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(Mark Stone)
El Paso’s Kress store is among the best examples of the work of Sibbert, the New York City–based in-house architect who designed many of the company’s stores nationwide, including those in Amarillo (see AO14) and Lubbock (LK7). The building faces San Jacinto Plaza with a narrow storefront offset by a commanding eighty-foot tower that frames the vista up S. Oregon Street and acts as a beacon to those approaching the plaza from Ciudad Juárez. The store’s interior wraps around the other buildings on the block facing Mills Avenue, emerging with another entrance midblock on N. Mesa Street.
The building’s exterior is covered in oyster-colored terra-cotta tile in a square grid. Ornamentation ranges from Moorish to Mayan to modernist, executed in accent tiles of varied colors. The N. Oregon Street side is most elaborate, where a tower and its pilasters recall those on adobe mission churches. The pilasters conclude with conical finials that spring from striped, turban-like bases. Inset at the top of the tower is a rectangular, windowless lantern covered in lavender and purple geometric tiles, capped by a foliate-decorated tile roof and a tiny circular tempietto and gold cylinder. El Paso architect Mabel C. Welch, coauthor of El Paso Architecture published in 1938 by the Woman’s Department of the Chamber of Commerce to promote the use of Spanish-influenced architecture, lobbied Sibbert to produce a Spanish design. The El Paso store, closed in the 1980s, has since passed into local ownership, retaining its retail function.
Nearby at 109 N. Oregon Street, One Texas Tower (First National Bank Building; 1921, Barglebaugh and Whitson), a narrow, fourteen-story tower in buff brick, exhibits a horizontal, Chicago School proportion with its wide bays.