Kress Building

The 1913 Kress Building is a significant historical asset of Houston, Texas. It was one of several tall buildings constructed downtown in the early 20th century, towers that rose dramatically above existing buildings, only to be dwarfed themselves in the coming decades. Its elaborately decorated Renaissance Revival façades reflected contemporary trends in the design of skyscrapers, affirming Houston's arrival and anticipating a prominent role for the Kress Building itself.

S.H. Kress & Co., the building's financier, and the most visible tenant was establishing 5 & 10 cent stores ever more rapidly on Main Streets across the country.

With its own architectural staff and the strict oversight of founder Samuel H. Kress, the retail chain was committed to housing its stores in impressive buildings with consistent, recognizable features. One of the largest buildings ever built by the company, Houston's Kress Building was relatively unique for incorporating professional offices. As a lasting remnant of downtown Houston's early 20th-century commercial development and a reminder of the legacy of S.H. Kress & Co., the Kress Building is nominated at the local level of significance under Criterion A in the area of Commerce.

Early 20th-Century Development in Downtown Houston

By the turn of the 20th century, Houston had begun to establish itself as a vibrant and modern American city. The city's population effectively doubled each decade from 1870 to 1890 and nearly doubled again between 1890 and 1893, when its population was estimated at 50,000.' It had telephones by 1880 and, in 1882, joined New York as the only two American cities with electric power plants. Both a seaport and a major railroad hub, the city's commerce centered on transportation and trade, exporting cotton, lumber, and cattle and importing goods and supplies as well as exotic items from around the world.

Intense growth and commercial prosperity would continue to characterize Houston through the first few decades of the 20th century. Beginning at Spindletop in 1901, the discovery and extraction of oil all over Texas ushered in a new economic base for Houston, which naturally became the center for its processing and distribution. This was further aided by the dredging and widening of Buffalo Bayou to create the Houston Ship Channel, allowing oceangoing vessels direct access to the city as well as numerous oil refineries established along the waterway. Meanwhile, the cotton, lumber, and transportation industries continued to thrive, as did the increasing numbers of banks, businesses, and services established to support the city's booming economy.

Through the 19th century, Houston's downtown business district remained relatively small, both in terms of its geographic area and the scale of its buildings. It was concentrated primarily near the Old Market Square, at the north end of Main Street on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, and consisted mainly of two to four-story masonry commercial buildings. The Main Street/Market Square Historic District illustrates the area's architectural development. While the antebellum buildings, such as the Pillot Building or the Kennedy Bakery, followed relatively simple vernacular traditions, more stylish and ornate examples, including the 1884 Houston Cotton Exchange Building and the 1889 W.L. Foley Building, appeared during the last quarter of the 19th century.

Downtown Houston, at the end of the 19th century, was arranged along Main Street in four recognizable subdistricts. Warehouses and wholesale establishments were concentrated near Buffalo Bayou, between Allen's Landing and Franklin Street, with financial buildings between Franklin Street and Congress Street and retail establishments on the south end from Congress to Texas Avenue. The areas immediately surrounding this commercial core were dedicated mostly to residential use, with large Victorian homes around "Quality Hill" to the east and along Main Street and Texas Avenue to the south.

Beginning around the turn of the century, however, Houston's commercial district expanded both out and up in an effort to keep pace with the city's economic growth. Following the lead of the largest American cities and the rising cost of downtown land, Houston focused its commercial construction efforts on erecting taller and taller buildings. Jacob Binz is credited with building Houston's first skyscraper, a six-story concrete, stone, and steel building, in 1894. The Binz Building's location at the corner of Main Street and Texas Avenue is also telling, as it foreshadowed the commercial district's southward expansion along Main Street. As mentioned above, retail establishments were already concentrated near the south end of downtown, and the influx of new stores, like S.H. Kress & Co., played a significant role in that expansion.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, taller steel and concrete-frame buildings became the norm in downtown Houston. More daring examples, such as the 16-story building labeled "Carter's Folly," were still popularly considered dangerous, and most ranged from five to eight stories. While several buildings between 10 and 15 stories were built by the start of World War I, the city's real vertical explosion would not occur until the late-1920s and 1930s. Typical of the pre-WWI period were buildings like the eight-story First National Bank Building (Main Street/Market Square Historic District), designed by Fort Worth architects Sanguinet and Staats in 1905. Its rhythmic, symmetrical facades and classically inspired details illustrate the widespread influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where many prominent American architects were trained in the late 19th century. Designed both by Texas and out-of-state architects, downtown Houston's 20th-century buildings often reflected such national trends.

