Historic Sun Furniture sign being removed for rehab.
Action a-plenty at 1253 Texas Avenue, former home of Sun Furniture and now, future home to Sportran Transit’s Resource Center and food court. This week, the iconic Sun Furniture sign came down, which we can jokingly say is a sign of things to come. The ‘things to come’ includes not only the rehabbing, relighting, and rehanging of the sign, but continued interior/exterior work on the buildings in the 1200 block of Texas Avenue to prepare them for new uses.
SporTran purchased the Sun buildings and a building in the next block in 2019 to create their Multimodal Resource Center across from their Murphy Street transit hub.
Interested in a space? Contact Realtor Trent Siskron for details.
The center will include spaces for a food court to serve both bus patrons and the general public, a transit technology center, training facility and employee wellness center. The former storage facility at 1309 Texas Avenue has been converted into a maintenance facility for the buses. The location for both couldn’t be more perfect- SporTran’s new intermodal transit center is just across Texas Avenue from both.
The building that was the old Sun Furniture wasn’t always known by that name. Sun Furniture was founded in 1950 by H. Leo Greengus, but the company didn’t move to 1253 Texas Ave. until 1966, the same year they rehabbed the historic building. You can see the changes below in the pre-1966 photo and the post-rehab picture. In the post-rehab photo, the medallions are gone and it appears the contours of the upper facade wall have changed. Windows, signage and a canopy have been added. It is somewhat surprising there was no canopy in the earlier photo; canopies were used extensively in earlier eras for cooling and sun protection. Buildings of the time also had windows, lots of them, for air flow pre- the era of air conditioning.
A 1936 photo of the Green Walls Drug Co.
A post- 1966 photo of the building. Windows, signage and a canopy were added.
The building had lived a long life prior to Sun Furniture.
The earliest records we found of the building date to 1900 when it was the Bernstein Brothers, a purveyor of drugs, groceries, liquor, crockery, grain and seed–a kind of ‘one-stop’ shop of the era. In between the years of Bernstein and Sun Furniture, the building was the Green Walls Drug Company (1936), and sported a pretty amazing array of painted advertising signage along its west (Murphy Street) wall. Along the way, the building was also home to other wholesale drug companies and at least one other furniture store.
Bernstein Brothers- 1902
A delivery man for Green Walls Drug Co.
SporTran’s plans for the building will bring some much-needed amenities to the area that will benefit both transit riders and the general public, and the rehab of three historic buildings which will now have both a new use and a new future.
