National Register Listing

Houston City Hall

901 Bagby St., Houston, TX

The Houston City Hall is an embodiment of the Modernistic architectural form, decorative iconography, and landscape design associated with projects of the Public Works Administration during the 1930s. It is a diminutive skyscraper designed in the Modernistic style by the prominent Texas architect, Joseph Finger. The design incorporates decorative arts with allegorical images expressing municipal government and the region; the work of sculptor Herring Coe and painter Daniel MacMorris. Hermann Square was redesigned by Hare & Hare landscape architects, creating a formal design complementing the modernism of the City Hall. Contextually the property relates to the public architecture of the New Deal Era, 1933-1942. Landscape Architecture is an archetypal American public building of the New Deal era.

The county courthouse was the pre-eminent building type associated with local government in Texas during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. The offices of municipal government, if they occupied purpose-built quarters, often were incorporated in a public market house. After the turn of the century new city halls in Texas began to be built apart from other functions and were seen as significant public symbols; and, like post offices and courthouses of the period, they were often designed in a classical style expressing their significance. During the 1920s two hybrid municipal building types emerged in Texas: the combined city hall and municipal auditorium in cities, and the joint city hall and fire station in smaller towns. At the end of the 1920s another building type was proposed as a model for public buildings: the skyscraper. Previously associated chiefly with office buildings and hotels, the skyscraper was romantically reinterpreted in the late 1920s as the modern American building type, therefore, appropriate for a wide range of functions. New York architect Bertram G. Goodhue initiated the vogue for skyscraper public buildings with his design for the Nebraska State Capitol (1920-1932). The Los Angeles City Hall (1928), the most famous skyscraper city hall of the decade, reflects the influence of Goodhue's design. In the wake of skyscrapers, public buildings were built in a number of Texas cities, notably the Potter County Courthouse in Amarillo (1932), the Jefferson County Courthouse in Beaumont (1930), and the State Highway Department Building in Austin (1932), all designed in the Modernistic style.

By 1930 Houston was the largest city in Texas. In 1925 it began to plan the creation of a "civic center" which was to be a group of public buildings focused on Hermann Square, a small park southwest of the downtown business district.

The Houston Central Library (1926, NR 1977), designed in the Spanish Plateresque style, provided the architectural keynote for the Civic Center. At the behest of the City Planning Commission Kansas City landscape architects and planners, Hare & Hare, prepared a plan for Hermann Square that was officially adopted in 1927. When the administration of Mayor Oscar Holcombe commissioned three Houston architects to design a new city hall in 1928, they proposed a 22-story modernistic building clearly based on the Los Angeles City Hall. Due to the onset of the Great Depression, this design was not built. In 1937 the project was revived after the city obtained a Public Works Administration grant of $818,181 to finance its construction. A block of the Civic Center west of Hermann Square was designated as the site. Removing city offices from the Victorian market house in Market Square would ensure a building better planned to accommodate the departmentalized bureaucracy of city administration. It would have a more dignified image for city government than the old City Hall had in the environs of the market, and it would be a building that would serve as a symbol of progressive public administration. Furthermore, a public construction project of this size and scope would provide a significant source of employment in Depression-era Houston.

Houston architect Joseph Finger was commissioned to design the new city hall. Joseph Finger (1887-1935) was Houston's most successful proponent of modernistic architecture. Born and trained in Austria, he immigrated to the United States in 1905, settling briefly in New Orleans before moving to Houston where he established an independent practice in 1914. Finger's major modernistic buildings include Temple Beth Israel (1924, NR 1984), the Houston TurnVerein (1929, NR 1978), the Montgomery County Courthouse in Conroe (1936), the Clarke & Courts manufacturing plant (1936), and a series of supermarkets for the Weingarten grocery chain. Roy W. Leibsle (1892-1968) was Finger's chief designer. The Finger office produced two other major public building complexes in Houston during this period, both modernistic in style and both built with PWA grants: the Jefferson Davis Hospital (1937, with Alfred C. Finn) and the Houston Municipal Airport terminal and hangar (1940).