The 1920s brought unprecedented growth and expansion to downtown Houston, which during that decade grew from the third-largest city in Texas to the largest city in the south. Much of the downtown growth focused on newer areas of development, which spread south along Main Street. From the 1920s through the 1960s, this new south end of Main, between Texas and Clay Avenues, would serve as "the operational and symbolic center of Houston." While smaller buildings were still built, the 1920s witnessed the construction of several towers over 30 stories, which became more and more common toward the end of the decade. The 36-story Gulf Building, built from 1927-1929, illustrates both the vertical expansion of the city and the period's changing stylistic attitudes. Designed by Alfred C. Finn, the architect of Houston's most prominent 1930s skyscrapers, it indicates the rejection of classical ornament in favor of simplified geometric and organic patterns, as well as the stepped massing that would define the Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1930s.

Downtown buildings constructed during these first decades of the 20th century provide a physical record of Houston's rising prominence. Its rapid economic growth was reflected in its equally rapid physical growth, and no more so than in downtown. The city's commercial district spread from a few blocks of small-scale buildings to a wide area of towering skyscrapers. At the time of its construction, the Kress Building was a perfect fit, exemplifying the city's newfound economic prosperity and architectural maturity while also predicting the horizontal and vertical direction of future growth.

S.H. Kress & Co.

Samuel H. Kress was one of the pioneers in the establishment of nationwide retail chains during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The concept of S.H. Kress & Co., to offer a wide array of goods at extremely low prices, followed a model set by the first and most well-known of such "five-and-dimes," F. W. Woolworth & Co. Despite being a Pennsylvania native, Kress focused his initial efforts on the South, opening the first Kress store in Memphis, Tennessee in 1896. By 1900, he had opened twelve stores in five southern states, including Houston's first store, which opened that year."With its corporate headquarters in New York after 1900, S.H. Kress & Co. would eventually spread throughout the country, and by 1955, the year of its founder's death, the chain included 262 stores with an annual gross income of $167.9 million. Although inflation did increase prices over the years (the stores changed from five-and-tens to 5-10-25 Cent Stores early on), S.H. Kress & Co. continued to offer a variety of goods at incredibly low prices, made possible by the sheer volume of sales. On any store's vast selling floor, one could find products ranging from jewelry to candy, with everything in between. The stores naturally developed a social dimension as well, which was encouraged and marketed with amenities like lunch and soda counters and slogans like, "Meet your friends at Kress."S.H. Kress & Co. distinguished itself from early on in the design of its stores. While many such chain stores preferred to lease buildings, Kress was committed to building its own. Beginning in 1905, the company had its own architecture division, which at its height employed over 100 architects and draftspeople." Through this centralized approach, Kress developed several characteristic design features that made their geographically extensive stores readily identifiable.

Some characteristic "Kress" features remained constant throughout the company's building history.

Regardless of the materials, nearly all Kress stores were buff-colored or had a similar tone. Their symmetrical façades typically featured the word "Kress" in a distinctive arched lettering, essentially a company logo, near the top. This was intended to distinguish the store as specifically Kress, a compliment to a long sign above the storefronts that read "S.H. Kress & Co. 5-10-25 Cent Store," which was rendered in a design and lettering style that was typical of all five-and-dimes.

Kress storefronts were also unique, with the end sections of plate glass curving toward recessed entrances and a row of prismatic glass transoms that facilitated the use of an interior mezzanine. The word "Kress" was applied liberally, appearing on the storefronts and doors as well as set into the floor of the entrance. These features encouraged passersby to follow window displays toward the interior while ensuring that they knew which store they were entering.

