Threefoot Building
Meridian’s grandest Art Deco tower rises seventeen stories above a railroad city that once rivaled Birmingham — the city’s tallest building since its completion.
At a glance
The Threefoot Building at 215 Fifth Street is Meridian’s defining skyscraper — a seventeen-story column of cream brick and green-glazed terra-cotta completed in 1929 at the height of the city’s railroad prosperity. Commissioned by the Threefoot brothers, German-Jewish immigrants who anglicized their family name from Dreyfuss, the building anchored commercial life for decades before a long period of vacancy. Federal historic tax credits and state preservation investment have renewed prospects for its rehabilitation, making the Threefoot once again a symbol of the city’s ambition.
Key facts
- Year: 1929
- Height: 16 stories
- Style: Art Deco (terra-cotta ornamental)
- Address: 215 Fifth Street (at 22nd Avenue), Meridian, Mississippi 39301
- Named for: Meyer and Isidore Threefoot, merchant brothers
- Status: National Register of Historic Places (1979); rehabilitation ongoing
- GPS: 32.3642°N, 88.6979°W
History
The Threefoot brothers — Meyer and Isidore — were among the prosperous merchant families who built Meridian into one of the South’s busiest inland rail hubs. By the late 1920s, the city served more rail lines per capita than almost any comparable American city, and its downtown was alive with department stores, hotels, and civic institutions. The brothers commissioned a headquarters tower that would signal their status and the city’s confidence: seventeen floors of Art Deco ambition in an era when skyscrapers were still a novelty below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Architect Claude H. Lindsley produced a design of striking verticality — a narrow shaft of cream brick ascending to a dense ornamental crown of green terra-cotta grotesques and geometric panels. The building opened in 1929, months before the stock market crash, and served its commercial function through the mid-twentieth century. As suburban retail corridors drew business away from downtown Meridian after World War II, the Threefoot fell vacant, and for more than fifty years it stood as a cautionary symbol of urban decline. Repeated demolition threats galvanized preservation advocates, and federal rehabilitation tax credits have since made the building’s rescue feasible.
Meridian’s broader significance to American culture — W.C. Handy worked here, Jimmy Rodgers was born nearby — gives the Threefoot’s survival added resonance: it is one of the last intact large-scale Art Deco buildings in the Deep South interior.
What you see
The facade follows the canonical American skyscraper formula of the late 1920s: a three-part composition of base, shaft, and elaborate crown. At street level, the base presents large retail bays framed in ornamental terra-cotta. The shaft rises as a slightly setback column of cream-colored brick, its windows grouped in vertical bands that emphasize height. The crown is the building’s most distinctive feature: dense geometric reliefs, angular grotesques that echo medieval gargoyles, and chevron panels in the green-glazed terra-cotta that gives the building its signature color.
The entrance on Fifth Street retains original bronze metalwork and decorative grille panels, giving a sense of the quality of craftsmanship that was invested throughout. The arrangement of ornament at the cornice — concentrated and complex against the plain shaft — creates a visual weight at the top that is characteristic of the Art Deco skyscraper tradition, drawing the eye upward and giving the building its profile on the Meridian skyline.
Practical information
- The building is undergoing rehabilitation; interior access varies by project phase
- The exterior is freely visible from Fifth Street and 22nd Avenue at all times
- Best viewed from across the intersection of Fifth Street and 22nd Avenue for the full elevation
- Allow 30 minutes for exterior viewing and photography
Getting there
Meridian is served by Interstate 20 (Exit 153) and Interstate 59. The Threefoot Building stands at the corner of Fifth Street and 22nd Avenue in central downtown Meridian, approximately 1 km from the Amtrak station on Front Street (served by the New York–New Orleans Crescent route). The surrounding downtown blocks contain several other Art Deco-era commercial buildings worth exploring on foot.
Nearby
- Temple Theater (1927), 22nd Avenue — Neoclassical auditorium
- Meridian Museum of Art — regional fine arts collection
- Jimmy Rodgers Museum — birthplace of country music’s first star
- Grand Opera House of Mississippi (1890) — restored Victorian theater
Sources
- National Register of Historic Places nomination form, Threefoot Building, Meridian, Mississippi (1979)
- Mississippi Department of Archives and History, architectural survey
- Mississippi Main Street Program, Meridian downtown documentation
- Library of Congress, HABS/HAER photographic archive
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