They put the industry in Industrial Boulevard.

Not the civic titans, for whom the local highways are named, but regular folks, like Howard Hansen, Julius Hardie and Jimmy Bishop, who have owned businesses on Industrial for six decades.

They can recite chapter and verse the colorful history of the thoroughfare carved out of river bottom. But it's with the wistful knowledge that their legacy will soon be overtaken by the Trinity River Corridor Project, a city-led makeover of the area expected to attract upscale residential, office, retail and restaurant properties.

Their street will be renamed. Their scenery will undoubtedly change, with the addition of parks and lakes. And they wonder if they're just supposed to fade away.

"It's like they don't want industrial people anymore," said Virgil Hargett, whose family has had businesses along Industrial since 1945.

Certainly, Dallas would not be where it is without them: The welders, machine press operators, rock haulers, dragline excavators, water pump installers, refrigeration specialists, heavy-industrial electricians and auto parts dealers. They used their hands and their brains to literally help build Dallas from the ground up and get it moving.

They worked out of corrugated-steel Quonset huts and cement-block warehouses – buildings that became blazing ovens in the summer or ice boxes in the winter. They got hamburgers at the Buckboard Drive-In, or the blue-plate special at Who Care's Cafe, and bought their liquor cut-rate at Buck and Ruck's.

They might drop by the two workingman's palaces, the Longhorn Ballroom for country and western music, and the Sportatorium for wrestling matches or the Big D Jamboree, which in the fall of 1955 featured a young rock 'n' roller by the name of Elvis Presley.

RICHARD MICHAEL PRUITT/DMN

Howard Hansen at his Industrial Boulevard welding shop.

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Jimmy Bishop remembers it all, including the time Elvis stopped at a restaurant in Oak Cliff to eat a bowl of chili after a show. The restaurant raffled off the bowl for $3 a ticket, Mr. Bishop said, and a friend of his won. "I don't know what he ever did with that bowl," he said.

One of the most successful independent businessmen on Industrial – if not in the city itself – Mr. Bishop graduated from Adamson High School in 1948 and promptly eloped with his girlfriend, Peggy, an Adamson cheerleader.

The Oak Cliff native started selling auto parts in a shop he rented near the corner of Industrial and Corinth.

Industrial proved a perfect location. "It was a good place to start out," Mr. Bishop said. "Easy to find and easy to get to – right near downtown and close to all the highways."

There was one drawback: no sewage system. "We had a septic tank here for a long time," he said.

Sixty years later, he's made a fortune in various auto parts businesses and real estate. Peggy, his wife of 54 years, passed away in 2003.

Now 78, Mr. Bishop still shows up for work every morning at the same intersection, though just across the Trinity River, he now owns several large warehouses, stacked floor to ceiling with thousands of engine cores, crankshafts, rods and other spare parts that he buys and sells all over the world.

Often described as a "character," Mr. Bishop enjoys bantering and joking with customers and employees, rather than spending hours on a computer or the phone. His office brims with photographs of friends and family, each sparking a story. He loves vintage cars and has spent a small fortune on hundreds of model cars from the Franklin Mint. He drives a new Range Rover, painted green like his warehouses, he said, "because green is the color of money."

Bishop's is among the remnants of the old Industrial. Much of it has been replaced by drive-through liquor stores, convenience shops and bail bondsmen.

Industrial Boulevard was born out of the disastrous 1908 flood, during which the Trinity River rose to a record 52.6 feet. The flood spurred plans to construct a levee system and move the meandering river a few hundred yards to the west along a straighter course.

In 1928, a group of private businessmen led by Leslie Stemmons organized to develop about 10,000 acres of floodplain into a modern industrial district. Taxes collected from new businesses that located in the reclaimed river bottom were to help pay off the millions of dollars in bonds used to build the levees.

After completion of the levees in 1932, city leaders dedicated Industrial Boulevard, a seven-mile highway envisioned as the spine for what they hoped would become a dynamic industrial district that would move the city forward.

