Current banners that hang along the Main Street Mall
Anyone familiar with Downtown Memphis will notice some small changes as they walk around the city in the coming months.
New Downtown banners The Downtown Memphis Commission is looking for local artists and graphic designers to create new banners for the 200 lamp posts on the Main Street Mall from Poplar to Peabody Place. Right now, five different designs hang along the Mall showing Downtown’s love of food, architecture, bicycling, music, and trolleys. The new artist will be announced next week, and the final art for the banners will be approved by the DMC in April.
99 South Second Street The owners of the popular City Market (Main and Union) may soon open Quench Wine & Spirits right next door to Second Street Shoppers, and both businesses would get a storefront makeover.
The entire storefront would get new glass, new doors, and new mahogany wood trim. A new metal canopy with recessed lighting and copper features would extend across both storefronts. Also, both stores would have new, internally lit signs, one reading (of course) “Quench Wine & Spirits” and the other, simply, “Convenience Store.” Below is the current storefront at 99 South Second Street.
And here is what the storefront will look like after the planned changes.
195 Madison Avenue The Toof Building (or as some call it the “Mural Building”) has a new life and a new look now as Pressbox loft apartments. The building was the headquarters of S.C. Toof and Co. Printers and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. The building got a brand-new profile in 2009 when Chicago artist Jeff Zimmerman unveiled his five-story mural “A Note for Hope” on the side of what is now Pressbox.
The branding for Pressbox stresses the building’s history in printing but also calls to the pressbox at nearby AutoZone Park. A main philosophy of the building’s redevelopment was to shape it “in ways that respect the last 100 years, resonate with the place today, and endure for the next 100 years,” according to developers Left Field Properties.
The new design will feature the Pressbox logo on a tall sign adorning the building’s south-facing facade and new colors on its awnings. A coffee shop is also in the works for the building’s ground floor. Here’s the new look.
