Suburban shopping arrived in Tenleytown when Sears, Roebuck & Co. erected a Moderne style store here in 1941. The sleek façade demonstrated the latest in department store design, and Sears was the second Tenleytown business after Giant Food to offer rooftop parking. The aromas of popcorn, half smokes, and doughnuts led customers to Sears' entrance and penthouse snack bar, and by attracting shoppers from the city and nearby Maryland, Sears ushered in Tenleytown's modern commercial era. Sears replaced the three-story former Tenleytown Inn, the neighborhood's oldest commercial landmark. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the inn was a stopping point for farmers and merchants traveling on the Georgetown-Frederick (Maryland) Pike. When William Achterkirchen ran the inn for owner Christian Heurich in the early 1900s, Tenleytowners came in with their growlers, tin buckets with lids, to carry out the inn's popular brew. By 1918 innkeeper Howard Crandall had adapted the inn for his Hilltop Service Station, Tenleytown's first gas station. While Tenleytown celebrated the arrival of Metrorail in 1984, it came at a cost. The station plaza across the street replaced the Burrows-Mostow building, built in 1900 as a commercial space with an apartment upstairs. It also replaced Joe's Variety Shop, where generations of Tenleytown children flocked to Joe Gould's narrow store, packed floor to ceiling with toys, games, penny candy, and school supplies. The William R. Singleton Masonic Lodge No. 30 has occupied the center of the block diagonally across the intersection since 1909, and its members follow Freemasonry, an ancient fraternal organization rooted in the building trades and dedicated to good works and fellowship.