Furniture dealer Norton Baker found there was sufficient demand for retail space downtown to justify building successive structures for his business, thereby freeing up space in the first building for lease to the Montgomery Ward Company. The first Baker Building (now the Watson Building) was a more richly detailed version of the one- and two-story brick-faced commercial blocks typical of Texan downtowns in the 1920s. The mixed blend of red and black brick and the crisp limestone decorative detail elevate the building above the ordinary. Baker’s second building, a block to the east, displays the impact that Texas Tech University’s initial buildings (LK17) had on shaping consensus on architectural style in Lubbock. The two-story masonry shell is faced with an elaborate two-story cast-stone frontispiece, detailed with eighteenth-century-styled Spanish Colonial decoration. Adapted from the design of the frontispiece of the Textile Engineering Building at Texas Tech, the ornamentation frames the front entrance and a second-story window above and culminates in a fanciful arched cap. A line of red roof tiles lines the parapet of the street facade above arched second-floor windows to complete the Spanish theme. Lubbock newspaper reports identify the contractor, J. B. Maxey, but not the architect.
Behind the second Baker Building at 1208 14th Street rises the eleven-story Citizens Tower (1965, Atcheson, Atkinson and Cartwright), the first of the three glass curtain–walled modern slabs built or occupied by Lubbock’s major banks in the 1960s and early 1970s.