Stix Baur & Fuller Building

The main anchor store at River Roads opened as Stix Baer and Fuller. With its white painted brick, distinctive diamond sea green and beige tile, sunken garden, and long-destroyed hanging globe lamps, it bears the distinctive marks of early- to mid-1960s product.

The Stix store is far and away the greatest loss. It is an elegant building: simple, well articulated, powerfully massed, trimmed with exotic (if somewhat dated) ceramic tile. The tile patterns are hypnotically complex in their endless repetion; their patterns change with the shifting sunlight through the day, and would be reason enough alone to argue for saving the building.

The sunken court on the south side is presided over by a looming massive wall of this glazed tile in a wonderful three-tone bowtie pattern unique to that side of the building, once proudly illuminated by a row of lights, themselves a spatial element in their neat file. The space is the epitome of 1960s elegance.

The small attached building on one side of the sunken garden was the Pavillion Restaurant, operated by Stix. The Pavillion offered sit-down dining as well as counter service and a cocktail lounge, in an atmosphere of 1960s elegance.