began declining along with other mailorder catalogs starting in the early 50s, and began closing down many of its manufacturing sites and distribution centers across the country. The Memphis location, however, because of its size and administrative functions was not among those slated to close. But as the early 60s approached, it became increasingly socially unacceptable for northern companies to run businesses in southern states where the workforce was racially segregated. When the company threatened to close its Chicago manufacturing plant in 1957, the integrated workforce as well as the shareholders (many of whom themselves were based in Chicago) were outraged, and threatened to divest from and boycott the business unless the company closed down its Jim Crow operations instead. The company, already hurting financially from a diminishing customer base complied, closing the Memphis plant, saving the Chicago plant, and moving its manufacturing administration to its Milwaukee plant.


The building is one of the few buildings remaining of what used to be called the "Hell's Half Acre" section of the Fort Pickering neighborhood (now known to most as the French Fort neighborhood), so named by locals because there were more factories and homes crammed together in this half acre area than anywhere else in the city. In this area, working class black and white families mingled and lived together freely, in what was one of the only racially integrated neighborhoods in the city's history.

Unfortunately, city planners caught up in the urban renewal fervor of the 60s and encouraged by a mayor unkeen on the integration he saw happening in his backyard, began displacing the longtime residents and razing nearly all of the historic buildings for Interstate 55. The remaining land was sold to a real estate developer who created the suburban French Fort community in the southwestern part of Fort Pickering, while the rest of the land was rezoned and sold as industrial parcels.

The residents mostly resettled throughout the city, but continued to have yearly reunions at Chickasaw Park up until 2005. Today, a few of the remaining residents still live in RVs at the Mississippi River RV Park in the neighborhood and commute to the nearby factories or docks just as their ancestors did.

[tigerphan]

I would like to see it redeveloped into some kind of industrial space. The location seems great from a distribution standpoint. I don't think it has rail access though. It would warm my heart to see it turned into a distribution center or call center for one of the big ecommerce companies.

It's interesting reading about how mail order businesses were hit by retail expansion, and now retail is being hit by ecommerce.

The mail-order business was in some ways parent of modern ecommerce today. Before you had Amazon and eBay, you could order everything from underwear to an entire house from a catalogue. Between this, Sears Crosstown, and even FedEx's early mistakes, Memphis has definitely gotten it's teeth kicked in by ecommerce. I suppose it could be argued that FedEx is agressively pushing to take some of that shipping business today from UPS and that International Paper indirectly benefits from ecommerce as a consumer packaging giant.

I imagine the building is way too far gone and will probably collapse or burn at some point.

Memphis needs an industrial base very badly. Mitsubishi Electric and Electrolux were a really good step in the right direction, but it just isn't nearly enough....especially with the loss of ConAgra and the loss of jobs at the old power plant that's been sort of outlawed by the Feds, not to mention the struggling north Memphis industrial sites where Firestone used to operate.

[jabogitlu]

Thanks for that history, ViolentDisasters. Never in all my time had I heard of Hell's Half Acre.

[eastmemphisguy]

Good news. Today's Commercial Appeal says this eyesore will be renovated and will become a U-Haul store. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

[Jardine8]

Originally Posted by eastmemphisguy

Good news. Today's Commercial Appeal says this eyesore will be renovated and will become a U-Haul store. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

A U-Haul store? That is an awfully big building to renovate and turn into a U-Haul store.

[eastmemphisguy]

Here's the link. Maybe the U-Haul folks have something more than just a standard store in mind.
U-haul plans to rehab decayed building at Downtown gateway