National Register Listing

San Felipe Courts Historic District

a.k.a. Allen Parkway Village

1 Allen Pkwy. Village, Houston, TX

San Felipe Courts was the largest public housing project built in Texas during the decade after the passage of the National Housing Act of 1937. The complex exemplifies the social ideals and planning standards of public housing of the New Deal era. It is of exceptional significance because of the very high caliber of modern architectural design and detail, a condition recognized nationally at the time of its construction. San Felipe Courts epitomized a new concept in housing for the poor of Houston during the Great Depression, and their designation as Defense Housing shortly before the United States entered into World War II provides a rare surviving link in Houston with the war effort. Eighty-two buildings in the complex are considered Contributing, and retain their basic integrity; a more recently covered basketball court is the sole Noncontributing structure. San Felipe Courts have high visibility along Allen Parkway, a major thoroughfare, and remain a source of pride to many Houstonians. They are considered of transcendent significance and will continue to grow in importance.

San Felipe Courts were the last and most ambitious of the initial set of four public housing projects completed by the Housing Authority of the City of Houston, following its institution by the City Council of Houston in January 1938, four months after the U.S. Congress passed the National Housing Act of 1937--creating the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) --and three months after the Texas Legislature authorized the creation of local housing authorities. The complex was constructed on a highly visible, 37-acre site at the foot of the Buffalo Bayou park development, adjacent to the city's new Civic Center complex. Because of its prominence, the buildings were designed to advertise the project to the public as a progressive example of slum clearance housing for low-income families. Modern architectural design, allied with unusually high standards of material selection and detailing, reinforced this progressive connotation. The name was changed to Allen Parkway Village in 1964, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which allowed Blacks to occupy the housing for the first time since construction.

Architecture

The site plan and unit plans of San Felipe Courts were determined to a large extent by USHA's regulations. The Zeilenbau configuration of housing blocks of bar-like slabs in parallel rows was adapted from German social housing of the 1920s and early 1930s and was intended to provide low-density apartments with maximum sunlight and fresh air. To ensure cross-ventilation, apartment units at San Felipe Courts run the depth of each building. Vehicular lanes ending in cul-de-sacs, accessible only from a perimeter ring road, were threaded between every other housing row. The alternating rows contained cross courts, reserved for pedestrians only. These gave access to larger squares of common space, intended for use as playgrounds. These site planning principles of separation of vehicular and pedestrian circulation and provision of generous open space, pioneered in a series of model suburban developments in the United States during the 1920s, were institutionalized in New Deal regulations in order to increase the healthfulness, security, and sense of community of re-housed slum dwellers.

The design of San Felipe Courts--featuring precisely defined contours, horizontal linearity, small scale, and crisp combination of materials, colors, and textures--especially recalled Dutch social housing of the 1920s. Two projects, J.B. van Loghem's housing blocks at Betondorp in Amsterdam (1923) and J.J.P. Oud's Kiefhoek estate in Rotterdam (1929), exhibit affinities with San Felipe Courts in the horizontal banding of the exterior walls, the precise groupings of door and window openings, the diminutive scale, the purposeful contrast of materials, colors, and textures, and the use of flat roofs. Kiefhoek, which was published extensively in the American architectural press in the early 1930s, even had low spur walls of brick, a device used at San Felipe Courts, that externally demarked outdoor space between units.

In the context of USHA housing projects, San Felipe Courts are exceptional for the quality of their architectural design and detailing. Even the most architecturally acclaimed New Deal slum clearance projects, such as the Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia by Kastner & Stonorov and W. Pope Barney (1935) and Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn by William Lescaze (1938), were much more severe and industrial in appearance than San Felipe Courts. The first two Houston Housing Authority projects to be built, the first section of Cuney Homes (1940) and Kelly Courts (1941), both designed by Stayton Nunn-Milton McGinty of Houston and still extant, are representative of the general architectural standards of USHA public housing. These standards also were evident in the designs of similar projects in other Texas cities: Cedar Springs Place in Dallas (1937, designed by a consortium of architects working simultaneously on the Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park [N.H.L., 1986] and headed by Walter Sharp with Lester Flint, Grayson Gill, Ralph Bryan, Anton Korn, Roscoe DeWitt, Everett Welch, Herbert Tatum, and A.E. Thomas), Santa Rita Courts in Austin (1939, Hugo F. Kuehne and Giesecke & Harris, architects), and Victoria Courts and Alazan Courts, both in San Antonio (1941, N. Straus Nayfach, architect). These designs shared an austere, somewhat regimented image; buildings were soundly constructed, but institutional, rather than domestic, in appearance. Associated Housing Architects of Houston, because of MacKie & Kamrath's involvement, produced far more ingratiating architecture in their three similar but varied designs for the second section of Cuney Homes (1942), at Irvinton Courts (1942), and at San Felipe Courts.

