May 2026.
After visiting Westerville recently, I had some spare time and decided to travel back to Newark to retake some photos. I did this for several reasons, in large part due to the fact that the Home Building Association Bank (designed by Louis Sullivan) was closed for renovations when I first visited in January 2025, but has since reopened. I also wasn’t satisfied with my cursory coverage of downtown and the poor weather that day. I didn’t seek out to redo everything, just bolster what existing photos I had, and get more of some more notable buildings. This article is an example of the latter category.
The Longaberger Basket Building is one of the most bizarre buildings I’ve had the pleasure of covering on this website. An example of the excesses of Postmodern architecture, in this case being a revival of the centuries-old movement of architecture parlante (where a building takes a form that evokes its function), the building is literally a gigantic basket. It is also frequently cited in Scholastic Book Fair-type tomes such as Guinness World Records or whatever as the largest basket. I don’t really visit these kinds of “roadside Americana” very often, but I honestly couldn’t pass this one up.
The Longaberger Basket Building is located at 1500 East Main Street, east of downtown Newark, Ohio. It is bordered by OH-16 to the north, Main Street to the south, and its large parking lots to the east and west.
History
The Longaberger Basket Building was built for the Longaberger Company, which manufactured quaint, kitschy home decor items like wicker picnic baskets that upper-middle class mothers in the 80s and 90s loved. (I asked my mom if she ever had a Longaberger basket, but she was in college during the 1990s and too broke to afford one.) Nowadays, their products from that time period mostly line the aisles of Goodwill. The company’s history goes back to 1896, when John Longaberger and his wife Carrie moved to Dresden, Ohio (near Zanesville) and began working for the Dresden Basket Factory.
In 1919, John’s son John W. Longaberger took after his father and began apprenticing at the Dresden Basket Factory. Dresden Basket went out of business during the Great Depression, but Longaberger continued to weave baskets in his free time, and he and his wife raised enough money to purchase the shuttered factory in 1936 and open his own business that made baskets for pottery manufacturers, the Ohio Ware Basket Company. Their fifth child, Dave, was born in 1934, who went on to found the Longaberger Company as it became known in the 1980s. John W. Longaberger’s business closed in 1955.
Dave Longaberger with his daughters Tami and Rachel, each holding one of the company’s signature baskets. (The Newark Advocate)
The Longaberger Company was founded by Dave Longaberger. In 1972, Dave noticed that nearby department stores were selling imported baskets, and he asked his father John W. Longaberger to weave a dozen, which sold quickly. John W. made ten dozen more baskets, which all sold in just a month. Inspired by this success, Dave founded his own company in 1973, naming it after his father: “J. W.’s Handwoven Baskets.” They started with five weavers, and Dave eventually changed the name to simply the “Longaberger Company.”
In 1978, the baskets began to be sold through home shows and with a multi-level marketing approach (i.e. a pyramid scheme), naturally appealing to stay-at-home moms across America. The company tried to cultivate a more artisanal image, as the baskets were handmade and were signed by their weaver. In 1981, they had 50 employees, and by 1985, this number grew to 400. By 1989, there was a "sales associate" in every US state.
The Longaberger Company remained in Dresden through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, and it was one of the town’s largest employers. They even built an earlier basket building, located on 5th Street just west of Main Street. However, they eventually needed a larger headquarters building due to their increasing sales and number of employees, and Dave and his daughter, new president Tami Longaberger (Dave remained chairman until his death in 1999) commissioned a building in Newark in adjacent Licking County. This building, designed by NBBJ, was styled to appear as a gigantic Longaberger basket, specifically their best-selling “Medium Market Basket.” Beyond its bizarre aesthetics, it was also difficult to design due to its flaring shape (the top floor has about 5,000 more square feet than the ground floor), and the overhanging “handles” needed to be heated in the winter to prevent ice from falling onto the glass roof. The Longaberger Basket Building was completed and opened in 1997.
Overhead view of the building, showing the atrium’s glass roof. (Zanesville Time Recorder)
The opening of the Basket Building coincided with the company’s sales peak of $1 billion in 2000. At that time, the Longaberger Company directly employed 8,200 people and had 45,000 “home consultants” (low-level pyramid scheme members, ostensibly) that sold their products, making it the eighth-largest manufacturer in Ohio and one of the 500 largest private companies in the entire United States. Along with their headquarters in the Basket Building, two additional manufacturing-related facilities opened in 1995, as well as an employee daycare.
