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South Elm stopped at the railroad tracks. Mebane Road took you west; Fayetteville Street (now Martin Luther King Drive) took you east. But around 1890, the city extended South Elm across the tracks for two blocks.

That move refocused the commercial sense of the city, according to Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro, and it shifted its business and cultural focus from east-west to north-south.

There was Blue Bell. It started out as a small operation over a grocery store that moved in 1919 to the corner of West Lee and South Elm and produced bib overalls with the “Blue Bell’’ label.

During World War II, Blue Bell became the country’s leading overall manufacturer. The plant closed in the late 1980s and the building became what it is today: an office complex known as the Old Greensborough Gateway Center.

And there was Fordham Drug Store. In 1898, pharmacist C.C. Fordham built the two-story brick building across the tracks. A distinguishing characteristic? The mortar and pestle on the roof.

The tornado of April 1936 — a storm that caused $2.5 million in damages and killed 13 people — destroyed several buildings along the block. Matter of fact, it destroyed the third floor of the building that now houses Table 16.

But since the city extended South Elm across the tracks, not much has changed.

There’s still architecture from Greensboro’s first boom years, which started in the 1890s, when the city had only 8,000 residents.

There are the granite window sills of the Cascade Saloon, the transom windows above the storefronts and the portico facade of the C.J. Kern Building, a style repeated in many places citywide from Bennett College’s Pfeiffer Chapel to the First Baptist Church on West Friendly.

Inside any of the buildings along South Elm is what Briggs calls the city’s architectural fingerprint: the tin ceilings, the peeling plaster walls, the beat-up wooden floors and the eclectic chandeliers.

“What Greensboro has is the real thing,’’ Briggs says. “A real urban landscape.’’