Two miles north of downtown, Asylum Heights developed in the late nineteenth century along the N. State streetcar line as a mostly African American community adjacent to the Mississippi Lunatic Asylum (1848–1855, Joseph Willis). The community was renamed in 1893 for the (white) Fondren family store and post office that stood at N. State Street and Old Canton Road. In 1925, the City of Jackson annexed the area, and in 1927, it built the Tudor Revival Duling Elementary School (622 Duling Avenue; C. H. Lindsley; 1935 auditorium, Frank P. Gates). This school for white children accelerated white suburbanization. Woodland Hills (1928), Hawthorn Hills (1928), and Cherokee Heights (1926) subdivisions attracted Jackson’s professional class to their large grassy house lots on curvilinear streets.
In 1935, the asylum moved to Rankin County, and in the 1950s, the state repurposed the western half of its property for the University of Mississippi medical school. This included a seven-story hospital (1952–1955) designed by M-N-O, a collaboration of E. L. Malvaney, R. W. Naef, and N. W. Overstreet and Associates. Two more hospitals rose on the eastern side of the asylum property: the four-story St. Dominic Memorial Hospital (1954, James T. Canizaro) and the Veterans Administration Hospital (1959–1962, Overstreet, Ware and Ware), the state’s first racially integrated hospital. At 570 E. Woodrow Wilson Avenue, the Felix J. Underwood State Board of Health building (1956–1957, R. W. Naef) anchored a medical clinic district just south of the Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium (1948; 1957, 1979 expanded).
Significant post-World War II architectural firms moved their offices to Fondren to take advantage of the city’s northern expansion, and several architects built their homes in the neighborhood, including Frank P. Gates at 716 Sherwood Drive (1959), J. T. Liddle at 132 Ridge Drive (c. 1955), and Tom Biggs at 3723 Kings Highway (1965).
After N. State Street became U.S. 51 in the 1930s, it transitioned quickly from residential and small farms to commercial use, and Old Canton Road commercialized after World War II. The result is a suburban downtown unique in the state, with a mix of office, retail, and institutional buildings. After declining in the 1980s and 1990s due to new suburban shopping centers farther north, downtown Fondren began its revival in 2003 with the conversion of the former Dale Building (1955–c. 1964, N. W. Overstreet and Associates) at 2906 N. State from government offices to Fondren Corner by Canizaro Cawthon Davis (CCD) for commercial and gallery spaces. CCD also renovated Duling School into a retail mall in 2009, and the adjoining mixed-use Fondren Place, a montage of Art Deco, Moderne, and Tudor motifs opened in 2008.
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