Changing tastes in home decor led to a decline in the Longaberger Company’s sales, reducing the $1 billion peak in 2000 to $100 million in 2012. Layoffs began in 2003 and continued through 2004 due to “lower than expected demand.” The company also shifted its manufacturing overseas, discontinuing the baskets’ signature image of being made in the USA. In 2009, further layoffs and wage reductions affected even senior managers at the company. By May 2010, the Longaberger Company fired its sixth president over the course of seven years. Despite attempts to bring back manufacturing to the United States, the company was acquired by umbrella corporation Computer Vision Systems Laboratory Inc. in 2013, at which point it had 800 employees. By July 2014, Longaberger only employed 340 total workers and 70 basket-weavers, though CVSL stated that its debt was reduced from $39 million to $6 million.
The Longaberger Company stopped paying property taxes on their building at the end of 2014, and its CEO Tami Longaberger (in charge since Dave’s death in 1999) resigned in May 2015. By July 2016, the company sold the building and consolidated to its factory in Frazeysburg, at which point it only had 75 total employees, 30 of which manufactured baskets. The Longaberger Company finally shut down its factory in May 2018, citing financial losses due to its lender taking all of its money. Its parent company, then known as JRjr33, filed for bankruptcy that June.
The very Postmodern atrium of the building. (roadtrippers.com)
Like the company it once hosted, the building has been treading water to an uncertain future. In December 2017, it was purchased by developers Steve Coon and Bobby George for $1.2 million, who proceeded to relist it for sale less than a year later. By 2019, Coon stated that it still had not sold, and that his plans for the building included turning it into a luxury hotel and listing it on the National Register of Historic Places. I’m no businessman, but this building has about 20 more years until it’s even eligible for the NRHP, and I don’t think anyone is going to want to stay in a hotel surrounded by light industrial space and far from downtown Newark. The COVID-19 pandemic derailed the hotel plans regardless. As of 2025, a local realtor claims that Coon intends to convert it to a mixed-use building instead. Apparently, the interior is still maintained and in good condition, as this 2025 tour attests. However, as of my visit in May 2026, the building remained vacant.
The Longaberger Company still lives on, since the brand’s intellectual property was purchased by Xcel Brands in 2019. They now sell extremely overpriced baskets on their eponymous website. Additionally, some of the company’s former employees were hired at Dresden & Company, a brand with similar products and sales methods that opened in Dresden in 2018.
Photos
This building just defies explanation. No architecture school in their right mind would tell a student to design a building that looks like a basket. As Robert Venturi, famous Postmodern architect and theorist, would say, it is a “duck,” a building that specifically highlights its purpose through its form and design.
Photos really do not do it justice, the building is much larger than it looks. For reference, this is a seven-story building, and the doors at the base are about 8 feet tall.
The building’s windows are tucked away between “weaves”:
They are sparser than most typical buildings, largely due to the unique design and its constraints.
A more condensed view of the entrance and window bays:
Admittedly, this texture is pretty cool:
Interestingly, the giant “LONGABERGER” signs are gold leaf:
Being vacant for years has seemingly started to take its toll on the exterior finishes, as the paint is chipping away from the handles and it needs a power wash.
The entrance is pretty unceremonious, just a set of doors with a fanlight above tucked below the basket’s body:
Some of these pictures really look like I shrunk down to the size of an ant.
Oblique view from the southwest:
It’s admirable how committed to the bit Dave Longaberger was, and how he wouldn’t accept designs that were just a regular building confined within a basket-shaped shell. Pretty much everyone stood up to this bizarre choice, but it was built anyways, and now his basket building is widely known.
Looking south from the entrance at the nearby drive and visitor parking:
This sort of design was the kind I grew up with as an earlier Gen-Z’er, so I felt very nostalgic being here. The odd brand of Postmodernism that this building exists in was really the last gasp of whimsy in architecture, and now academia has pretty much decided that we cannot and should not build like this anymore. Whether that’s true or not is up to you, but it certainly made the decline of my childhood places pretty depressing, as the decor and design I was surrounded by as a child has been replaced by buildings that are much more banal. Seeing this basket building stuck in time both in-person on the exterior and now on my computer viewing the interior, I really hope that whatever new use this building sees maintains its unique character.
Sources:
https://dresdenandcompany.com/about-us/
https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/2018/11/24/rise-and-fall-longaberger-company/2055643002/
https://www.archpaper.com/2018/01/longaberger-basket-building-sold/
https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/longaberger-basket-building/
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/10658
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/longaberger-basket-building-hotel
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