DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just along for the ride. There's a four-story brick building standing in Dallas's historic west end that has watched nearly a century of commerce pass through its doors, and if those corbelled cornices could talk, they'd have some stories to tell. It went up in 1909 — solid brick, industrial bones, the kind of construction that wasn't going anywhere — and by 1910 the Hobson Electric Company had moved in and made it home.
That was only the beginning. The warehouse changed hands the way good Texas real estate tends to, and before long the Maroney Hardware Company had taken up residence, filling those floors with the clatter and commerce of the trade. Now here's where the story gets its name.
In 1926, a man named Rufus W. Higginbotham and a man named Hyman Pearlstone bought the Maroney Hardware Company, and with it came the building, the business, and apparently a legacy worth carving into a sign. Their outfit — the Higginbotham-Pearlstone Wholesale Hardware Company — set up shop right there and stayed.
Not for a season, not for a decade, but all the way until 1977. That's more than fifty years of hammers and hinges and wholesale hardware deals conducted beneath those corbelled cornices in the west end of Dallas. The building's still there.
Four stories of brick, still standing as a focal point of the city's historic west end — a reminder that some things, if you build them right and tend to them well, just don't go anywhere.
What the marker says
Constructed in 1909, this building was first occupied in 1910 by the Hobson Electric company. The warehouse was next leased to the Maroney Hardware Company, which was bought in 1926 by Rufus W. Higginbotham and Hyman Pearlstone, owners of the Higginbotham - Pearlstone Wholesale Hardware Company, which was located here until 1977. The four-story brick industrial building, featuring corbelled cornices, remains as a focal point of the city's historic west end. RTHL 1986