History

The Sterick Building was developed by a group of Memphis businessmen who engaged Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick to design a skyscraper that would be the tallest in the mid-South. Construction began in 1928 and the building was completed in 1929, standing 365 feet and 29 stories above street level. For nearly three decades it was the tallest structure in Memphis and in the entire mid-South region, a visible symbol of the city’s commercial confidence in the years before the Depression.

The building’s Gothic ornamental crown — the gargoyles, pointed finials, and carved stone panels at the upper floors — was a deliberate architectural statement. In the late 1920s, American commercial architects frequently invoked Gothic sources for their crown ornament, positioning their clients’ buildings within a visual tradition of permanent institutional authority. For Memphis, a city whose commercial culture had long been dominated by cotton and timber, the Sterick Building’s Gothic silhouette was both a civic assertion and a competitive gesture toward the more established commercial centres of the northeast.

After decades of continuous office use, the building was vacated in the early 1980s as tenants relocated to newer downtown towers. It has remained empty ever since — a condition that has made it one of the most prominent vacant historic skyscrapers in the United States. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, the building has been the subject of numerous redevelopment proposals over the decades, all of which have to date failed to proceed. Its future remains one of the central questions in Memphis’s ongoing conversation about downtown heritage and urban regeneration.