Crosstown Concourse is a large mixed-use building in Midtown Memphis that combines apartments, offices, a school, a clinic, retail space and arts venues under one roof. Before its 2017 reopening, the building spent decades as a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog distribution center and retail store, built in 1927 and shuttered by Sears in 1993.
What was the building originally?
The structure was built by Sears, Roebuck and Co. as a regional distribution hub, handling the mail-order catalog business that made Sears a dominant national retailer through the twentieth century. It also housed a retail store on its lower floors, a common pairing at large Sears facilities of that era.
At roughly 1.5 million square feet, according to figures published by Crosstown Concourse’s own materials, it was one of the larger buildings in the Sears distribution network and, for decades, a major employer on the Midtown side of the city. Its scale — a long, dense, multi-story block rather than a single-story warehouse — reflects how catalog operations were organized before trucking and highway logistics reshaped retail distribution later in the century.
Why did Sears close it?
Sears closed its national catalog operation in 1993, ending a business model the company had run since the 1890s, as mail-order catalog retail was overtaken by shopping malls and, later, other forms of retail. The Memphis facility, tied directly to that catalog business, went with it. The building then sat largely vacant for close to two decades, a fate shared by other large Sears distribution centers around the country once the catalog division closed.
A vacant building of that size, in the middle of a residential Midtown neighborhood, became a long-running civic question in Memphis: what do you do with 1.5 million square feet of empty industrial floorplate once its original purpose is gone.
How did it become Crosstown Concourse?
The answer that emerged, over roughly a decade of planning, was to convert the building into a single site holding multiple institutions rather than one anchor tenant. The redevelopment was led by Crosstown Arts, a Memphis nonprofit, working with a coalition of development, community and civic partners, and financed in part through federal historic and new-markets tax credit programs — the kind of financing typically available only to a building that carries National Register of Historic Places status or an equivalent historic designation.
The project reopened the building in 2017 under the name Crosstown Concourse. Its organizers describe the model as a “vertical urban village” — a single structure designed to hold health care, education, arts, retail and housing together, rather than separating those functions across a city as most zoning and development typically does.
What is inside Crosstown Concourse today?
The building functions as a small institutional district compressed into one address. According to organizations with a public presence there, tenants and uses have included:
- Crosstown Arts, the nonprofit’s own galleries, a theater, artist studios and residencies
- Church Health, a nonprofit health care provider serving uninsured and underinsured patients in the Memphis area
- Crosstown High School, a public charter school
- A YMCA branch with fitness and pool facilities
- Classroom and program space used by area universities
- Market-rate and mixed-income residential apartments on the upper floors
- Independent retail, office space and food and drink venues on the ground floor
The exact tenant roster shifts over time, as leases turn over and new organizations move in, so a reader planning a visit around a specific business should confirm current occupants through Crosstown Concourse’s own site rather than treat any list as fixed.
Is Crosstown Concourse open to the public?
The ground floor, atrium and Crosstown Arts’ gallery and event spaces operate as public areas, open on a schedule that Crosstown Arts publishes and updates itself. Residential floors and clinical space are not open to casual visitors, in line with how any working apartment building or medical clinic operates. Gallery admission, exhibition hours and event listings should be checked on Crosstown Arts’ own site rather than assumed, since museum and gallery hours across Memphis change seasonally — a pattern covered more generally in the site’s guide to which Memphis museums are free, and when to visit.
Where does Crosstown Concourse sit in the city?
The building anchors the Crosstown neighborhood, part of the wider Midtown Memphis area, at the intersection of North Cleveland Street and North Parkway. Its footprint and height make it visible from a distance across Midtown, a scale that owes entirely to its origin as an industrial distribution center rather than to any design choice made for the current mixed-use building.
For residents, the building functions less as a single attraction and more as neighborhood infrastructure — a school, a clinic, a gym and a set of galleries that happen to share a lobby. That pattern, of a former industrial building repurposed to hold civic and cultural functions rather than demolished, fits a broader story told across the site’s guide to living in Memphis, which covers how Midtown differs from downtown and the eastern suburbs in density, housing stock and daily use.
How does it compare to other Memphis landmarks?
Memphis has several buildings whose current identity depends on understanding what they were built for originally. The Metal Museum, the Cotton Museum at the old Memphis Cotton Exchange, and the Pyramid — now a Bass Pro Shops retail store — all carry this same before-and-after structure, where the building’s present use only makes sense against its earlier one. The site’s guide to the Memphis Pyramid and why Bass Pro is there covers a comparable case of adaptive reuse on a different scale.
Crosstown Concourse is not treated as a museum in its own right and does not appear alongside the city’s collecting institutions covered in the Museums & Galleries archive, but its galleries and public programming put it in regular conversation with that world. As a piece of the built city, it belongs more properly with the sites covered in the Landmarks & Sights archive, which tracks buildings defined by what they were before they became what they are now.
What should a visitor actually plan around?
A visit works best treated as a stop within Midtown rather than a destination requiring a half-day. Parking, gallery hours, and which retail or food spaces are currently operating all change; Crosstown Concourse’s own site is the reliable source for current hours and events, not any third-party listing. For a broader sense of how to sequence a Midtown stop against downtown landmarks, riverfront sites and museum hours across a single trip, the site’s practical guide to getting around and planning in Memphis lays out the logistics, and the Memphis guide hub situates Crosstown alongside the city’s other neighborhoods and day-trip options.
Because the building holds a school, a clinic and private residences alongside its public galleries, visitors should expect the same boundaries any working institution sets — public floors and hours, and private space that is not part of the visitor experience regardless of how the lobby and atrium are used for public events.
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D., source, CC BY-SA 3.0
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