By 1941 when the United States entered World War II, the first phase of San Felipe Courts was under construction. Because of this national crisis, the second phase of San Felipe Courts could not have been carried out without being designated as Defense Housing. This reassignment from USHA to Defense Housing made the planning and solidity of San Felipe's construction indebted to the USHA regulations and allowed the quality and modernity of the design to exceed other projects planned and underway as Defense Housing.

The Division of Defense Housing of the Federal Works Agency was created in April 1941, to build 21,000 units of housing throughout the country in proximity to critical defense industries. The Division of Defense Housing and its affiliate, the Division of Mutual Ownership Defense Housing, commissioned architects directly, displaying by their choices a marked preference for modern architecture. Defense Housing had to be built quickly and for much lower unit costs than USHA housing. Therefore, construction standards were not as high and many projects seemed to have been planned as temporary expedients. In Texas, the best-known Defense Housing project was Avion Village in the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie (1941, largely wood-frame single- and multi-family houses on cul-de-sacs, still extant, Roscoe P. De Witt, architect, Richard J. Neutra and David R. Williams, consultants). Alden B. Dow of Midland, Michigan, designed defense housing at Lake Jackson, Texas, the new town in Brazoria County that he planned in 1941 for the Dow Chemical Company, in the form of free-standing, single-family houses (still extant). In this architectural historical context, San Felipe Courts stand out from the other Defense Housing projects by virtue of their apartment-style blocks, central city location, their durable construction, and the range of community amenities they provide.

At the time of their construction, San Felipe Courts were noted in a pair of articles published in the April 1942 and May 1942 issues of Architectural Record. "In both design and structure, this 1,000-unit low-rent housing project merits special study. Particularly noteworthy elements are the unit plans, integration of units of differing size into row houses, and the three-story blocks which occupy the central area." (April 1942) The second article was devoted exclusively to the design of the Project Center building, which was described as "remarkable." During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the national architectural journals extensively published low-income housing developments throughout the United States, and Avion Village was the only other Texas project that received as much critical attention as San Felipe Courts. Cuney Homes and a temporary Defense Housing project in the subdivision of Meadowbrook were the only other Houston projects published briefly in architectural journals.

The architects of Associated Housing Architects of Houston who designed San Felipe Courts, Frederick J. MacKie (1905-1984) and Karl Kamrath (b. 1911), opened their practice in Houston in 1937. Between 1937 and 1942 they worked in a variety of styles. But Kamrath, the designer, was drawn to modern architecture and the firm's best buildings were modern in design. In 1946 Kamrath visited Taliesin, the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was so moved by the experience that he committed himself to Wright's Usonian architecture. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, MacKie & Kamrath were Houston's best-known modern architects and their work was published frequently in the national architectural press.

An early client of the firm was Eugene M. Bigger, a commercial printer who had MacKie & Kamrath design both his house (1938) and his printing plant (1938, demolished). The printing plant, published in Architectural Record in July 1941, was on Sabine Street, across Buffalo Drive (Allen Parkway) from San Felipe Courts. Biggers was appointed to the first board of commissioners of the Housing Authority and in November 1939, six months after Associated Housing Architects of Houston was formed, he was elected chairman of the board. MacKie & Kamrath's first important public commission preceded the design of San Felipe Courts. This was the Fire Alarm Building in the Civic Center (1937-1940, scheduled for demolition), published in Architectural Forum in November 1940, the first public building in Houston of modern architectural design. Subsequent major projects, in Houston unless noted, are included. Phyllis Wheatley Senior High School (1948); Temple Emanu-El (1940); the Contemporary Arts Association Museum (1949, demolished); offices and laboratories for the Dow Chemical Company in Freeport (1953, 1958); the Schlumberger Inc. headquarters complex (1953); the Humble Research Center (1954); St. John The Divine Church (1954); the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute (1954) and the University of Texas Dental School (1955), both in the Texas Medical Center; the Champlin Oil Company and Commercial Standard Insurance Company buildings in Fort Worth, and the First National Bank Building in McAllen (all of 1956); the Farnsworth and Chamber Buildings (1957); the Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church (1959-1972); Temple Rodef Shalom in Waco (1961); the Pasadena State Bank Building in Pasadena (1962); the City of Houston Health Department Building in the Texas Medical Center (1963); the campus of Wharton Junior College in Wharton (1965); the Science and Research Building at the University of Houston (1968); and the Big Three Industries Building (1973). Kamrath's work was consistently Wrightian in character, displaying his predilection for horizontal alignment, dramatic structural engineering, and finely crafted masonry work and glazing details.

