With a foundation as a sophisticated mail-order operation that began in 1889, Sears Roebuck & Company successfully created the role of “buyer for the American farm” by connecting rural people to retail goods. Its goals were to reach communities in rural areas that had limited access to retail stores and to provide affordable and quality goods that might otherwise only be found in the largest cities.

On August 8, 1927, Memphis Mayor Rowlett Paine officially opened the Memphis Sears distribution center and retail store in the Crosstown neighborhood. As one of ten nationwide distribution centers, the Crosstown facility was one of the last three catalog centers to be opened prior to the Great Depression.

The initial 650,000 square-foot facility was built in only 180 days and eventually grew to a 1.5 million square-foot complex. The catalog distribution function of the building remained in use until 1993, when all catalog sales nationwide at Sears were discontinued. Partial operations were also relocated to newer warehouse facilities in other parts of Memphis, and the building was abandoned.

Designed by Albert Kahn, the famed “architect of Detroit,” the McCullough Center was Ford’s first assembly plant outside of the Motor City. In its 1920s heyday, hundreds of Model T’s rolled off its lot every day. But after Ford closed the plant in 1932, the building foundered for decades, serving as a sales office, a warehouse, and office space. By the time Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) acquired the iconic 1915 building in 1981, it was already in need of considerable renovation, if not an outright overhaul.

Due to cost constraints, however, the Center’s full potential as a hub of artistic endeavor was left unrealized for 25-plus years. During this time, CIA’s campus was split between two buildings separated by a half mile of parking lot – a drab, deadening asphalt gulf that students dubbed “the Beach.”

Constructed in 1912, the George W. Adair School is a two-story brick building located at the heart of the Adair Park neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. Adair Park, a “bungalow suburb,” was developed between the 1890s to the 1940s and features a variety of unique architectural styles, including Queen Anne and Folk Victorian, English Revival, and the predominant American Craftsman bungalows.

The George W. Adair School was designed in the Academic Gothic Revival style by Edward Dougherty, one of Atlanta’s leading architects of the time known for his works throughout Atlanta, including Druid Hills Baptist Church, Druid Hills Golf Club, Imperial Hotel, and the Highland School. For almost 60 years, it operated as both a school and a community gathering center, until enrollment began to diminish in the early 1960s. The school shut its doors in the fall of 1973 and has remained vacant and decaying ever since.

In the late 1800s, Fall River, Massachusetts, had become one of the country’s leading textile regions in America and, by the turn of the century, housed more than 1 million spindles in operation, second in the world to only Manchester, England. Originally known as the Bradford Durfee Textile School, the facility opened its doors in 1904 to provide advanced courses in textile manufacturing and chemistry to educate the rapidly growing population of local mill workers.

The school was named by the school’s original landowner, Miss Sarah S. Brayton, a descendant of local textile industry pioneer and Civil War veteran Maj. Bradford Dufree. Classes initially offered included advanced designing, electrical laboratory, motor testing, hand warping, loom, mechanical drawing, and machine shop.

The school expanded over the years and started to offer additional courses of study, eventually gaining the ability to award Bachelor’s degrees. At that point, the school’s name was changed to the Bradford Durfee College of Technology. In 1960, it merged with a neighboring technical institute to form the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute and, in 1991, was acquired and merged with several branches of the University of Massachusetts to become UMass Dartmouth, vacating the building in the transition. A local community college briefly took over some of the space for classes but left nearly 20 years ago. The building has since sat vacant, awaiting a new use.

The 74,000 square foot, five-building campus will soon become the Creative Class Lofts and provide 44 market-rate apartments, 11 affordable apartments for practicing artists, and 23,345 square feet of commercial, community, and retail space.

Anchoring the commercial portion of the building will be the Spectrum Empowerment Project and the Youth Musical Theater Corporation (YMTC). Spectrum provides autistic adults with an alternate path to college and employment through economic independence, social growth, and creative expression. YMTC is a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization that provides young people with the opportunity to participate in theatrical experiences and produces two Broadway-style musicals each year. The building will also include a 170-seat event space/black box theater to support these groups, as well as an art gallery open to the public.

Groundwork, a Massachusetts-based coworking space provider, will be opening a new site within Creative Class Lofts after celebrating five years of successful growth in their New Bedford location. The Groundwork space will provide coworking memberships and support several local businesses, including Entrepreneurship for All (“E for All”), a year-long small business incubation program.

Built in 1909, the historic Odell Building at 21 North Avenue was one of the first, if not the first, commercial buildings located on what is now known as North Avenue in Baltimore City, Maryland. During the mid-1800s, Taney Place was an upper-class residential boulevard of many free-standing estates and large rowhouses. The street began to transition to more high-end commercial use with the construction of 21 North Avenue, which housed the Auto Outing Company, a luxury Buick sales and service station, and Tuttle’s Dancing Academy. Generations of Baltimore’s upper-class took lessons at this academy, including Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.

