Old mounted police station to get new life as company’s headquarters and apartment units

Daily Memphian
Tom Bailey

A 109-year-old building – stuck behind a Walgreens and just off Union Avenue – is about to receive some overdue love.

Lexington Asset Management plans to spend up to $1.8 million carrying out an adaptive-use project once 189 S. Barksdale is placed on the National Register of Historic Places and becomes eligible for historic tax credits.

The front of the 8,500-square-foot, two-story building will become company headquarters, and the back will be seven apartment units.

The building’s fate had commanded little of the attention once given to two other old structures in the Union Avenue corridor.

The once endangered Nineteenth Century Club building is now renovated and preserved as Red Fish restaurant. And Chick-fil-A negotiated with preservationists to save the ornate, front wall of a former church headquarters to create, arguably, its most distinctive restaurant.

But the long-ignored building hidden behind the chain pharmacy features striking architectural details that should soon land it on the National Register of Historic Places.

Land use consultant Andy Kitsinger and architectural historian Judith Johnson have produced a detailed history as part of Lexington Asset Management’s effort to include the building on the National Register and to qualify the project for historic tax credits.

The Barksdale Mounted Police Station still has bars in its windows. Not burglar bars to keep bad guys out, but bars on four small jail cells to hold them in. Radiators are still mounted on the cells’ ceilings to keep them out of reach.

The building still has nine small, arched windows on the north wall, overlooking the back of the Walgreens. The openings were for the horses that carried police on their patrols from 1910 to 1918, the research shows.

And prominently etched in stone on the front, exterior wall is the name and early title of Tennessee’s most infamous power broker: “E.H. Crump Mayor.”

That’s akin to a valuable autograph. Crump was mayor a short time – 1910 to 1915 and briefly in 1940 – so not many Memphis buildings bear his name.

The man who would be dubbed “Boss Crump” had just been elected mayor. He got the city to spend $16,000 to erect Memphis’ first suburban police station that would house the city’s first mounted patrol, according to Kitsinger and Johnson’s research. (The new station also happened to be just two blocks from Crump’s home on Peabody.)

The horses were removed from the station in 1918, replaced by patrol bikes and Model T Fords. Police left the building in July 1958. The structure soon was leased to the Memphis Boys Club, which inhabited it until 1979.

The Boys & Girls Club of Greater Memphis used the building for storage until the city sold it in October 2018 for $406,000 to Lexington Asset Management.

The company owns and operates about 3,000 apartment units across the nation and develops apartments and warehouses. It employs 70 people nationwide, including 10-12 employees at its headquarters in the high-rise apartment building at 1437 Central.

Chief executive Eric Clauson and chief operating officer John Planchon had been looking for a place to move their headquarters. The search included other cities.

“I was just driving by and saw the building and thought it was a cool building,” Clauson said. “We started to dig a bit into who owns it and what’s going on with it.”

Other prospective buyers intended to demolish the building and build new apartments, Clauson said.

But he and Planchon liked “the fact we’ll have this historic building with super high ceilings,” Clauson said. “It will just be a really cool place to have as our corporate office. And I think it will help us attract young people to work with us. A lot of millennials want to work in cool office environments.”

The design of the adaptive reuse is a joint project of Warren Architecture and archimania.

The building’s main façe will not be altered, but the interior will change dramatically.

Construction firm Grinder, Taber & Grinder will convert the 3,000-square-foot front, or east end, of the building into offices for Lexington Asset Management.

The west end will be transformed into seven, two-bedroom/two-bathroom units of about 800 square feet each, Peter Warren, principal with Warren Architecture, wrote in an email to The Daily Memphian.

The apartments will have gated parking and exposed, original timbers, and most will have private patios, Warren said.

The goal is to keep at least some of the jail cell bars, but the building must also meet codes that require sleeping rooms to have operable windows through which people can exit, Warren said.

“At the offices, the conference room will feature the large, arched window that you see on the principal façade,” Warren said. “That, combined with high ceilings at 12 feet plus, it’s going to be a fantastic space.”

If the project goes according to schedule, the renovation should be completed by the end of 2020, Clauson and Planchon said.