A Foundation That Still Holds

Long before Crosstown Concourse became a place to gather, work, and explore, it was a place of urgency—built to move goods, meet deadlines, and power a city’s rhythm. For structural engineer Howard Carman, the building wasn’t a landmark. It was a job site.

In the 1960s, Carman was a young engineer assigned to inspect the construction of the Sears Crosstown garage and later, a major addition to the building. He remembers the work not as glamorous, but as gritty—summer heat, creosote-soaked wooden pilings driven deep into the ground, and long days ensuring everything held together just as designed.

“There was a deadline,” he recalls. Sears needed the space ready before the holiday rush. Like so many who worked on the building, Carman focused on function. Get it built. Get it right. Move on.

And he did.

For decades, he rarely returned. Once the structure was complete, his role was finished. Life moved forward—into a long career at the University of Tennessee, and eventually into watercolor painting, a quieter craft shaped by the same eye for structure and detail.

But recently, Crosstown called him back—this time not as an engineer, but as a guest.

He came to see a friend’s art exhibition in the Church Health space. Walking through the building again, he found himself in a place both familiar and entirely new. The bones were the same—the garage still standing, the structure still sound—but everything around it had transformed.
Standing in the Central Atrium, his eyes moved upward, slowly taking it all in—the light, the openness, the life filling a space he once knew as purely functional. There was an unmistakable sense of awe.

“It really does something to you,” Carman said. “To see it full again… it was just something.”

Where there was once industry, there is now creativity. Where there were deadlines, there are now moments of connection.
For Carman, the visit brought his story full circle: from building spaces to experiencing them.

His story is a reminder that places like Crosstown are layered. Beneath every mural and market, every gathering and event, are the hands—and memories—of people who built it.

The foundation hasn’t changed. What’s grown on top of it has.