Memphis in the 1920s
When the Columbian Mutual Assurance Society chose to move their headquarters to Memphis, the city was in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom. The city of Memphis was founded in 1819, with an urban grid surveyed by William Lawrence. By the 1850s, Memphis was a thriving trade center and the world’s largest inland cotton market.[1] The city’s economic growth dramatically slowed during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but its population rose, largely due to an influx of Confederate veterans and their families. The increased population, coupled with inadequate drainage and sewage infrastructure, led to a devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Of the city’s roughly 40,000 residents, about 25,000 fled the city in the epidemic’s first two weeks, and of those remaining, over 5,000 died. The city went bankrupt, and in 1879 the state legislature revoked the Memphis charter. Compelled by a desire to avoid such catastrophe in the future, a special commission appointed by the National Board of Health implemented a new sewer system, and the city’s population had largely recovered by 1890. The city’s charter was restored in 1893. In 1895 the city’s first steel-frame building, the ten-story National Bank Building (Edward Culliatt Jones, now known as the D.T. Porter Building), was completed, and it is widely recognized as the first skyscraper in Memphis.[2] The city’s economic and physical growth continued in the early years of the twentieth century. New buildings used steel-frame technology developed in New York and Chicago. Among them was the 1910 Exchange Building, the tallest building in Memphis until the construction of the Columbian Mutual Tower. At nineteen stories, the 264-foot skyscraper was designed by Neander Montgomery Woods and built by the city’s primary economic engine, the Cotton and Merchants Exchange. The first century of Memphis’s history witnessed dramatically uneven economic fortunes, but by the start of World War I the burgeoning city was a regional leader in business.
In 1919, Memphis celebrated its centennial anniversary, and the year ushered in a decade of prosperity that also featured the city’s first efforts at urban planning. The 1920s were “undoubtedly [a] golden era of business prosperity and flamboyance” for downtown Memphis.[3] Like the country as a whole, the city of Memphis benefited from pent-up demand during World War and increased use of consumer credit, and downtown property values skyrocketed. Between 1923 and 1929, one million square feet of office space came on the market, with the city’s peak construction year coming in 1924.[4] In response to this rapid development, Harland Bartholomew was hired to create a comprehensive city plan, and as a result the city’s first zoning ordinance was passed in 1922. This zoning ordinance included building height districts, and the downtown district was limited to 150 feet or 12 stories because Bartholomew felt that “tall buildings in congested downtown areas were injurious to the city by compounding congestion and by shutting off air and light to pedestrians.”[5] However, the city plan was not printed or distributed until 1924, when the Columbian Mutual Tower and several other buildings exceeding the height limit were well underway. Thus the height restrictions were compromised even before the plan was enacted, and they did not prevent the construction of Wyatt Hendrick’s Sterick Building in 1930, which, at a height of 365 feet and 29 stories, surpassed the Columbian Mutual Tower as the city’s tallest building. However, the Bartholomew plan did restrain overall verticality in Memphis in favor of horizontal expansion, thereby increasing the visual impact of the Columbian Mutual Tower for decades to come.
Despite its economic prosperity in the 1920s, the city of Memphis was still significantly smaller than the leading economic centers in the United States. In the 1920 census, Memphis had a population of 162,351, making it the fortieth largest city in America. In comparison, New York City had the largest urban population with 5.6 million residents; however, only two other cities—Chicago and Philadelphia—had more than one million residents.[6] Memphis was not a national economic center, but its leaders aspired to be an economic leader on a regional scale. In 1920 Memphis was the fifth largest city in the southeastern United States, behind New Orleans, Louisiana, at seventeen; Atlanta, Georgia, at thirty-third; Birmingham, Alabama, at thirty-sixth; and Richmond, Virginia, at thirty-eighth. Memphis’s size was thus comparable to its regional peers, and by the 1930 census its population had increased to 253,143, making it the thirty-fourth largest city in the United States.[7] Because of Memphis’s size, the Columbian Mutual Tower did not need to be on the same scale as New York and Chicago skyscrapers—it could have a strong visual impact even at a much smaller size. Similarly, the scope of its business was significantly smaller than that of global businesses based in New York and Chicago, but it used the same promotion and expansion techniques on a regional scale.
[1] Eugene J. Johnson and Robert D. Russell, Jr. Memphis: An Architectural Guide (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), xvi.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Robert Alan Sigafoos, Cotton Row to Beale Street: A Business History of Memphis (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1979), 155.
[4] Sigafroos, Business History, 152.
[5] Sigafroos, Business History, 150.
[6] Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1920, U.S. Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1920; published online June 15, 1998).
[7] Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1930, U.S. Bureau of the Census (Washington, DC, 1930; published online June 15, 1998).
