A Basket Case

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The first time I saw it, I almost rear-ended the car in front of me. Who would expect a gigantic basket on the side of the highway?

I was on my way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had left my home in Columbus, Ohio late in the afternoon. The structure I saw beside the highway, was not even an hour away from our house. We had just moved to Ohio two years earlier and back then I was still learning my way around. Wherever we go in life, whatever places we see, there is always history that needs to be explored. Everything tells a story.

Back then, the basket-building was still in use; today, it’s empty. Once the pride and joy of the Newark neighborhood, the Longaberger Company closed its doors in 2018 after struggling to sell these beautiful, overpriced baskets for years.

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I had never even heard of the baskets but I remember very well how my neighbor reacted when I chuckled a bit after she told me she wanted $40 for a used empty basket. Virginia, an older lady had three of these baskets lined up in front of her at our yearly community garage sale. When I left her driveway, I felt sorry for her. Surely nobody in their right mind would even consider buying these baskets. As so often, I was wrong. She sold them all. Today they resell for $20-$30, some rarer ones even for hundreds of dollars. The baskets are not collectors’ items.

I don’t know if you can call a building in the form of a picnic basket an attraction, yet it interested me right from the start, and over the years I learned more about it.

The Longaberger Company has an interesting history, but in the end, it’s just another story about a business that was founded by a hard-working man and driven into bankruptcy decades later, by his children. A changed marketplace, poor management decisions, overspending, lack of a succession plan, and a decline in the popularity of decorative baskets.

The ‘Basket building’ known in the area as the BIG BASKET is an exact replica of a Longaberger basket, scaled up 160 times. The construction was finished in 1997 and cost about 30 million US dollars. It was sold in December 2017 for $1.2 million, plus over $800,000 in back taxes (property taxes). 

Sadly, it’s now just another empty building on the side of the highway. They talked about turning it into a luxury hotel but they never even started. In 2021 it was put back on the market for a whopping $6.5 million, but nobody bought it.

It is an unusual structure. A perfect example of novelty architecture. A building designed to physically mirror their purpose. The seven-story, 180,000-square-foot office building resembled a typical Longaberger basket. The basket handles weigh 150 tons and can be heated during cold weather to prevent ice from falling onto the building’s glass roof.

“I figured if Walt Disney could build an empire around a mouse, the Longaberger home office building could resemble a basket,” Dave Longaberger writes in his memoir. “Whenever I talked about it, people looked at me like I was nuts,” he writes.

The BIG BASKET has a 30,000-square-foot atrium topped with a glass ceiling. Two 725-pound, 25-foot-wide, gold-leaf tags are attached to each long side of the building. It even has glass elevators.

It’s inside and outside a beauty and I find it shameful that beautiful constructions like that are vacant. I see endless possibilities. Hotels, shelters, convention centers. It’s a BASKET CASE, use it for mental rehabilitation, give it to a charity organization or veterans, and turn it into a school.

One day I will get off the highway and I will explore on my own.

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