1916 - Melba Almyra Johnson

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1916 - Starting over here.

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1 - More later . . .

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5 - The Steck Company

Mom (Melba Johnson Crosby Knight) worked here for 8 years (1946-53), never missing a single days work.
She was a Lithographer. She thoroughly enjoyed her job painting out blotches, scratches, errors on photograph negatives and read everything inside out, upside down, whatever.



www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/ameam1/steck_publishing_company_8000_shoal_creek_blvd/

I feel like I've shared this one before here but my post history says otherwise. I apologize if that's the case. Well today is Groundhog Day so I suppose that's appropriate. It's been almost 20 years since this building in the photo existed. Old timers might remember seeing (the backend of) it visible on the eastern side of Mopac just south of 183 for years during the 80s and 90s. I wanted to know more about the Steck company (later called Hart Graphics), specifically about this building, and what the street was named for so I looked it up. Today I want to share a brief bit of what I found, so let's get started.

It turns out to be a long and complicated tale of corporate acquisitions and spinoffs. Luckily the Austin History Center keeps a record of it all. They host The Hart Graphics Papers, and the description of the volume of information gives a great little summary of the company, which I quote:

The Steck Company began as the Christian publishing house Firm Foundations. Firm Foundations started in the late 19th century in Austin and published weekly bulletins and songbooks for the Church of Christ. In 1912, E. L. Steck took over the printing side of the business from his father and founded the E. L. Steck Company, which continued to publish works for Firm Foundations well into the 1920s. In 1921 they dropped the "E. L.," changing the name to the Steck Company, and continued to prosper as a general line commercial printing company selling printing, lithographing and stationery to cities, schools, counties, banks and commercial accounts in Texas.

In 1928 the Steck Company facilities moved to 9th and Lavaca streets, where it prospered for many years. In 1937, it produced the first four-color process on newsprint in the U.S.

The company has gone through many names in its 89-year history. In 1962, Vaughn Building Corporation in Dallas acquired 100 percent of the shares of the Steck Company. In April 1965, the Publications Division of the Steck Company was turned into a separate corporate entity entitled the Steck-Vaughn Company, which was acquired by Intext Educational Publishers in 1968.

In August 1965, the Steck Company acquired Warlick Press of Dallas and changed its name to Steck-Warlick. Warlick, founded in 1894, was a financial printing house that had recently acquired web press printing facilities.

In 1971, Steck-Warlick spun out its Data Processing Division to create Steck Data Corporation, which engaged in performing data processing services for municipal tax accounting, voter registration, hospital patient accounting, mailing lists and other specialty fields. Both Steck-Warlick and Steck Data Corporation were still owned by Vaughn Building Corporation.

In April 1972, Steck-Warlick spun off its publishing activities to create Shoal Creek Publishers, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. The new corporation dealt in a broad line of publishing activities.

In December 1973, William Hart, then president of Steck-Warlick, acquired the Austin division of the company, which he renamed Hart Graphics, Inc. During the 1970s and 1980s, Hart Graphics was the largest commercial printer headquartered in Texas. Its products and services ranged from printing TV Guide, catalogs, publications, coupons, inserts and software manuals to financial, insurance, and government forms, including election ballots and supplies sold to every county in Texas. It also had additional sites in Houston, Simpsonville, South Carolina, and Irvine, California.

Hart retired as company chairman in 1997. After losing its contract with TV Guide and due to the high cost of modernizing its printing equipment, the company closed its doors in March 2001.

So it goes like this: Firm Foundations --> Steck ---> Steck-Vaughn (spun off) --> Steck-Warlick --> Shoal Creek Publishers (spun off) --> Hart Graphics.

Welp, long story short, there is now a Lowe's Home Improvement store on the lot of the now demolished building in the OP. For the story of the fate of Hart Graphics, I turn to this paywalled 2001 Austin Business Journal article:

What might be the largest available site in an otherwise developed area along North MoPac Expressway is on the market.

The 16.5-acre site includes the former printing operations and headquarters of Hart Graphics Inc. at 8000 Shoal Creek Blvd., as well as a warehouse-turned-office that was home to Garden.com Inc. Total space in the buildings is about 226,000 square feet.

Hart Graphics is closing its doors. The company will remain in existence to handle its real estate but won't be a printing company, says Bill Hart, the majority shareholder.

"We just thought it was the proper time to sell it," Hart says.

Hart Graphics completed its last order April 20. Hart says much of the company's business came from printing instruction manuals for computers and other equipment, but with the widespread use of help desks and other electronic mediums, the day of the printed manual is past.

The company will auction all printing presses, bindery, shipping equipment, office furniture and other printing assets at the site May 31. The auction will be conducted by Michael Fox International of Baltimore in association with Rosen Systems Inc. of Dallas.

"We hate to close our business. Our company and the Steck Company have been here since 1912, but that's part of the times," Hart says.

"Since we were closing our business and the main assets left in Hart Graphics were real estate, we thought it was appropriate to sell the real estate to have a stream of income for the shareholders."

Hart Graphics has hired Royce Lacey and Alan Lacey of NAI/Commercial Industrial Properties Co. to market the land and buildings for sale.

Royce Lacey says he and son Alan will begin distributing marketing materials for the property this month. The brokers don't have an asking price, and are promoting the sale as an opportunity to either redevelop the existing buildings or replace them entirely.

"It's one of the only tracts of this size that's available for this kind of development in this area," Royce Lacey says. "My guess is it's going to be best-suited for an office development."

Two of the buildings are offices fronting Shoal Creek Boulevard: Huffcutt & Associates Inc. leases all 4,800 square feet of the building at 8030 Shoal Creek Blvd.; a mix of tenants occupy the 10,600 square feet in second office building, at 8008 Shoal Creek Blvd.

The remaining buildings include the warehouse Garden.com converted to offices at 3301 Steck Ave. The company has closed and terminated its lease there.

The final structure is the 162,000-square-foot Hart Graphics building, the majority of which is filled with printing presses, bindery and other equipment.

Zoning in place on the tract includes a "limited office" designation for the two office buildings, and a larger "light industrial" zone encompassing the industrial buildings.

If a buyer were to leave the existing zoning in place, the light industrial area would allow office construction to a height of 60 feet.

Lacey says that translates into a comfortable office height of about four floors. Simply removing the Hart Graphics building and erecting four stories of offices within that 162,000-square-foot building footprint would equate to several hundred thousand square feet.

"It could hold perhaps as much as 500,000 or 600,000 square feet of office space, but that's only a guestimation," he says, because the total could vary depending on engineering and other factors.

Lacey says the property might be most interesting to outside developers looking for property to break into the Austin market. He says the current real estate market dip shouldn't hamper marketing for the land, because the time required to prepare plans and secure development approvals for redeveloping the site likely would extend into the next market cycle.

"By the time you get this project ready to go, in other words redeveloped, your timing in the market could be very good," he says.

Hart Graphics was the parent of what now is Hart InterCivic Inc. before that firm was spun off in 1995 as Hart Information Systems Inc. Hart Information Systems, now independent of Hart Graphics, changed its name in September to better reflect its focus on government clients.

The story of Steck Publishing still isn't over, however, and lives on through another incarnation. The Steck-Vaughn publishing company, spun off in the mid-60s, is still around today and according to Bloomberg has an office down around 45th street.

The 1928 building at 205 W 9th still exists.















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