Tri-State Bank eyes new office site

Company may move headquarters to Midtown location

Tri-State Bank is considering a Midtown site on Union Avenue for its new head office.

The city’s only black-owned bank sold its longtime Downtown office building last year to Memphis developer Belz Enterprises. Since then the bank has been searching for a new headquarters location.

A building permit identifies a renovation project proposed at 1407 Union as the head office site for Tri-State and lists The Crump Firm of Memphis as the architect.

Tri-State Bank chief executive Thomas Felder declined to comment Tuesday, but said through a spokeswoman, “We’re still in negotiations with that building being the headquarters.”

The 1407 Union site is a 15-story tower on Union near the Methodist

University Hospital complex. Tri-State would make use of part of the building.

The bank, founded in 1946 on Beale Street, sold its prominent office corner at 180 Beale and Main in January 2016 under a plan to relocate within 18 months.

Belz paid about $3 million for the property and also bought bank stock and bank deposits.

At the time, Tri-State executives revealed a potential relocation to another part of the city and a strategy to draw in black and white customers in their 20s and 30s.

“We have a new generation coming,” Tri-State executive Jesse Turner Jr. said last year. “Everyone is trying to reach the millennials.”

Belz has not disclosed a use for the Tri-State property. Tri-State’s seven-tenths of an acre sits immediately west of Beale Street’s Hard Rock Cafe on the west end of the busy entertainment district.

Felder was hired last year to help the bank complete its turnaround.

After the 2008 recession pressed hard on Memphis’ black middle class, Tri-State losses totaled $4.8 million between 2011 and 2014 and continued into 2015.