[uwcart_audioplayer width=400 url=http://irinateacher.podfm.ru/my/55]
The five-story building had been built a hundred years earlier by a cotton merchant and
his sons after the Reconstruction, during the revival of cotton trading in Memphis. It sat
in the middle of Cotton Row on Front Street near the river. Through its halls and doors
and across its desks, millions of bales of cotton had been purchased from the Mississippi
and Arkansas deltas and sold around the world. Deserted, neglected, then renovated time
and again since the first war, it had been purchased for good in 1951 by an aggressive tax
lawyer named Anthony Bendini. He renovated it yet again and began filling it with
lawyers. He renamed it the Bendini Building.