Kress stores went through a number of stylistic changes through the years. With centralized control of design, however, those changes uniformly affected stores across the country. The Kress stores of the early 20th century were similar to other commercial buildings of the period. Most ranged from two to four stories, and while some early examples included other tenants, the buildings were most often reserved exclusively for Kress, including warehouse and office space above the selling floor.

Designed by company architects Julius H. Zeitner and, later, Seymour Burrell, the buildings were classically detailed and often featured a prominent cornice and parapet. The Kress stores blended well with other "Main Street" buildings across the country, although they were often more ornate than others in the small towns they inhabited. Examples include the 1909 Goldsboro, North Carolina store or the 1911 store in Trinidad, Colorado, which also housed the local Masonic lodge."This early Kress style reached an apex in the late 1920s with elaborate Beaux-Arts and revival designs, as in the 1928 stores built in Tampa, Florida, and Wichita, Kansas. Under the direction of head architect George E. Mackay, Kress stores also began incorporating impressive marquees with dramatic flood lighting directed back toward the façade. While the use of marquees and other elements of Mackay's designs continued, his tenure was short-lived, and the company underwent a significant shift in terms of architecture in the 1930s. Encouraged by Edward F. Sibbert, who joined the architectural staff in 1929, S.H. Kress & Co. announced formally that the company would now build solely in "modern" styles. For Sibbert, this meant Art Deco façades composed of simplified geometric forms and highly stylized ornament."Through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, Sibbert designed countless new Kress stores in this vein and remodeled several others to match the modern theme.

Although eclectic and often cleverly regional, the whole of Sibbert's designs exhibits a unified and consistent stylistic vocabulary. From the 1932 store in Lubbock, Texas, with its stylized cow's head marquee anchors, to the elegant relief work of the 1934 store built on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, Sibbert combined the simple, rectangular massing of Art Deco with an ornamental language derived from the work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright."Over the years, Kress's architects also mastered the stores' interior design. The architectural division was responsible for designing every light fixture and display case, with everything carefully arranged to showcase the goods on sale and encourage browsing. Kress even patented its design for candy counters, which they advertised as especially sanitary. Architect-designed storage bins and shelves filled the stores' upper floors, as extra supplies of every item were warehoused on site. Even the arrangement of the manager's office, down to the location of the company-issued desks and file cabinets, was dictated in the plans. As on the exterior, uniformity among all stores was a high priority, and every store's tan, cream, and ivory paint (neutral colors were used to make the merchandise stand out) was purchased directly from S.H. Kress & Co.

Samuel H. Kress himself maintained strict control over the design of Kress stores, and no plans were allowed to leave the headquarters without his expressed approval. He was always willing to spend money on design and construction, but he would not settle for less than the highest quality product. Beginning in the 1920s, Samuel Kress became a serious collector of medieval and Renaissance art, and he seems to have fashioned himself a modern-day patron of the arts. Through the Kress Foundation, established in 1929, he donated countless works of art to museums nationwide, and the Kress buildings were undoubtedly considered an important component of his patronage. In a clear expression of this attitude, the Kress family coat of arms was incorporated in the designs of several stores, first on the interior and, later, as an exterior ornament as well. For Samuel Kress, the crest was a symbol of his commitment to the public, evidenced in the quality of the building and the merchandise inside." In a sense, the Kress stores were intended to bring fine art to the broader public. During the Christmas season of 1938, Samuel Kress made perhaps his boldest statement of that intent, displaying one of his finest Italian Renaissance paintings, Giorgione's The Adoration of the Shepherds, in a window of the Fifth Avenue store in New York.

The significance of Samuel Kress's role in the stores' design is further indicated in the declining quality of Kress's buildings after his departure from the company's daily operations in 1941. Changing market forces, however, were perhaps a more significant factor. As Main Streets lost ground to suburban shopping malls and much larger discount stores became the norm, the five-and-dime, as both a commercial and architectural type, disappeared. By 1944, S.H. Kress & Co. no longer needed designers and replaced the Architectural Division with the "Buildings" Division. Edward F. Sibbert remained with the company as a vice president and head of the Buildings Division, assuming an executive role, but he became dissatisfied with the new direction of the company and resigned in 1954. The era of S.H. Kress & Co. as originally conceived was over, and after being sold to Genesco, Inc. in 1963, the Kress operation was officially closed in 1980.

