Cultural Resources Survey of

The Medical District

Memphis, TN

Census Tracts 37, 38, 39, 40

Conducted by Memphis Heritage, Inc. for the Memphis Landmarks Commission

April 2003

Written by Susan M. Mascolino

I.                   Introduction

The Medical District consists of several neighborhoods that have been merged into one area.  The survey area followed the borders of Danny Thomas, Vance and Peabody, Interstate 240, and Poplar Avenue.  Major streets running east and west through the district include Vance Avenue, Pontotoc Avenue, Linden Avenue, Beale Street, Union Avenue, Madison Avenue, Jefferson Avenue, Adams Avenue, and Washington Avenue.  Cross streets running north and south include Lauderdale Street, Orleans Street, Walnut Street, Manassas Street, Dunlap Street, East Street, Pauline Street, Camilla Street, and Somerville.   The various neighborhoods included within these borders are the Vance-Pontotoc district, the Edge area, Victorian Village, along with the UT-Memphis campus and the hospitals that make up the Medical Center and the core of the Medical District. Although this district once included some of the best examples of turn-of-the 20^th century architecture in Memphis, it was decimated by urban renewal efforts in the 1960s-70s.  What was not torn down during urban renewal has been lost to demolition because of neglect or arson.  Thus, this area has been left with a patchwork of historic buildings in a variety of states of disrepair. 

            The area south of Union came from the five thousand acre Ramsey land grant, owned by John Ramsey and Judge John Overton.  In 1938, the South Memphis Company, owned by Robertson Topp, bought 414 acres of the Ramsey grant and began land sales. By 1845, Topp had incorporated the town of South Memphis, which was bordered by Union, Delaware, Walnut, and East Streets.  The area of South Memphis became very fashionable for the wealthy to build homes, filling the streets of Beale Street, Linden Avenue, and Vance Avenue.  By 1850, South Memphis was incorporated into the city of Memphis and continued its popularity as a residential area until the end of the 19^th century.[1] 

By the early 1900s, newer development became fashionable in the Central Gardens and Annesdale Park areas, which were opened up by the streetcars.  In the 1920s, the Vance-Pontotoc district began to shift from upper class to lower income residents with the high-style homes becoming boarding houses and businesses.  The beginning of the end for the historic structures of this area was the development in the mid-1930’s of Foote Homes, a black housing project bound by Danny Thomas Boulevard, Vance Avenue, Mississippi Boulevard, and Fourth Street.  Despite petitions by all races that resided in this area, the city razed all the buildings within these boundaries and in 1941 constructed the new housing project.  A white housing project, named Lamar Terrace, was also completed at the same time on Lamar Avenue at Camilla Street just a couple blocks south of Vance Avenue and the survey area.  The impact of these projects shifted the area completely from high income to low income.  Institutions such as Grace Episcopal Church and Second Presbyterian Church moved eastward as did schools such as St. Agnes Academy and Siena College.  The area continued to decline and the urban renewal program swept through in the 1960’s created large vacant spaces along Beale Street, Linden, Pontotoc, and Union Avenues. [2]  Many of these empty tracts still exist to this day and have been added to as more houses have suffered from neglect and deterioration only to be demolished along with their past neighbors.

The northern portion of the Medical District also has a similar early history.  The original portion of Memphis came from the John Rice land grant of 5,000 acres.  John Overton and Andrew Jackson eventually bought interests in these tracts and became the original proprietors of Memphis.[3]  The Bayou Gayoso, which still runs channeled under Danny Thomas Boulevard, formed the eastern boundary of Memphis from 1832 until 1848.  In 1849, the city boundaries were extended to Manassas and new bridges were built crossing the bayou.  This opened areas to the east for further development. [4] 

