When this building was razed in 1968, after standing for nearly a century, a small strip mall replaced it, drastically altering the appearance of the northeast corner of First Avenue at West Franklin Street. The Crescent Furniture Company was one of the “8 Great Factories,†an exclusive conglomeration of factories in Evansville that produced furniture from about 1860 to the late 1920s. By 1924, the city boasted over thirty factories that shipped furniture from coast to coast, as well as internationally. During the Great Depression, which closed many of them, the building functioned as a WPA recreational facility.
