fix it today

fix it to stay

 

The Welch Plumbing sign still bedecks, although not brightly, the brick building at 14th and Avenue J.  Apparently Welch's Plumbing has been in business since 1942, but I don't know whether they started at this location.  The building was built in 1934.  About 2000 it was purchased and turned into urban lofts with masonry walls, exposed steel beams and storefront windows.  In the background is some of the downtown skyline.  The Pioneer Hotel was built in 1925, sat vacant for years and then was renovated into up-scale condos -- and still sits vacant.  The buffalo is the emblem for Plains Bank which has its operating center in the former Hemphill-Wells building -- a premiere department store long out of business.  Downtown is not quite on life support but it certainly isn't bustling.  However it does seem that urban lofts do better than upscale condos.

 

View from 15th and Avenue J 

Lubbock, Texas

 

Bonus:  This building was also at one time home to the Jackson Motor Company.  I deduced that from the ghost sign in the alley.  I know Jackson Motor Company was in business pre-1960s because the phone number is 4644 -- long before the prefixes of PO, SH and SW!

 

 

 





ballroom splendor



The Lubbock County Historical Commission met today in the former Pioneer Hotel, which is being renovated as condos.  Built in the Renaissance Revival architecture style, Hotel Lubbock, later called the Pioneer Hotel, is one of a handful of remaining early pre-World War II major buildings left in the city.  The first five floors were built in 1925, with six additional floors added in 1929.  Other than the exterior brick walls, the first floor staircase and the ornamental plasterwork found in the former ballroom, not much of the original remains.  These decorative plaques sit atop windows in brick arches -- maybe an architectural-minded person can provide their name.  I remember attending a function or two in the ballroom but my clearest memory of the Pioneer was going to the Embassy Club as an underage, young Tech student in the days when Lubbock had only private clubs.

The Pioneer
Broadway and Avenue K
Lubbock, Texas