Memphis was experiencing a boom period in the 1830s-40s as the center of steamboat and railroad transportation lines. The c. 1830s Hunt-Phelan house (with an 1851 Greek Revival façade) on Beale Street is a rare example of a building surviving from this early period of Memphis development.  Cotton planters moved into the region during the 1830s, as they looked westward for more land.  In 1825 only 300 bales of cotton were coming into Memphis.  By 1830, that number increased to 35,000 bales.  At the start of the Civil War, the amount of cotton moving through Memphis had jumped to 400,000 bales.  Real estate, local commerce, railroads and steamboats, and the telegraph all came to be dependent on the cotton industry.[5]  The few surviving homes that constitute the Victorian Village area represent this period.  Many of the men who built these houses made their fortunes in cotton, including the Woodruff-Fontaine and James Lee homes.  Amos Woodruff helped to build and rebuild the city during Reconstruction as president of Merchants National Bank and founder of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad.  Noland Fontaine was a cotton broker for Hill, Fontaine, and Company.  James Lee Fontaine, Jr. shipped cotton with his Lee Steamer Company.[6]   The cluster of houses along Adams and Jefferson that were built from the 1840s to the 1890s constitute the only remaining group of such 19^th century, high style homes in Memphis.

At the core of the Medical District is the University of Tennessee-Memphis campus and the adjoining hospital buildings that make up the Medical Center, including the former Baptist Memorial Hospital and the Med.  This area has been connected to medicine since the early days of Memphis when the Memphis City Hospital was opened in 1841 on a ten-acre tract, where Forrest Park now is situated.[7]  The Hospital was torn down and the park, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Civil War general, was created in 1899.  The creation of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine came after several attempts to establish a medical school in Knoxville failed.  Five medical schools merged to form the statewide medical college in Memphis in 1914.  The new college was housed in several buildings, which no longer stand, along Madison and Union.[8] In the 1920s, the campus had a building surge and the architecture firm of Jones and Furbringer was hired to develop a plan for the campus.  The original plan was for a traditional quadrangle enclosed by buildings with one projecting into the center of the quad on axis with Union Avenue, visible through a cloistered walkway.  The gothic revival concept for the buildings was carried throughout the next thirty years of campus building but the plan for an enclosed quad did not quite make it through the years of additions.  The Wittenburg Anatomy Building (d.1926), the Mooney Library (d.1928), and the Crowe Pharmacy Building (d.1928) formed the U-shape of the eastern side of the quad.  The College of Dentistry Building (d.1949), now the Johnson Faculty Building on Dunlap, formed part of the other side of the quad.  The Hyman Administration Building (d.1955), the Nash Biochemistry-Physiology Building (d.1955), and the Cloistered Walkway (d.1955) were added along Union in the 1950s.[9]  All of these buildings embody the gothic revival architectural style of the campus as interpreted over the decades.

To the east of the UT-Memphis campus is the Baptist Memorial Hospital complex.  The Baptist Memorial Hospital opened in 1912 and has since been added onto over the years to form what was the largest private hospital in the United States by the 1970’s.[10]  The idea for the hospital was formed at the Shelby County Baptist Association meeting in 1906.  Dr. H.P. Hurt proposed a Baptist-sponsored hospital that was “open to all who are sick and in pain regardless of their creed or faith.”  By 1908, they had raised a portion of the funds and made arrangements with the Physicians and Surgeons College (one of the five medical schools that merged to form UT-Memphis) to deed a lot on Madison for the new hospital along with $25,000 for a new building.[11]  This original building has been engulfed by additions from 1918 to 1938 and in 1946. [12]  Much of this older portion of the hospital still is visible on Madison and the western facade between Madison and Monroe.  In the early 1950’s, a 13-story addition was placed on the east side of the hospital and two doctor’s office towers were constructed across Dunlap and Madison.  Designed by Walk C. Jones and Walk C. Jones, Jr., this new addition to the hospital, completed in 1955, is the Madison Avenue part of the X-shaped building that stands today.[13] 

By the early 1960’s, the hospital needed to expand again.  It purchased the land across Madison, where Russwood Park, a professional baseball park, was located prior to being destroyed by fire, for another medical office tower. In addition, the footprint of the expansion was already in place for the extension of new hospital to form an X-shape, facing Union Avenue.  The hospital had planned for this expansion to occur over a 20-year period to become a 1400-bed hospital, however they were turning away 600 patients a month.  In 1968, they opened the 19-story Union Avenue wing and closed some wards in the 1912 original portion of the old hospital, arriving at a total of 1750 beds.[14] 

Despite all of this growth, by the 1970s, Baptist Hospital announced its intention to develop a satellite hospital in the eastern suburbs of Memphis, following the trend of Methodist Hospital opening in Whitehaven and St. Joseph on Park Avenue.    At the time Baptist officials insisted these new facilities were “strictly satellites” and its major medical and surgical facilities would remain in the Medical Center.[15]  Although Mayor Wyeth Chandler and several council members tried to block the building of the satellite hospital on Walnut Grove, stating that a hospital was need in Frayser-Bartlett-Raleigh area rather than East Memphis, Baptist Hospital moved ahead with its plans. The addition of these new facilities was also over neighborhood objections to the traffic, noise, and increased development pressures.[16]  In 1987, the hospital expanded its satellite hospital with a $16.5 million building program and began closing beds in the Medical Center location, still stating they were not abandoning their commitment to the downtown medical community but just “moving beds to where they are most needed” while transforming the empty space to research labs.[17]  However, in 1998, the hospital announced its $172.5 million expansion of the Walnut Grove hospital thereby making its intentions known of leaving the downtown area in favor of its suburban patients.[18]  Today, the closed Baptist Memorial Hospital and adjoining office tower sits at the center of the Medical District awaiting its fate as the site of the new Memphis Biotech Foundation.[19]

Many other hospitals were built in the same area during the 1920s and 1940s that have since been engulfed into larger hospital complexes such as the Med.  These hospital buildings include the Memphis Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital on Madison, which was built in 1926 and is currently the Regional Forensic Center.[20]  In 1942, the Gailor Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, located on Dunlap, was opened as the first mental hospital for Memphis by UT psychiatric staff.  Ten years later it was already too small for its demand and the Memphis Mental Health Institute was opened along Poplar in 1962.[21]  The Gailor Hospital is now sitting vacant on Dunlap.  The demolished John Gaston Hospital from 1936 along with the TB Hospital and the Crump Hospital on Dunlap and Jefferson, which were both built in the late 1940s and 1950s and have since been taken into the Med complex.  Only the TB Hospital, known as the Adams Pavilion, has its original façade still visible.  In the 1960s, several hospitals were built in the area including the William F. Bowld Hospital in 1965 and the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1967, both affiliated with the medical school.[22]

Along with Baptist Hospital, the UT-Memphis campus also had a building boom in the 1960’s.  Working hand in hand with the urban renewal projects, many of the surrounding neighborhoods were razed under urban renewal and UT-Memphis expanded onto the cleared land.  In 1956, the Memphis Housing Authority (MHA) had begun preliminary studies on an urban renewal project that included the Medical Center area.  UT and hospital officials proposed to MHA long range plans for the area that allowed for their campus and hospital expansion. Called the Medical Center Urban Renewal Area, it was bound by Orleans, Poplar, Pauline, and Madison/Union.  All of the campus and hospital buildings were excluded from urban renewal projects.[23]  This area covered almost 117 acres and included such landmarks as Russwood Park, Memphis Steam Laundry, and large tracts of commercial and residential properties.  Another blow to the historic structures around the medical center came in 1970, when the Medical Center No. 2 Urban Renewal project began, extending south from Union to Linden/Vance and Myrtle and Pauline to the west and east.[24]  This area included about 86 acres.  Along with the many residential and commercial buildings lost in this area were the MATA bus barns, all of which were visible in aerial views of Memphis in the 1930’s and early 1960’s but no longer exist.