Community Planning

San Felipe Courts were the most visible example of low-income public housing to be constructed in Houston, because of their location on the Buffalo Bayou park development adjacent to the Civic Center. The 37-acre site lay in the San Felipe district of Houston's former Fourth Ward, the oldest Black settlement in Houston, which now includes the Freedmen's Town Historic District (N.R.H.P., 1985). The 37-acre San Felipe Courts. site had been the original center of Freedmantown and was the oldest, poorest section of the district, backing onto Buffalo Bayou north of San Felipe Road (now West Dallas Avenue). Between 1908 and 1917 this same area had been the site of "the Reservation," the city's legal vice district. After the park along Buffalo Bayou was built between 1924 and 1926, to the designs of Kansas City landscape architects Hare & Hare, to connect the newly planned Civic Center downtown to the newly planned model garden suburb of River Oaks, the Freedmantown-Reservation neighborhood suddenly gained unwelcome prominence. This was principally because it lay adjacent to Buffalo Bayou and was traversed by Buffalo Drive (later Allen Parkway), the curving thoroughfare that ran along the south bank of the Bayou between Sam Houston Park and River Oaks.

Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, a number of imposing public and commercial buildings were built along the course of Buffalo Drive (widened and renamed Allen Parkway in the 1950s), which theretofore had been largely undeveloped. These included the 12-story, skyscraper-style Jefferson Davis Hospital, just to the west of the housing site, planned in 1930 but only completed as a Public Works Administration- financed project in 1937; the Sears, Roebuck & Company store at Allen Parkway and Montrose (1929), the first suburban department store building in Houston; the cluster of Mediterranean-style printing plants west of Waugh Drive: Star Engraving Company (1930), Gulf Publishing Company (1928), and Rein Company (1928) buildings; and, on the north side of the bayou at Shepherd Drive, St. Thomas High School (1940). San Felipe Courts intended to replace a too-conspicuously located slum neighborhood in order to tie together architecturally one of Houston's most important civic corridors.

Of the four low-income public housing complexes built by the Housing Authority of the City of Houston between 1939 and 1944, San Felipe Courts were the only ones to achieve one of the specific purposes of the federal government's ambitious housing program. This was to provide safe, decent housing in well-planned communities for poor Whites through the elimination of existing slum neighborhoods. The Housing Authority's first annual report, issued in 1940, stated:

While the Authority has planned projects to be constructed in different sections of the city where bad housing exists, one of its principal goals has been to redesign and reconstruct the old San Felipe district. This has been for years a section in which hundreds of families have lived under the worst of substandard conditions. This section lies almost under the shadow of Houston's magnificent new two-million-dollar city hall and has heretofore defied all attempts that have been made to beautify or modernize it.

The Authority plans to build one of its major projects for white families in this old area. In addition to the building of hundreds of new modern residential structures, it will construct a beautifully landscaped 150-foot parkway along Buffalo Drive [Allen Parkway] and adjoining Houston's civic center. This will replace one of Houston's undesirable residential sections with one of the finest beauty spots in the South and will enhance the beauty of Houston's principal scenic drive. (Houston's Public Housing Program, 1940: 9)

The incongruity of displacing Black families in a Black neighborhood for publicly subsidized housing restricted to White occupants was not lost on the residents of the San Felipe district. Despite a vigorous campaign to protest this procedure, the San Felipe community was unable to affect the Housing Authority's plans. Indeed the occasion for slum clearance proved so opportune that in mid-1940 the Housing Authority consolidated another project planned for White occupancy with San Felipe Courts and almost doubled the amount of property it acquired by condemnation. Although a notorious slum neighborhood was cleared, it did not benefit those who formerly had lived in that neighborhood.

The elimination of all but one street in the 17-block Freedmantown area enabled the transformation of the 37-acre site into a "superblock," where careful provision might be made for separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic and for generous common green spaces, two popular planning techniques. Although delayed until the early 1950s, Buffalo Drive was reconstructed and renamed Allen Parkway in front of San Felipe Courts using another popular planning concept to provide protected local traffic lanes--separate from the main parkway thoroughfare--to serve San Felipe Courts and Jefferson Davis Hospital. These site-planning strategies reflected the most current notions of community planning in the United States during the 1930s when the project was conceived.

They were visible in other Houston projects of this period, particularly the three large Federal Housing Administration-insured garden apartment complexes built in the city: River Oaks Gardens (1938, demolished), Parkland (1940, demolished), and Wilshire Village (1940), and also in the layout of the River Oaks Courts on Pelham Drive and Sharp Place in River Oaks (1936).

