When H-E-B named this former Piggly Wiggly as its Store No. 1 in the mid-1940s. It was at West Sixth and Colorado streets, and this is the view from looking south on Colorado.
Contributed by Austin History Center/C00950
When did your neighborhood H-E-B open and, over the years, how did it grow? What are its core attributes and culture nowadays?
These questions will guide our new series, “Central Texas H-E-B Histories,” informed by articles in newspaper archives, city directories, store visits, crowdsourcing and personal interviews. Over the next months, we’ll roll out short chronicles of the more than 50 H-E-B grocery stores in the Austin area.
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We’ll unveil them three or four at a time — like the popular “Jim Duncan’s Austin” series — organized from the start chronologically by opening dates. Duncan’s thematically presented Austin business histories will resume in these pages as well.
How did H-E-B spread?
The H-E-B store in Frisco was the grocery chain’s first H-E-B brand store to open in the Dallas-Fort Worth market.
Lola Gomez / Dallas Morning News
The June 26, 1950, Austin Statesman, the city’s evening paper, reported that the chain entered the market in 1938 by purchasing four Piggly Wiggly stores, which were converted to the H-E-B name gradually.
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At the time, the chain was anchored in Corpus Christi. It wasn’t until 1985 that Charles Butt moved the company’s headquarters to San Antonio, a better launching pad for reaching more territory in Texas and Mexico, where it opened its first store in 1997.
From South Texas, H-E-B reached Houston with its smaller Pantry Food stores in 1992, then officially arrived with large-format stores — and its Central Market brand — in 2001. After testing the Pantry Foods concept in North and East Texas during the 1980s, the company introduced Central Market to North Texas in 2001, before opening its first official full-sized H-E-B there in 2022. (Yes, that recently.)
The iconic chain has still not reached El Paso and much of West Texas other than Midland, Odessa and Lubbock. In addition, spots in East Texas — where Brookshire’s reigns — and North Texas — even within the city limits of Dallas — are still without an H-E-B.
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H-E-B leadership routinely declines to reveal its expansion plans until they are completely settled. Nevertheless, they study each region carefully and start buying promising properties years, sometimes decades in advance.
Where were the first H-E-B stores in Austin? Are any of those still open?
In 2018, we spent some time in the reading room at the Austin History Center. There, we pulled city and phone directories from the late 1930s through the late 1940s.
We were dazzled by the number of listed markets, some just a block or so from the next shopping option. A few were part of national, regional or local groups, such as A&P, Red & White or Checkered Front. Others bore cool names, such as New China (two locales), Handy Hut Food Pantry and Achilles IGA.
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Until 1945, however, we found no listing for an H-E-B, but rather six for Piggly Wiggly. The year the war ended, the Piggly Wiggly brand had disappeared. Instead, H-E-B listed two supermarkets — larger and more varied grocery stores devoted primarily to self-service shopping — and six smaller, more traditional stores:
Supermarket No. 1: 2014 S. Congress Ave. Now: refurbished condos across Crockett Street from the Meteor coffee, cafe and bicycle repair shops. (It had moved from 1502 S. Congress Ave. sometime in the early 1940s.) Neither of these is the address for the current, multi-level urban-style H-E-B at South Congress Avenue and Oltorf.
Supermarket No. 2: 3106 Windsor Road. Now and then: Tarrytown Center. This supermarket could not exist currently given the center’s landlord, Jeanne Crusemann Daniel, who forbids the sale of animal products.
Store No. 1: 117 W. Sixth St. This handsome store was gone by 1954, when the ultra-modern Starr Building, also known as the American National Bank Building, replaced the grocery outlet. This landmark was lovingly renovated in 2009-2010. It became the stylish “Mad Men” home of the McGarrah Jessee marketing agency. “I happen to be one of the people who went to work at that first H-E-B on West Sixth Street,” May Smith told the Statesman. “I’m so happy you’ve found all the stores.”
Store No. 2: 824 W. 12th St. Now: ACC garage. This store would have served the Old Austin, Old West Austin, Clarksville, Judge’s Hill, Enfield, Pemberton and some University of Texas neighborhoods.
Store No. 3: 601 E. Sixth St. Now: offices. The intersection of Old Sixth and Red River streets was a place where all Austin encountered each other, even in a segregated era. Just a few years later, racial lines hardened with the construction of the Interregional Highway, eventually renamed Interstate 35 during the 1960s.
Store No. 4: 1405 San Jacinto Blvd. Now: Capitol complex garage. Some Austinites forget how heavily residential the areas north and east of the Texas Capitol were before the current governmental complex and the university expanded voraciously.
Store No. 5: Oddly, there was no such listing. At least not in 1945.
Store No. 6: 1111 E. First St. Now: Central Health. The only H-E-B in what we think of as East Austin by the end of World War II, this store served the mixed-race neighborhoods that became primarily Hispanic by the 1950s. The grocery had been phased out by the 1990s.
How can you help?
Nobody knows your local H-E-B like you do. You have memorized the layout of the sections and the sequence of the aisles. You’ve got your favorite counter helpers, as well as friendly front-end checkers and sackers. Heck, you might have chatted with a manager or two over the years.
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Please send your thoughts about your H-E-B to mbarnes@statesman.com.