National Register Listing

Lewis Apartment Building

2815--2817 Smith St., Houston, TX

The 1923 Lewis Apartment Building is an example of the multi-family residential buildings that became enormously popular in the South End area of Houston after the First World War. It is characteristic of a building type built throughout the United States during the 1920s in huge numbers and which continued in popularity during the inter-war years. The Lewis Apartment Building was, at the time of its construction, a typical rather than exceptional 1920s Houston apartment building. Because of massive demolitions in the neighborhood during the last 30 years, the building has now become exceptional by virtue of its survival and because of its relatively unaltered state. The building, in spite of its rather unassuming manner, provides a glimpse into apartment building types built to house the growing urban population during the 1920s. The Lewis Apartment Building is nominated under Criterion C in the area of Architecture for its representation of 1920s multiple-family dwellings in Houston.

A historically recent development in the United States, the apartment building developed in the early 20th century as a way of housing large numbers of people closely and comfortably on increasingly valuable urban land. Their popularity continued through the 1920s and beyond as more and more people moved to growing urban centers like Houston. Typical middle- to moderate-income apartment buildings were usually built on the edges of commercial and residential areas. These small and less elaborate apartments tended to have plain, boxy appearances with flat roofs and little landscaping (Maddex, 16). Their popularity and continued use, however, make them an important building type in American architecture. The Lewis Apartment Building represents this building type and is an excellent example of a 1920s apartment building, one of the few surviving in the Houston area, because of its unaltered state. Built in 1923 by successful Russian Jewish immigrants Simon and Ella Lewis, the Lewis Apartment Building was designed as an income-producing property to attract middle-class tenants to an ever-popular and well-positioned neighborhood on the trolley line.

Simon Lewis came to America in 1892, part of the third wave of massive Jewish immigration (2 million) which occurred between 1880 and 1924, due to persecution that affected all classes of Jews in Eastern Europe. By 1899, he had settled with his young Russian wife Ella in the small town of Ganado, in Jackson County, Texas, about 80 miles southwest of Houston near Matagorda Bay. There the couple had three children, Joseph Rudivich, Raye, and Bessie. By the 1910 Census, Simon Lewis still listed his first language as Yiddish, but could also speak English, and described himself as self-employed in a "general merchandise" store in Ganado.

The Lewis began buying property in Houston as early as 1906. They bought the Smith Street lot from Joe and Yetta Weidinger that year for $5200. They purchased five different multi-lot properties in the Houston Heights neighborhood between 1917 and 1924. Records only hint at the extent and location of their holdings. The 1920 Census places the Lewis family in Houston Heights, living over their shop at 411 West 11th Street.

With the children somewhat grown, Simon and Ella Lewis became business partners and opened a grocery/hardware/general store called Simon Lewis Grocery Company. By the mid-1920s, Lewis' younger brother Max and Lewis' own son Joseph Rudivich became part of the family grocery business. Further research would shed light on the nature and extent of their parallel real estate ventures.

In the 1870s the area of Houston known as the "South End," where the Lewis Apartment Building is located, had been the site of the socially essential but short-lived 93-acre Fair Grounds. The area became known as the South End because it sat south of downtown. At the time the neighborhood was a prosperous, middle and upper-class urban "garden district." Although the fairgrounds went bankrupt in the mid-1870s, it was not until the 1890s that the Galveston and Houston Investment Company created, platted, and sold the Fair Grounds Addition as lots for single-family frame dwellings. When Lewis purchased the Smith Street lot, it had a frame-built corner store facing Tuam Street, erected to cater to the needs of the new, affluent family neighborhood.

By the 1920s the South End neighborhood was in a transition, caused by its close proximity to downtown, its excellent street car/trolley line connections, and the exploding urban population in need of housing. By the mid-1920s, the store building had been replaced by the Lewis Apartment Building, which remained in the Lewis family's possession until the 1980s. The building's features are characteristic of low-rise, second-generation brick apartment buildings erected in the South End during the 1920s just after the demolition of many first-generation, turn-of-the-century, single-family domestic buildings.

The Lewis Apartment Building today can almost be compared to a beached whale, surrounded by massive cleared sites and inappropriate post-war construction. The immediate neighborhood also includes other 1920s apartment houses in various states of disrepair, as well as a number of surviving Victorian/Edwardian single-family dwellings, and the ubiquitous local churches and synagogues. In the grassy, tree-shaded vacant lot across Tuam Street from the Lewis Apartment Building are historic archaeological remains of the massive James Fannin School that burned down in the late 1950s. Since the 1970s, the eastern sector of the South End also included a flourishing Vietnamese community, filled with popular restaurants centered on Milam Street, known as "Little Saigon." The neighborhood is presently in transition, recently described by some as "Midtown," and is poised for massive residential redevelopment as a thriving urban community as envisioned by the Midtown Redevelopment Association, the local religious communities, the City of Houston, the preservationists, and others.

The simple but elegant design of the Lewis Apartment Building represents multiple-family apartment buildings built during the 1920s in growing urban areas like Houston. The increase of people moving into the city led to higher-density residential patterns and an increase in apartment building types. Close to downtown and the trolley line, the building offered an attractive living space near the hub of activity in urban Houston. The building's rather plain facade, accented by patterned brickwork and arched doorways, is representative of small, middle-income apartment houses. Unfortunately, no historic photographs of the building have yet surfaced. The original interior woodwork, French doors, and Art Deco bathroom elements furnish views of apartment life in the 1920s. The floor plan of the Lewis Apartment Building is particularly significant because it is intact, with the rooms still functioning as they did in the 1920s. The building continues to be used for the purpose for which it was designed and remains in surprisingly good condition with very few alterations, maintaining both the exterior and interior integrity.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1996.