The Kress Building

Houston was home to the first S.H. Kress & Co. in Texas, which opened in 1900. Like several of the chain's earliest stores, it was housed in a leased building on Main Street. It must have been profitable because Kress also opened a second corporate office in Houston in 1907. That office was combined into the New York headquarters by 1916, but the step indicates the importance that Houston was gaining in the South, where Kress focused the early years of its enterprise. Kress experienced Houston's rising prominence first-hand in the early 20th century, and it was only a matter of time before they built a permanent home in the city.

The explosion of the petroleum industry and the opening of the Houston Ship Channel would certainly have encouraged Kress's existing interest in the city, and by 1913 the company was ready to make a considerable investment in Houston's downtown. The Main Street Bridge was about to open, bringing even more potential shoppers downtown from the rapidly growing neighborhoods on the north side of Buffalo Bayou.

When a 1912 fire destroyed several blocks along Main Street, in the retail-dominated south end of the commercial district, S.H. Kress & Co. was quick to purchase a prominent lot at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue. The Kress Building would be the first to rise from the ashes.

A March 30, 1913 article from the Houston Post announced the start of construction on, "a handsome, thoroughly fireproof and in many ways distinctive building for S.H. Kress & Co.'s store." The building, to be constructed by Buchanan & Gilder, was scheduled to take about seven months and cost about $300,000. The walls were to be built of reinforced concrete, with additional steel columns in the basement and on the first floor. They intended to use the "Turner or mushroom system of reinforcing," the first building in Houston to employ this innovative construction method. According to the article:

The system obviates the use of beams in ceilings through a fibrous network of rods running in all directions throughout the concrete filling of the floors and ceilings. These rods radiate umbrellalike from the tops of the columns and bring into play the principle upon which the structure of the well-known fungus is built."

The system was undoubtedly appealing to Kress architects, who were always interested in technology that facilitated longer clear spans on the selling floor.

The new Kress Building also boasted "the longest unbroken line of show window space in the city," and was described as "the only entirely terra cotta-faced structure of its height in the South and West outside of San Francisco and Los Angeles." It was clearly an ambitious project for Houston, and S.H. Kress & Co. may have been overly ambitious at first. The article quotes F.E. Haynes, Houston manager for the company, saying, "It will be the tallest 5 10-cent store building utilized solely for that purpose in the country."

Either he was misquoted, or the size of the store was significantly scaled back, however, because S.H. Kress & Co.'s store and offices would only occupy 3 1/2 floors of the building, including the basement, with the remainder leased as professional offices." It was therefore always referred to as the "Kress Building," as opposed to bearing only the name of the S.H. Kress & Co. store. The Kress Building was most likely designed by Seymour Burrell, a Kress architect from 1910-1918. Julius H. Zeitner, Kress's first staff architect, was still employed and signed as co-architect of the Houston building, but Burrell seems to have been the company's main designer after 1911. Kress stores were most often cited in the small-scale commercial districts of America's small towns, and in 1913, the Houston building was by far the largest ever built by the company.

Only the flagship New York store on Fifth Avenue, built in 1935, would ever surpass the Houston building's height, and even then by only one story. The tall commercial block was, then, a rare building type for the chain, and the Kress Building was a relatively unique project.

Burrell's design followed architectural trends that became popular in the last decades of the 19th century and continued to shape tall buildings through the 1920s. The Kress Building's three-part vertical organization, articulated as if a column's "base," "shaft," and "capital," was a common design metaphor. As buildings grew increasingly taller in the late 19th century, architects developed methods for augmenting the monotony of identical, repeating stories. Chicago architects are often credited as the defining designers of the new building type, and it was the most recognized of those early skyscraper designers, Louis Sullivan, who established the column-like model, where "lower stories (public or semipublic) function as a heavy base; attic stories (service) as a rich and emphatic crown; intermediate stories (office) as a tall shaft, with soaring piers that express verticality and decorated spandrels that recall the horizontal dimension."