Social/Humanitarian

San Felipe Courts were part of a nationwide public program undertaken by the federal government during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to improve the living conditions of lower-income American families. F.D.R.'s New Deal bespoke concern for the conditions under which poor Americans lived; this concern had been articulated since the last quarter of the 19th century, but not acted on in any comprehensive way until the 1930s. In Texas and Houston, the action during that decade was virtually unprecedented.

Prior to the creation of the Housing Authority of the City of Houston in January 1938, several New Deal efforts had been made to provide new housing in planned communities in the Houston area for low-income families. The earliest of these was the Woodlake Cooperative Community in Trinity County, approximately 100 miles northeast of Houston, planned by Dallas architect David R. Williams. Begun as a philanthropic endeavor by Mrs. J. Lewis Thompson of Houston in 1933, it was taken over by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to become Rural Industrial Community Project Number 1. The notion of settling unemployed families in a semi-rural setting where they might cultivate subsistence gardens guided the development of Houston Gardens, built just outside Houston on Homestead Road between 1933 and 1935 as one of the earliest projects of the Suburban Resettlement Division of the Resettlement Administration. Only a fraction of the 100 houses originally planned there seem to have been built, however. A similar project, Nira Park on Market Street Road, planned as a limited dividend venture by oilman J.S. Cullinan, had only two of its envisioned 80 houses built between 1934 and 1935.

Problematic experiences with such "resettlement" efforts led to a shift in national housing policy in the mid-1930s. This entailed building new housing for poor urban families in existing low-income neighborhoods. Such "slum clearance" projects were intended to eradicate the worst conditions existing in low-income neighborhoods, replacing them with new communities built to high standards of structural durability and domestic amenities. Non-combustible, well-serviced, and well-ventilated housing grouped in "superblocks" where there would be generous greenspace, playgrounds, amenities to stimulate community life, and separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic circulation were essential components of this reform movement. In order to ensure an abundance of communal outdoor space, dwelling units were usually grouped in rows of housing blocks of one to four (or sometimes more) stories in height. The Public Works Administration built 51 such projects across the United States between 1934 and 1937. Only one of these was constructed in Texas, the 181-unit Cedar Springs Place in Dallas (1937), the first public housing project in the state.

In September 1937 the Wagner-Steagall Act, the National Housing Act of 1937, was passed by the U.S. Congress. This established the USHA as a division of the Public Works Administration to fund up to 90% of the construction costs of slum clearance-type public housing projects. These were to be built and administered by local housing authorities rather than by the Public Works Administration directly. The Texas Legislature authorized the establishment of local housing authorities in October 1937 and in January 1938 the Housing Authority of the City of Houston was created.

Between 1939 and 1941 the Housing Authority of the City of Houston built 2,215 units of public housing for occupancy by low-income families, concentrated in four housing complexes. These projects were built with substantial subsidies from the USHA. They were built as the first increment of a program aimed at providing decent housing for the occupants of 25,680 substandard dwellings. This motivating figure had been reached by the Housing Authority of Houston through a survey of local housing conditions conducted by the Work Projects Administration and published in 1939. The new projects were segregated racially and ethnically. The first two to be constructed, Cuney Homes in Third Ward (1940 and 1942) and Kelly Courts in Fifth Ward (1941), were for Black families. The next pair to be built, Irvington Courts (1942) in Fifth Ward and San Felipe Courts in Fourth Ward (1942, 1944), were for White families. San Felipe Courts was the authority's premiere project because of the complex's large size (it contained 45% of the authority's total dwelling units) and its prominent location. In addition to dwelling units, San Felipe Courts were designed to accommodate a wide range of community activities and services, as well as the executive offices of the Housing Authority.

Because of the United States' accelerated preparation in 1941 for World War II while the first phase of San Felipe Courts' construction was underway, it was designated as Defense Housing. In 1943 the Housing Authority reported that 300 of these first 564 units were occupied by low-income defense workers and another 57 units by the families of servicemen. The Authority's annual report for 1944-1945 stated that the completed complex housed 4,064 occupants.

San Felipe Courts comprised the largest single USHA housing complex constructed in Texas during the 1940s. During the periods of construction, it was described as the largest public housing complex in the southern United States. It was the only slum-clearance type development undertaken by the Housing Authority of the City of Houston among its four initial projects. It was the most prominently situated development in Houston to benefit low-income White people and to represent this particular facet of New Deal programs designed to respond to the social crisis emphasized by the Great Depression. It then became the one permanent example of public housing in Houston built specifically as Defense Housing.

In 1964 the name San Felipe Courts was changed to Allen Parkway Village. This action resulted from the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the shift from a White-only project to one accepting Blacks and other minorities. It was at this time that the area of the project returned to those who had originally settled in Freedmantown and the Reservation area of Houston's Fourth Ward.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1988.