The Threefoot Building: Meridian's Art Deco Exclamation Point

On the Meridian skyline, one building still commands attention the way it did when it was new. The Threefoot Building, completed in nineteen twenty-nine and rising sixteen stories, remains the tallest structure in the city. It was designed by architect Claude H. Lindsley in the Art Deco style, and its exterior is one of the most ornate examples of that vocabulary in Mississippi.

The name comes from the Threefoot family, Jewish merchants who had been fixtures of downtown Meridian's commercial life since the late nineteenth century. When they commissioned an office tower during the prosperity of the late nineteen twenties, they chose a design that made their investment visible from every direction. The building's base is Georgia granite. The exterior is brick. And rising above the brickwork, glazed polychrome terra cotta tiles in shades of red, orange, gold, white, green, blue, and black form geometric patterns that catch light differently at every hour.

Historians of Mississippi architecture group the Threefoot with the Plaza Building and the Tower Building in Jackson as Mississippi's three Art Deco skyscrapers of nineteen twenty-nine to nineteen thirty, a moment when the state's commercial centers competed to assert their modernity. The Threefoot is the most exuberant of the three.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December eighteenth, nineteen seventy-nine, and designated a Mississippi Landmark in two thousand eight. Then the building sat empty for years, deteriorating, the subject of repeated failed redevelopment proposals.

The story ended well. After a five-year comprehensive renovation, the Threefoot reopened as a hotel, part of the Marriott Tribute Portfolio, restoring the upper floors to active use for the first time in decades. The terra cotta is cleaned, the lobby restored, and the building is again the vertical punctuation mark of downtown Meridian.