DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you've ever driven past a building and thought, 'that thing looks like it means business' — well, pull your eyes back to this one, because the Higginbotham-Bailey Building in Dallas has been meaning business since before your grandfather was born. We're talking dry goods.
Manufacturing, distributing, the whole operation — and the outfit behind it went by the name of Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan Co. That's a lot of name for a lot of company. They needed a building to match.
So they went and got Lang and Witchell — a noted Dallas architectural firm, the marker says, and noted is not a word you throw around lightly. Lang and Witchell drew it up in a simplified Renaissance Revival style. Now, simplified doesn't mean plain.
This thing has geometrically-detailed corner towers. Corner towers, friend. On a dry goods building.
That right there tells you something about the ambitions of everyone involved. The western section went up first, completed in 1914. But they weren't done — not by a long shot.
They came back in 1917 and added more. Then again in 1923. Three rounds of construction, each one saying, 'we're still here, we're still growing, and we'd like more building, please.' The company itself kept right on going under the Higginbotham-Bailey-Logan name until 1945, when it simplified down to just Higginbotham-Bailey.
The name got shorter. The building, by that point, was already as big as it was ever going to get — and it was plenty. Some buildings just stand there.
This one stands with corner towers.
What the marker says
Designed by noted Dallas architectural firm of Lang and Witchell, this building was constructed to house the dry goods manufacturing and distributing business of the Higginbothham - Bailey - Logan Co. (known as Higginbotham - Bailey after 1945). The western section was completed in 1914, and additional sections were constructed in 1917 and 1923. The building features a simplified Renaissance Revival architectural style with geometrically-detailed corner towers. RTHL 1984