Another group of buildings affected by the urban renewal projects in the Medical District was Automobile Row.   In the Medical Center No. 2 and 3 Urban Renewal areas, the MHA targeted the area, which included auto dealerships along Union.  The Medical Center No. 3 area was bound by Jefferson, Linden, Camilla and Pauline, and the Interstate, including about 60 acres.  The concentration of dealerships on Union help to explain the many historic garages and auto parts stores that still exist in the area called ‘the Edge’ today, which is found between Danny Thomas and downtown to the west and the Medical Center to the east. However, MHA purchased properties from the dealerships in this area in order to sell the land for development, including high-rise apartments, a motel, and commercial enterprises such as the many fast-food establishments that exist today.  The auto dealerships such as Bluff City Buick Co, which had been at 739 Union since 1945, and Oakley Ford at 1048 Union moved east, using the opportunity of payment for their land by the city to move toward the new development in the suburbs.[25]

Other urban renewal projects were occurring in the downtown area as well that affected the historic buildings within the survey area of the Medical District.  The Beale Street Projects, both No. 1 and 2, stopped at the eastern boundary of Danny Thomas but successfully cut off this area from downtown. These projects created a feeling of desolation within the vacant land that extends from the two blocks of Beale Street that were saved by National Register designation.  The Court Avenue No. 3 project also extends into the survey area.  Its boundaries covered Orleans, Madison, Washington, and Fourth, an area of 80 acres.[26] Today, it contains several high-rise MHA apartment complexes and commercial buildings.  All of these urban renewal projects had a drastic effect on the historic landscape of this area of Memphis.  It wiped out vast areas of historic buildings, some of which were slums as originally targeted but the projects were expanded to take in many functioning, historic buildings that just stood in the way of the expansion of larger institutions who had more sway with the city.  One resident in an urban renewal area in south Memphis described the fear the residents of these targeted areas lived with because of the uncertainty of whether their block or home would be the next to go.  She described urban renewal as coming through “like a white tornado.”  With no one certain what the future of these neighborhoods would be, businesses pulled out and property owners stopped spending money of the upkeep of their buildings.[27]  The urban renewal work did not stop in Memphis until the late 1970s, after two decades of razing buildings.[28]

            The residents of the Medical District included a range of residents from the upper to the lower classes, moving to the middle and lower classes as the 20^th century progresses.  In 1946, the City Directory has shows residents that were grocery clerks, state inspectors, drivers and salesmen along with many widows and unemployed people.[29]  The census lists respondents representing a couple census tracts, including tracts 37, 38, 39, and 40.  The 1940 census has census tract 37, bound by Peabody, Bellevue, Union, and Walnut, consisting of 84% white and 15% black residents.  Tract 38, bound by Union, Bellevue, Poplar, and Dunlap, has 77% white and 22% black residents.  Tract 39, bound by Poplar, Dunlap, Madison, and Danny Thomas, consisted of 78% white and 22% black people. Finally, Tract 40, bound by Danny Thomas, Madison, Walnut and St. Paul, had the greatest inversion with 26% white and 73% black population.  The 1960 census shows that census tracts 37, 38, and 39 remained stable racially, however tract 40 shifted even more to one race with only 3% white and 96% black residents.  Not surprisingly, the 1950 census shows a division of labor along racial lines as well.  With the white populations in these tracts clustered around clerical, sales, craftsmen, and operative positions.  In the same census tracts, the black population tends to be clustered around operative, household and service workers, and laborers.  By 1960, the white population also begins to cluster around the craftsmen and operatives, showing the decline in socio-economic status of the area in general.[30]  

II.                   Methodology

The Medical District was chosen for study by the Memphis Landmarks Commission to determine what historic resources were still standing in the area.  Boundaries for the area follow Vance/Peabody, Danny Thomas, Poplar, and Interstate-240.  Surveyors did not include structures obviously built after 1965.  Excluded structures were noted on maps as non-contributing structures but were not always comprehensively surveyed.  Black and white prints, color slides, and digital photos were taken of each surveyed building.

