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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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Urban Land > Development > A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis

A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis

By Joe Gose September 17, 2018

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A former loading dock on Crosstown Concourse’s south side was converted into a continuous front entrance and retail walkway.

To bring in natural light and foster connections between people roaming the corridors and public spaces, the developers cut out numerous >oors throughout the building, creating three large atriums and four smaller ones. (Jamie Harmon/Amurica)

In 1927, Sears, Roebuck & Company opened a distribution center and retail location in the Crosstown neighborhood of Memphis. As business boomed, the footprint more than doubled in size over the next 40 years. After a nearly three-decade decline that hastened decay in Crosstown, the 1.5 million-square-foot (139,400 sq m) building Tnally closed in 1993, sitting behind a chain link and barbed wire fence for years.

In the last year, the now-historic brick-and-cast-stone behemoth is anchoring a renewal of this part of Memphis. Known as Crosstown Concourse, the ten-story “vertical village” mixed-use project opened in 2017, following a $200 million redevelopment that took seven years of planning, fund raising, demolition, and construction. Health companies, artists, a high school, educational organizations, retailers, and restaurants occupy virtually all of the commercial space, while residents Tll 265 apartments spread across the upper four \oors. Between employees, residents, students, and customers, 2,000 to 3,000 people frequent the 1.1 million-square-foot (102,200 sq m) Crosstown Concourse on any given day.

“Crosstown Concourse has really become the most signiTcant part of Memphis in terms of activity at the moment,” says Alan Boniface, a principal with the North American design Trm DIALOG and a ULI full member, who was involved in the effort to reuse Crosstown Concourse. “It is a meeting place for all walks of life.” https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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Rather than simply paying rent in return for space to serve customers, more than 40 commercial tenants in Crosstown Concourse are pursuing a collaborative mission to become “better together”—a mantra that is cited often in the building’s redevelopment story. It’s a vision that started with Todd Richardson and Christopher Miner, founders of Crosstown Arts, an organization focused on cultivating the creative community in Memphis. They believed that by moving their group into the building, they could rebuild the neighborhood.

Yet, as an art history professor at the University of Memphis, Richardson acknowledges that he may have underestimated the disculty of selling the idea given the building’s size and the amount of money needed to Tx it up, especially in a depressed real estate market.

“We didn’t give ourselves much of a chance for success,” he said. “If you look at the building as just space to be Tlled, where do you start? It’s the size of 25 football Telds.

“But we began thinking about using the building to create a great neighborhood and all the things that make up a great neighborhood. Then we were asking, ‘Do we have enough space?’”

The rebirth of Crosstown Concourse began in 2010. At that time, local investment manager and entrepreneur Staley Cates owned the property after quietly acquiring it in 2007. He had anticipated moving a small private college into the building, but the Great Recession derailed the plan. When Crosstown Arts founders approached Cates about moving their group into the building to spark the creation of an urban vertical village, he agreed to fund a feasibility study.

Stairways and seating take advantage of the atrium and natural light at the building’s center. (Chad Mellon)

The idea of creating collaborative spaces where all occupants are expected to contribute to the broader community is not a new concept, Boniface says, but it is becoming more widespread in the United States as urban neighborhoods are rediscovered. In Crosstown, the challenge was convincing people who assess real estate deals on a fundamental level to buy into the notion, says Frank Ricks, a principal with Memphis architecture Trm Looney Ricks Kiss, which also worked on the project.

“When I Trst met Todd and Chris, I told them I didn’t know how they were going to make the numbers work,” Ricks says. “But to their credit, they wouldn’t quit. They don’t play in the real estate world and kind of deTed logic. That’s probably what made success possible.”

The effort to pull together a plan entailed hundreds of meetings with neighbors, civic leaders, and institutions. A signiTcant breakthrough came after Richardson met with Dr. G. Scott Morris, founder and CEO of Memphis-based Church Health, which provides health care to some 70,000 low-income workers who lack insurance.

Initially, Richardson asked Morris if he would set up a clinic in the building to serve artists. Although Morris didn’t consider the idea Tnancially viable, it nevertheless intrigued him along with the mission to be “better together.” Church Health services were spread over 13 buildings throughout Memphis, and he wanted to consolidate under one roof.

“We had to become more escient and Tnd ways to better care for people in a holistic approach,” says https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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Morris, who is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. “When I chewed on how the Tnancing could possibly work, I could see how there was a path to get there.”

Because of the building’s historic landmark designation, the exterior is largely unchanged. (Chad Mellon)

Church Health eventually invested $40 million and leased 150,000 square feet (13,900 sq m). But more immediately, Morris joined Richardson in the recruitment of additional organizations focused on health, arts, and education. Six more groups ultimately signed up, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis Teacher Residency, and Crosstown High School.

Together with Crosstown Arts and Church Health, they became the building’s eight foundational partners and over time raised $200 million from 32 different sources. Meanwhile, the planning process included a tour of Midtown Exchange, a near carbon copy of the Sears distribution ediTce in Minneapolis that had been redeveloped into a mixed-use structure, and intensive design sessions.

“For over a year, we worked through how each partner might interact with the others and public spaces by talking about their business models and the resources they would bring,” says Tony Pellicciotti, a principal with Looney Ricks Kiss. “While we talked about their physical needs, they were really secondary to the community we were building.”

Developers and designers held workshops to Tgure out how to dissect the building to foster connections between people in the corridors and public spaces. But because of its landmark designation, they could not alter the exterior, Boniface says. As a result, they converted the former loading dock on the building’s south side into a continuous front door and retail walkway. To bring in natural light and foster connections between people roaming the corridors and public spaces, the developers cut out numerous \oors throughout the building, creating three large atriums and four smaller ones. That and the demolition of a one-story addition wrapped around a rail spur helped reduce the amount of square footage to Tll.