For the design of City Hall Finger relied upon an explicit model: the 12-story Racine County Courthouse in Racine, Wisconsin (1931) by Chicago architects Holabird & Root. The Racine courthouse's setback "skyscraper" massing and modernistic abstraction of classical detail are salient features of the Houston City Hall. The treatment of carved architectural ornament on the exterior of the building is derived from Goodhue's Nebraska State Capitol, especially the human figures that emerge from pylons to either side of the main entrance. The use of rough-sawn Texas Cordova Shell limestone as a facing material was widespread on public buildings constructed in Texas during the 1930s and 1940s; this material was valued because of its regional connotation. The Houston City Hall achieved modernity without sacrificing the attributes of dignity and permanence. Its success in appealing to both progressive and conservative instincts was demonstrated when, in 1939, a panel of "leading citizens" selected City Hall as Houston's most outstanding new building in a survey conducted by the magazine Architectural Record.

Contributing to the artistic embellishment of City Hall were the sculptors Herring Coe and Raoul Josset, and the decorative painter Daniel MacMorris. Herring Coe (b. 1907), a Beaumont artist, studied under Carl Miller in Cranbrook. He was responsible for the Dick Dowling Memorial at Sabine Pass (1936) and "The Texas" at the Vicksburg National Military Park (1960). Raoul Josset (b. 1900) who consulted on the drawings for the sculpture, was a native of Tours, France. He worked as an architectural sculptor in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s on such projects as Holabird & Root's Palmolive Building and the administrative building at the Century of Progress Exposition. He came to Texas to work at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas where he was responsible for the sculpture along the Esplanade of State and the Administration Building there. Daniel MacMorris (b. 1893) executed major murals at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and the Ohio Office Building in Columbus.

Hare & Hare of Kansas City were consulting landscape architects to the City Planning Commission and the Board of Park Commissioners and had worked for the City of Houston since 1923. S. Herbert Hare (1888-1960) was the partner in charge of the firm's Houston work. In addition to planning and landscaping Houston city parks and other municipal properties between 1923 and 1960, Hare & Hare were also consulting landscape architects for the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Centennial Exposition. The firm also served. as park planning consultants to the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City. Donald Bush was the firm's chief landscape designer. The project coordinator for Hermann Square was Ralph Ellifrit (b. 1909) whom Hare & Hare sent to Houston to oversee its local operations. In 1940 Ellifrit became the first director of the Houston Planning Department, a post he held until 1963.

In the context of American city halls of the New Deal era, the Houston City Hall represents a continuation of the 1920s fascination with the skyscraper as a symbol of progressiveness. The 30-story Kansas City City Hall (1937) was the most notable PWA-financed skyscraper city hall. It followed the precedent of such earlier projects as the 38-story New York Municipal Building (1914), the 28-story Los Angeles City Hall (1928), the 17-story Atlanta City Hall (1930), the 18-story St. Paul City Hall (1931), and the 28- story Buffalo City Hall (1931). Houston's City Hall emulated these towers, but on an appreciably smaller scale. In the context of Texas city halls of the period, Houston City Hall is preeminent. Fort Worth (1938) and Austin (1939) both obtained PWA-funded city hall buildings designed in a modern manner during this period. Neither was designed as a "skyscraper" however, (nor were any of the modernistic PWA county courthouses built in Texas), and neither still functions as a city hall. In the context of public buildings constructed in Houston during the New Deal, the City Hall is also unusual. is still used for the purpose it was built to serve, it has been consistently well maintained, and it has had no appreciable alterations or additions.

The Houston City Hall remains the most visible symbol of municipal government in Houston. It retains its dominant position in the Civic Center, although it now confronts much taller office buildings constructed nearby during the 1970s and 1980s. The integrity of the building, its art, and its setting on Hermann Square make it a jewel of New Deal architecture in the midst of Texas' largest city.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1990.