            Original plat maps for the subdivisions were viewed from the Shelby County Register’s Office.  Tax maps were obtained through the Shelby County Assessor of Property and used as survey maps.  Census briefs and City Directories were used to research the population of the area.  Newspaper accounts stored at the Memphis and Shelby County Public Library and the University of Memphis Special Collections aided in historical research. 

            Dates of construction for houses in the University District were obtained from the Shelby County Assessor of Property.  Though this is generally the most complete and reliable source available, it should be noted that the construction dates listed for a small number of houses occasionally conflicts with primary historical records.  In such cases, the construction date provided should serve as a close approximation.  The dates of institutional and commercial structures were obtained through secondary resources or by approximation.

            For a property to be considered as a contributing structure in a potential district, the survey team used their knowledge of historic architecture to determine how closely each house resembled its original form.  Rear additions were usually permissible, but major front alterations were not. 

III.                Patterns made evident by the survey 

The presiding pattern evident over this area of the city is that of the effect of urban renewal on historic buildings and neighborhoods.  What were once affluent neighborhoods at the edge of downtown, filled with examples of buildings displaying characteristics of high style, 19^th-century architecture, were transformed by the constant movement of Memphis neighborhoods eastward and the city’s efforts to deal with the changing economics of the residents by building housing projects and then urban renewal projects.  The building of two housing projects off of Vance and Peabody and one off of Poplar at the northern end of the survey area precipitated the end of the popularity of this residential area.

The few historic houses that are left from the 19^th-century represent high styles such as Second Empire, Italianate, and Greek Revival and vernacular architecture in the smaller homes representing forms such as foursquares, side hall plans, gable front cottages, and composite cottages.  Many of the large parcels of land where structures were razed for renewal projects have been filled with unsympathetic buildings that have no connection to surrounding structures. The grid for this area of the city has been altered as many streets have been closed to allow for development of high-rise apartment complexes and large-scale hospital and university projects.  The overall feeling of neglect and deterioration over the neighborhoods in the survey area along with the many vacant, overgrown lots, where demolition of historic buildings has occurred, reflects the lasting effects of urban renewal and the struggle that faces any revitalization efforts.

  At the core of the survey area is the Medical Center with the UT-Memphis campus and various hospital complexes.  This area also shows the lasting effects of urban renewal.  The campus and hospital officials worked with the MHA to get the land they needed for expansion efforts by razing the surrounding residential and commercial structures.  Many landmarks structures were lost in this process along with countless historic homes, not all of which would count as slums, the original target of urban renewal projects.  Today, most of the new structures within the Medical Center are standing on urban renewal land.  Victorian Village has only the last cluster of homes that represent what once was, and even along Adams there are intrusions such as the Memphis Housing Authority offices and 1960s apartment buildings.  However, the Medical Center represents the greatest hope for this area of the city to once again be desirable.  This hope depends on how the planning for the new biotech center will move forward and its impact on the remaining historic resources in the area.

IV.             Recommendations

The Vance-Pontotoc area of the Medical District survey area was once listed on the National Register and has been de-listed due to the loss of so many historic buildings. Much of the rest of the survey area falls under this same category.  Many historic resources have been altered and the few that have been left with most of their original fabric are suffering from neglect.  Those that would be considered contributing to a historic district are scattered and not able to be defined as a district.  The only exception to this can be found in Victorian Village, already a National Register district.  The area called the Edge, between the Medical Center and Danny Thomas, might also be considered for a local district as it has many historic garages, commercial structures and warehouses, although many have been altered.  Of 327 structures within the Medical District boundaries described above, 115 were considered contributing.  There are 277 vacant lots that were not included in this count.  Therefore, this neighborhood does not meet the guidelines for acceptance in the National Register with only 35% of its structures falling into the contributing category, which does not meet the 80% minimum for consideration. 

There were 115 contributing structures within the survey area.  The following is a list of addresses noted as ‘contributing’ by the survey team

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