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https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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An aerial view of Crosstown Commons in Memphis. (Aerial Innovations)

In addition, elements such as green and red stairways that draw on the old Sears chute conveyor system were incorporated to entice the public into various parts of the project, Boniface adds. The building includes underground parking, and developers Txed up a 1,150-car garage across the street. Crosstown Concourse also earned a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum designation for historic adaptive use and is believed to be the largest project of the kind to earn that distinction.

More important is the in\uence that the development has had on the Crosstown neighborhood, which is where Richardson, Franks, and Pellicciotti live. Residential development has picked up in the area, and shuttered commercial buildings are coming back to life, Richardson says.

“An abandoned and blighted building for 20 years doesn’t do much for property values,” he says. “But now it’s full of stuff, and people want to be part of it.”

https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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Emily • 5 months ago

As one of the thousands who comes to work at Crosstown each day, I am so inspired by and honored to be part of the community here. It's amazing to see how Memphis reclaimed this building for the higher good.

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How Hines and Other Developers Are Future-ProoTng Their Projects

By Adam Branson September 17, 2018

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A panel discussion at the ULI Europe Real Estate Forum 2018 in Dublin focused on a key question facing the development industry: how to future-proof urban redevelopment in an era of constant change. Kicking off the discussion, Jay Wyper, senior vice president at the Hines Conceptual Construction Group, related his experience of working on large-scale projects across Europe.

He pointed to the vast Diagonal Mar development in Barcelona, which he described as a true “placemaking mission.” At the time that Hines acquired the site, said Wyper, it wasn’t even on the city’s maps and it took two years for the company to come up with a master plan that would deliver genuine and lasting change.

Totaling 4 million square feet (372,000 sq m), the development was and remains truly mixed-use, with a regional shopping center, a convention center, residential, and a major new public park among the key elements. The key to its success, said Wyper, was “bringing in the neighbors and getting them to own the park.”

Wyper also talked about Hines’s work on the Porta Nuova project in Milan. Until Hines acquired the former railway, it was referred to by locals as “a black hole in the middle of the city” and was discult to traverse.

As a result, the key challenge on the project was to Tnd a way to create bridges between the site and surrounding neighborhoods, according to Wyper.

Due to the scale of the site, Hines broke the development down into three interconnected projects and commissioned three master plans. In total, 20 different architecture Trms worked on the development, from local practices to globally recognizable names. Apart from creating new routes into surrounding communities, Wyper said that a new public park—Milan’s third largest—was vitally important, with a curated

https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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program of activities and events, bringing vitality to the site throughout the week.

Wyper also noted several different trends from his experience in Europe, as well as North America, and urged delegates to think about them carefully. For instance, he noted that suburban developments are increasingly urban in nature, with densiTcation and a mix of uses providing places where people can work, live, and play.

In addition to providing a mix of tenures, he added, residential elements in successful placemaking initiatives are also often now aimed at multiple generations, re\ecting increasing urbanization across generations. Finally, he noted a move away from concentrating simply on buildings’ environmental sustainability to the role they play in promoting wellness.

Getting the mix of uses right in order to create places where people both live and work was something picked up by the second speaker. Nuala Gallagher, who was recently appointed as a director at Bristol City Council, used examples from throughout her career to illustrate her main contention: that “it is all about getting the basics right; about only ever being Tve minutes from a pint of milk or pint of beer.”

For example, Gallagher talked about her work on the regeneration of Canning Town, east London, which was heavily bombed during the blitz and subsequently saw large volumes of poor-quality housing estates constructed after the war. “People just didn’t want to live there,” she said.

As a result, the London borough of Newham drew up a comprehensive supplementary planning document setting out its ambitions for the area, which included a focus on creating high-quality affordable housing and regenerating the town center. In order to attract developers, as landowners the borough was able to delay land receipts so that developers only paid for plots once developments had started selling— something Gallagher said was critical to success.

The session’s Tnal speaker, James Mary O’Conner, principal at Moore Ruble Yudell Architects and Planning, didn’t disagree that comprehensive intervention can be necessary, but argued that, where possible, “the most sustainable thing to do is use what we have” and that “we have to know where we’ve come from.”

O’Conner pointed to his work on Grangegorman, Dublin, a former mental hospital that has been closed off from the city for 200 years but that is now being opened up to create a new home for the Dublin Institute of Technology. The project is retaining existing structures but adapting them for modern use and providing new student accommodation facilities throughout the site.

Elsewhere, O’Conner also urged delegates to think about how buildings can respond to rapid changes in technology. His Trm is using what he called its “open building principle” on a new teaching facility at the University of California, Berkeley, which he said should ensure it is future-proofed from a technology perspective. “Planning can take years, so you have to proof for change,” he added.

Finally, O’Conner talked about the increasing importance of cities providing genuinely affordable housing and doing so in an integrated fashion, pointing out that “the middle classes are being pushed out of cities around the world.” As an example, he pointed to a recent development in Santa Monica, California.

“It was done with public land and private developers,” said O’Conner. “It’s 50 percent affordable and there was a proTt share after a certain level of return was achieved. It’s exceeded all expectations—it’s a good example of total integration.”

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https://urbanland.uli.org/development-business/from-a-retail-ruin-a-mixed-use-vertical-village-brings-needed-density-to-memphis/

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A Mixed-Use Vertical Village Revives a Retail Ruin in Memphis - Urban Land Magazine

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