During the 1920s, the street became fully commercial and catered almost exclusively to wealthy patrons. During this time, the founder of Auto Outing Company, JM Robbins, changed the business name to Robbins Buick, to reflect an increased focus on car sales. This period was short-lived and came to an end with the Great Depression of 1929. Robbins Buick closed its doors in 1932, but the ballroom remained.

As the country recovered through the 1940s, the area around North Avenue shifted to serve the growing middle-class community and became a major point of connection for the city’s eastern and western residential areas. With excellent streetcar services, North Avenue became a social and entertainment center for Baltimore’s younger population, and the building became the social landmark. From the 1950s through the building’s vacancy in 1992, the building housed several famous nightclubs and venues, the most iconic of which being Odell’s. Opened in 1976, Odell’s was Baltimore’s premier disco venue through the 1980s and is often cited as the birthplace of Baltimore Club Music. Since the club’s closing in 1992, the building has sat vacant and waiting for revitalization.

The historic General Electric complex and its contribution to the community began in 1881 with the establishment of the Fort Wayne Electric Company. After meeting with the inventor of one of the earliest variations of arc lighting, local entrepreneur Ranald Macdonald established the Fort Wayne electric company to manufacture and sell the Jenney arc lighting system for Indiana and four other states. Within four years, the Fort Wayne Electric Works had grown from a start-up enterprise to a successful and growing business. By 1892, Fort Wayne Electric caught the eye of and was acquired by the General Electric (GE) company, one of the three largest electrical companies in the country at the time.

Upon taking control of the Fort Wayne Electric Works, General Electric invested heavily in expanding its operations in Fort Wayne. Through World War I and into the heady economic years of the 1920s, the company continued to grow exponentially. The company was at the forefront of the rise of electrical streetcar systems and the leader of electrical consumer appliances. As America electrified, General Electric grew rapidly. By the mid-1940s, the complex supported more than 20,000 employees.

However, through these decades, GE’s national footprint continued to expand and its prioritization of the Fort Wayne location began to diminish. By the 1950s, the Fort Wayne location was no longer the epicenter of GE’s key business. Over the ensuing years, production and employment levels at the Broadway campus dropped consistently and at times significantly as GE shifted production to newer, more efficient factories with cheaper and typically non-union workforces. Thus beginning in the Post-World War II years, the Broadway campus no longer served as a singular symbol of Fort Wayne’s industrial-strength, but rather one of many GE assets to be managed by GE’s corporate headquarters in Schenectady, New York. The company permanently closed the 39-acre complex in 2015 and it was acquired in 2017 for redevelopment by a partnership led by Durham-based Ancora Partners.

The history of the American Snuff Company can be traced back to 1782 with the founding of Garrett Scotch Snuff, one of the earliest producers of the smokeless tobacco product in the country and one of the first 10 patents to be issued in America. In 1900, Garrett Scotch merged with several major tobacco empires of the time, to form the first iteration of the American Snuff Company. This merger, however, created a monopoly on tobacco products and was divided into three separate companies in 1907.

The new American Snuff Company, under the management of Martin J. Condon Sr., a former Mayor of Knoxville, constructed the Memphis warehouse in 1912 to house the production, packaging, and distribution of their snuff products. Condon chose the Memphis location due to its proximity to a high-quality dark-fired tobacco farming region known as the ‘Black Patch,’ as well as its central location and well-connected rail hub.

The American Snuff Company prospered under Condon’s direction through the 1930s. The Wall Street Journal called the American Snuff Company “depression proof,” after a decision to broaden product lines to include sweet-flavored snuff resulted in higher sales than the company’s pre-depression years. During this period the Memphis plant was featured heavily in the company’s advertising campaigns as well as those for the city of Memphis.

During the 1940s and 1950s, women comprised a majority of the American Snuff staff, many of which were members of the growing labor union movements of the time, such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Memphis warehouse was the site of a major union strike in 1950 when 324 workers staged a 185-day strike in demand of better pay and working conditions. The walkout and strike resulted in workers getting a $.05 raise, dues check-offs from paychecks, and a new recreation room in the warehouse.

By 1955, the American Snuff Company was the second largest snuff manufacturer in the US employing 500 at the Memphis plant. Condon was eventually succeeded by James E. Harwood, a long-time employee of the Nashville factory. In 1965, the firm’s name was changed to Conwood Corp., a combination of his and the former president’s last name. Reynolds American acquired the Conwood Corp in mid-2006 for $3.5 billion in cash. It now generates nearly 7% of Reynolds American’s annual revenue. They used the Keel Avenue facility until 2012 when they sold the property.