Mr. Stemmons boasted that the intersection of Industrial and Commerce Street would soon become the busiest in Dallas. In fact, the intersection would become the busiest in the state, not just the city. But it would take another 20 years to earn that distinction.

In the 1930s, the country was mired in the Great Depression, "and it was rock-bottom times and land was impossible to sell. You couldn't give it away," said Leslie's son, John Stemmons, in a 1978 speech about the history of the industrial district.

Leslie Stemmons died in 1939, his vision unfulfilled. It wasn't until the years right after World War II when the area attracted its first important clients, including Continental Trailways, International Harvester and the Texas and Pacific freight terminal. In 1955, when John Stemmons gave 102 acres of right of way for what would become the Stemmons corridor of Interstate 35, business took off.

The newcomers included Nels Hansen. An immigrant from Norway, he settled briefly in Minnesota, developed a lung ailment and soon headed to the drier climes of North Texas. A welder and machinist in South Dallas, he relocated in 1950 to a shady lot behind the Longhorn Ballroom, along the old river channel, where Industrial petered out into an unpaved, dusty side road.

"It was just a good, handy, off-the-road place to work," said Howard Hansen, who was 18 at the time. When his grandfather died in 1957, the business passed to his father and eventually to him. His was a natural apprenticeship, and he learned to use his grandfather's massive, 100-year-old lathe, which still sits in the garage.

"My dad taught me how to weld," he said. "I started welding on little light things. Then I got more accomplished and learned more, and I've been welding all my life."

The corrugated metal shop was cooled by a 300-year-old, shady pecan tree that grew in the middle of the road. But in the 1980s, the tree started dying and dropping limbs, prompting a city crew to cut it down.

The Hansen business paralleled the progress of the city.

In the 1950s, when a rapidly growing Dallas seemed like one big construction site, they repaired draglines, front-end loaders and similar machinery. As the city grew into a transportation hub, he repaired and rebuilt axle hubs on trucks.

He never went to the Longhorn, other than to install the faux cactus around the building. His other neighbors included Danceland, a nightclub, and the Million Item Company, a popular variety store.

Now 76, he retired last fall after developing health problems. His only child, a daughter, is not interested in taking over the business, and he has a contract pending on the lot. Lately, thieves have broken into his place, looking for metal scrap and despoiling the shop he'd always kept immaculate.

One morning, he found shards of glass scattered under a broken window. An electric motor lay broken on the floor and some wiring had been ripped out. "It's all the copper thieves," he said, his voice shaking in anger. "All this here was wired in 1950 by me and my dad and my granddaddy."

Another early arrival was Industrial Electric Equipment, near Cadiz Street, which builds, designs and renovates industrial electric motors. "We chose the name of our company for both the street and the type of work we do," said Julius Hardie, whose father started the company and whose son, Paul, is president.

"To rename the street is not going to be a benefit to us."

Mr. Hardie, 70, can rattle off businesses on Industrial from 50 years ago. One place made equipment for Frito-Lay and another the machinery for making chain-link fences. Growing up, his favorite was a nearby Freez-ette. He was about 9 when they invited him to be their ice-cream tester one summer.

"It sure beat sweeping the floor" for his dad, he said.

Virgil Hargett, 84, owns five buildings on Rock Island Street just off Industrial, which house businesses that he describes as "blue-collar, get-your-hands-dirty kinds of places."

Growing up, young Virgil got his hands dirty planting okra and onions on a fertile patch of floodplain on South Industrial that his father once owned. It's now the site of a flourishing scrap yard, harvesting spare metal parts.

His father, who had an electric company, bought a building on Industrial in 1945, and then built four adjacent buildings for tradesmen, which Mr. Hargett still owns and manages. He's skeptical about the Trinity River Project.

"I've listened to plans about the Trinity for years – until I'm blue in the face," he said.

"Best outcome for me? They let me continue to lease to the same people – working people. You need places where people can get started, and maybe they make it and maybe they don't."