The Kress Building, then, illustrates the established conventions for buildings of its type and period. Through the 1920s, a majority of skyscrapers were arranged in some form of three-part vertical block. Although more progressive and modern architects were suppressing the use of historicist ornament by the 1910s, Classical and Renaissance-inspired details like those of the Kress Building remained far more common. Although unique in Houston, Burrell's extensive use of terra cotta was also reflective of contemporary trends and, once again, owed much to the work of Sullivan and the "Chicago School," who often used terra cotta as a decorative, but also fireproof, sheathing on steel-frame buildings. Furthermore, the Kress Building's terra cotta is in many instances intended to imitate stone, illustrating some early 20th. century architects' tendency to substitute modern materials for more traditional ones while retaining the latter's formal characteristics.

Although the overall form of the Kress Building was that of an office block, Burrell's design also incorporated some characteristic features that would identify the building with S.H. Kress & Co. The ground-floor storefronts were, besides their greater length, much like those of any Kress store across the country, with expansive product displays leading to the curved glass marking each entry. S.H. Kress & Co. signage above the storefronts and the distinctive Kress logo on each parapet also followed the company's nationwide design standards.

The Kress Building, with its prime location and distinctive design, quickly realized the prominence that the company had anticipated. Early tenants included several physicians and dentists, as well as the first offices of the Harris County Medical Society and the Houston Academy of Medicine Library. Finger and Bailey, a well-known local architecture firm, also located in the Kress Building, and Gulf occupied the eighth-floor penthouse until 1917.

For decades, S.H. Kress & Co. thrived on the corner of Main and Capitol, and by 1947, the Houston store needed expansion. The company purchased the adjacent 1910 Gas Building, a handsome 2-story brick building that shared the Kress Building's east party wall. The building was especially attractive to Kress because of its overbuilt foundation, originally designed to handle a 20-story building. Although they didn't intend to dwarf their building, Kress did add 2 more stories to the Gas Building in their 1952-1953 renovations. The 4-story annex was an entirely new building, with no recognizable components of the original left intact. The new International style design was simple and plain, and it illustrates the company's changing attitudes regarding its buildings. The annex exhibits very little evidence of creative thought and is more of a generic building envelope than anything specifically associated with Kress. Less and less emphasis was being placed on design (recall the company's 1944 replacement of its Architectural Division with a Buildings Division).

Although Kress must have been encouraged enough by its Houston store's success to build the annex, by the 1960s Houston's downtown retail establishments had begun a steady decline. Even today it appears that "not even the daily presence of approximately 180,000 workers downtown can compensate for the defection of shoppers to suburban malls." This trend was not limited to Houston, and S.H. Kress & Co. was losing ground across the country, evident first in their 1963 sale to Genesco and finally in the closing of the entire Kress operation, including the Houston store, in 1980.

With S.H. Kress & Co. gone, the Kress Building was stripped of the company's associative characteristics, including its storefronts, signage, and parapet, in 1983. However, it continued to function as an office building and maintained a high occupancy rate. Eventually, the Kress Building became more valuable for residential use, and it has been converted into loft apartments, the "St. Germain Lofts," with retail establishments on the ground floor. Like many of the buildings built by S.H. Kress & Co. across the country, the quality of the Kress Building's initial design and construction has greatly facilitated its continued adaptation and reuse.

Houston's 1913 Kress Building exemplifies important aspects of the city's history. Its location, height, and style are all indicative of early 20th-century trends in Houston's downtown commercial development. Renaissance-inspired detailing, a three-part vertical arrangement, and terra cotta facades all identify the Kress Building with its period and function, illustrating its role, along with similar commercial buildings of the era, in declaring Houston's rising importance and prosperity. Although most of the characteristic S.H. Kress & Co. features have been removed, the Kress Building remains a testament to that company's commitment to high-quality architecture and a reminder of the five-and-dime's role in American communities of all sizes.