Tennessee Brewery, Memphis

The brewery was organized in eighteen seventy-seven, and its Romanesque Revival building went up in Memphis in eighteen ninety, a massive Romanesque Revival brick complex that at its peak produced hundreds of thousands of barrels of beer annually for the thirsty river city and the cotton-country towns around it. The brewery reopened after Prohibition but closed for good in nineteen fifty-four, and for decades the cavernous brick hulk sat empty on the south edge of downtown, its arched windows looking out over a neighborhood that declined and then slowly revived around it. The brewery became one of those beloved ruins that define a city's relationship to its industrial past, photographed, explored, argued over, and periodically threatened with demolition.

In the two thousand tens a developer converted the shell into apartments, preserving the brick facades and the brewhouse's distinctive copper-domed roofline. Today it is apartments, the ghost of an industrial Memphis that smelled of hops and river commerce.