Here’s a motorized-pasteurized-electrified edition of Cowtown yoostabes.
The McCarthy Building (1927) at 2222 North Main, with its ornate brickwork and red clay tile roof, in the 1930s yoostabe Cliff Magers’s Chevrolet dealership.
Today the building serves as a brick billboard for Joe T. Garcia’s.
And this building (1926) at 1204 West 7th Street yoostabe a Packard auto dealership.
And later, from the 1930s into the 1960s, the building housed H. B. Ransom’s car dealership. More recently the building yoostabe the offices of the Hyder family and of Fort Worth Weekly. Today it houses advertising and energy companies.
The building has been much changed since 1926, with a second story added.
T for “Texan”: The long red-brick building behind the parking lot at 3600 McCart Avenue today houses Martin Sprocket & Gear Company.
But that building yoostabe the assembly plant of the Texas Motor Car Association. Built in 1919, the plant for a brief time rolled out the Texan car and truck.
This building at East 8th and Calhoun streets was designed by Sanguinet and Staats and built in 1919 as the Winfield Garage for guests of the Hotel Texas, which originally was going to be named the “Winfield Hotel” (as in Winfield Scott).
Today the building is Winfield Place and contains office space and has also housed restaurants such as Billy Miner’s and Embargo.
This building (1915) at the Masonic Home and School (1899) on Wichita Street yoostabe the orphanage’s dairy barn. The building was later converted into the orphanage’s industrial arts shop.
And near the intersection of Oakland Boulevard and I-30 this monument to verticality yoostabe a grain silo of W. F. White’s White Lake Dairy.
The silo is not really made of brick. The concrete is textured to look like bricks and mortar.
The White Lake Dairy ad from 1917 locates the dairy a mile north of the Oakland interurban stop (1400 Oakland Boulevard). The 1921 ad congratulates the Texas Hotel on its opening.
W. F. White and R. C. Mann invited the public to inspect their dairy “at all times.”
In 1933 White Lake Dairy got some competition as Vandervoort’s Dairy opened on South Main Street. Note the ad on the left for Acres Sign Company, which made the big neon sign.
Vandervoort’s, which “processes milk from independent Grade A dairies in the Fort Worth milkshed,” bought White Lake Dairy in 1960. Vandervoort’s was later bought by Kroger.
Reddy Kilowatt slept here. Well, sort of. Maybe he napped a bit after you closed your refrigerator door. Yes, this building (1926) on Race Street in Riverside yoostabe a power substation of Fort Worth Power & Light Company. It is now a residence.
Still on the East Side, every school day in the late 1950s I walked past this anonymous little red brick building on Collard Street—still unpaved then—on my way to D. McRae Elementary. The little building hunkers now unnoticed and unused, but once it hummed—literally—with purpose: Fort Worth Power & Light Company built it as an electricity substation in 1928. After Fort Worth Power & Light merged with Texas Electric Service Company, the little substation helped Reddy Kilowatt “cook your meals, turn the fac-t’ry wheels, . . . wash and dry your clothes, play your ra-di-os.”
All together now:
Crave more Kilowatt? Here’s fifteen seconds of a television commercial:
