National Register Listing

Star Engraving Company Building

3201 Allen Pkwy., Houston, TX

The Star Engraving Company Building, built in 1930, is an example of the application of historical architectural decoration to a light industrial manufacturing plant and business office building, which was characteristic in the 1920s. The use of Spanish Mediterranean-style architectural detail insinuated the building into a landscape setting that was both civic and suburban. Contextually, it relates to the statewide context of Spanish Mediterranean-style architecture in Texas in the 1920s and early 1930s. In a secondary capacity, it relates to Community and Regional Planning in Texas as a product of the suburban growth of Houston and the planned development of Buffalo Bayou Park. The building is significant at the local level of Commerce and Industry, as the headquarters of a manufacturing company with extensive regional trade and in the area of Architecture as a prominently cited local example of Spanish Mediterranean style architecture and in the area of Community and Regional Planning as contributing to the development of a light industrial district in a planned landscape setting that was both civic and suburban in nature.

Houston in 1930 was ranked, for the first time in its 94-year history, as the largest city in Texas. This was because of a sustained period of economic expansion that began during World War I, based on Houston's status as a petroleum processing and exporting center (Houston, A History and Guide: 112-118). A key factor in this expansion was the demand for petroleum products resulting from an extraordinary surge in motorcar production and ownership in the U.S. during the 1920s. Houston was a prime example of this phenomenon.
While the city's population nearly doubled between 1920 and 1930 (from 155,000 to 292,000), car ownership in Harris County increased almost four and one-half times, from 22,032 registrations in 1920 to 97,902 in 1930. Reliance on the motorcar prompted the evolution of what Peter Papademetriou called a "new urban form" in Houston's patterns of real estate development after 1920 (Papademetriou: 51-53). An emphasis on improvement and rationalization of the street network was occasioned by intense, low-density development all around Houston's suburban perimeter. Concerns about traffic management were addressed by Houston's city planning consultants during the 1920s, the landscape architects Hare & Hare, who proposed integrating traffic engineering with urban design and civic landscape (Report of the City Planning Commission: 31-39). The chief example of their large-scale civic design work is the 2 1/4-mile park and parkway corridor built along the course of Buffalo Bayou in 1925-26. This linked the Civic Center in downtown Houston, also planned by Hare & Hare, to Houston's exemplary garden suburb, River Oaks, in whose early planning Hare & Hare were involved.

The pervasiveness of affordable automobile transportation in the 1920s made it feasible to decentralize the dense urban cores of U.S. downtowns. Thus, even as Houston acquired an impressive cluster of skyscraper office and hotel buildings, large new specialty stores, and opulent movie theaters downtown in the 1920s, light manufacturing enterprises found it feasible to vacate downtown as both their trade and their spatial requirements grew. Such businesses could acquire much larger sites at less expense outside of downtown cores. Problems of access and parking for customers, employees, shipping, and deliveries disappeared. And space was available for rationally planned, illuminated, and ventilated buildings. Businesses with a regional trade felt less tied to downtown, especially when they could be located along major thoroughfare streets.

The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance as an embodiment of these general trends. The building derives additional significance from its association with a company that for nearly half a century was identified with the manufacture and sale of high school class rings and other commencement-related products. The Star Engraving Co. was incorporated in 1911 by several prominent Houston businessmen. Located on the upper floor of a building near Courthouse Square in downtown Houston, it provided design, illustration, and engraving services to a local clientele. In 1919 and again in 1922, the company moved to different downtown lease spaces. In 1922 the company was acquired by Roy J. Beard, sales manager of the Southwestern Engraving Company of Fort Worth. Beard developed a specialty market for the Star Engraving Co. At the time of the construction of the Star Engraving Co. Building was announced in the Houston Post-Dispatch in April 1930, the company's business was described as concentrated in steel and copper plate engraving and jewelry manufacturing. The Star Engraving Co. produced engraved diplomas, commencement announcements, engraved certificates, etchings, greeting cards, and commercial engravings, as well as high school class rings, pins, badges, and belt buckles.

Sales were as important a company function as manufacturing. The construction announcement article indicated that 100 to 150 employees would work in the factory processing orders secured by a force of 45 salesmen, whose trade territory encompassed 16 Southern states (Houston Post-Dispatch: 1930). By 1935, the Great Depression notwithstanding, the Star Engraving Co. advertised itself in Houston business publications as the "South's Largest Manufacturer of Class Jewelry, Diplomas, Invitations" (Houston: 1935).
During the decade of the 1920s, the combination of urbanization, the expansion of middle-class affluence, increased secondary school attendance, and institutionalization of the "ritual" of high school graduation produced a market that Roy Beard identified and exploited. In doing so he conformed to a pattern of market specialization that other successful Houston printing companies followed in the 1920s. The Gulf Publishing Company produced publications and printed material for the oil industry. The Rein Company seemed to specialize in commercial advertising; it produced superlative graphics for the River Oaks Corporation's advertising. Clarke & Courts, which moved to Houston in 1936 from Galveston (NR, 1994), specialized in the provision of government documents and bank checks, as well as the sale of office equipment and furniture. Thus the Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from the role that its builder and primary occupant played in the entrepreneurial development of a specialized and highly responsive approach to the provision and marketing of printing and engraving services, expanding upon these to provide specialty items, such as jewelry for the ritual observance of public school ceremonials, for a broad regional market.

The Star Engraving Co. is the most intact commercial building designed by Rezin D. Steele, a Houston architect whose local practice began in 1893 and continued until his death in 1936. Steele never achieved special prominence, but he produced a substantial body of work during his long career. His major buildings included the original St. Paul's Methodist Church (1909, demolished); the original Memorial Hospital (1910, 1924, demolished); downtown retail buildings for Harris-Hahlo (1920, demolished), the grocer Henry Henke (1924, contributing, NR 1984, Main Street-Market Square Historic District), and Rettig's, Inc. (1927, demolished); Sidney Lanier Junior High School (1925, with Jonas & Tabor); Baptist Temple in Houston Heights (1931); and houses in River Oaks for William J. Buhmann (1925, altered) and Herbert E. Neuhaus (1928). Steele's most famous building is the Henke-Pillot South End grocery market (1923, extensively altered). The historian Richard Longstreth has identified the Henke-Pillot store as the first suburban market building to be oriented not to the street but to its own off-street parking lot. The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from its design by a Houston architect who attained historical recognition for adapting commercial building typologies to suburban settings in the 1920s.

Steele's detailing of the Star Engraving Co. Building with Spanish Mediterranean architectural features places it in the context of neo-Spanish style architecture in Houston in the 1920s (Papademetriou and Hester; Fox). This was introduced in Houston by two distinguished American architects, Harrie T. Lindeberg of New York in the Womack House in Shadyside (1921-23) and Ralph Adams Cram of Boston in the Central Library Building in the Civic Center (1922-26, NR, 1977) and the Sewall House in River Oaks (1923-26, NR, 1979).
Thus the style's initial associations in Houston were with elite patronage, high culture, and civic dignity. By 1927, Spanish-Mediterranean architecture was being applied to commercial buildings in Houston to imbue them with these associations. This was especially visible in two districts: the 10-block-long Spanish Village retail corridor on South Main Street, to which the Isabella Court is an extant contributor (1929, NR 1994), and the "crafts section" on Allen Parkway between the Civic Center and River Oaks, where the Star Engraving Co. was built. Both districts are of historical significance. They represent an attempt, characteristic of the 1920s, to use picturesque architectural styles to elevate the status of commercial buildings as well as to create a distinct sense of place in the new roadside landscape that began to evolve in deference to the automobile.

The crafts section consists of the Gulf Publishing Co. Building at 3301 Allen Parkway (1927-28, Hedrick & Gottlieb, architects), the Rein Company Building at 3401 Allen Parkway (1927-28, Howell & Thomas, architects), and the Star Engraving Co. Building, as well as two smaller buildings, the Wilfred H. Stedman studio at 3327 D'Amico Street (1928, Wilfred H. Stedman, designer), and the Parke Engraving Co. Building at 3307 Vick Street (1936, Jonas & Tabor, architects). The three large printing plants, the Parke Engraving Co. Building, and the no longer extant Houston Poster Advertising Co. Building at 3515 Allen Parkway (1936) was designed in the Spanish Mediterranean style. As in the Spanish Village section of South Main, voluntary adherence to a unified architectural theme identified the bend of Allen Parkway around which these plants were configured as a distinctive place. It also suggested their allegiance to a broader cultural purpose. This purpose was implicit rather than explicit. It borrowed from the Central Library Building and the adjoining Federal Land Bank Building in the Civic Center (1928-29, Hedrick & Gottlieb, architects) associations of high culture and civic dignity. It borrowed from the Spanish-style River Oaks Country Club (1924, demolished), the Sewall House, and a collection of other picturesque Spanish Mediterranean-style houses built in River Oaks between 1925 and 1930 associations of refined leisure and suburban propriety.

Spanish Mediterranean architecture was popular throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. In Texas, it exerted a special appeal because of its putative connection to Spanish Texas of the 18th century. Other printing plants built in Texas in the 1920s and early 1930s exhibited this style, notably the El Paso Times Building in El Paso (1930) and the San Antonio Light Building in San Antonio (1931, Robert B. Kelly, architect). These were downtown buildings. An early example, important not only for its neo-Spanish architecture but also for its suburban setting, was the Johnston Graphic Arts Building in Dallas of 1925, designed by the notable Dallas architect David R. Williams. The spatial and decorative format Williams pursued was quite similar to that Steele employed at the Star Engraving Co. Building. A two-story, tile-roofed office building, sparingly decorated with conventional Spanish ornament and craft detail, prefaced a larger, one-story, flat-roofed manufacturing plant at the rear of the property. As home to the Johnston Printing and Advertising Company, the Johnston Graphic Arts Building explicitly signified with its name its aspiration to artistic, rather than merely industrial, status.

The use of architectural styling in the 1920s to re-evaluate the status of a building and the activities it housed can be related to the phenomenon of suburbanization. The straightforward display of construction and spatial organization that characterized early 20th-century Commercial Style manufacturing buildings was applied most often to buildings constructed in industrial and warehouse districts. Once such activities began to migrate to the suburbs, and especially to sites along major thoroughfares and adjacent to affluent new residential communities, the Commercial Style seemed insufficiently decorous. The eclectic array of historical styles based on American and European vernacular types that became popular for high-style residential architecture in the 1910s provided a new architectural vocabulary with which to address this design problem. Typically, American architects of the 1920s sought to harmonize potentially incompatible circumstances by architecturally expressing hierarchical distinctions in spatial organization and the distribution of ornamental finishes and decoration. This allowed them to combine picturesque stylistic motifs with functionally determined planning and construction. Among the eclectic styles, the Spanish Mediterranean proved especially compelling. It required only the right finish materials (stucco and roof tiles) and an economic application of ornament to suggest the desired architectural ambiance. Spanish styling could be applied without compromising the rational distribution of space that governed the planning of modern industrial buildings. The association of Spanish Mediterranean architecture with artistic values implicitly equated industrial manufacturing with artistic and artisanal creativity. Thus revalorized, such activities could be represented as compatible with prestigious civic and suburban settings.

The development of Allen Parkway was of concern to the Houston civic leader Will C. Hogg (Hogg Building, NR, 1978; Bayou Bend, NR, 1979; Forum of Civics Building, NR, 1987), the developer of River Oaks, chairman of the City of Houston's City Planning Commission, and a dedicated proponent of urban planning. Hogg was personally involved in assisting the City of Houston with the property acquisition necessary to construct the Civic Center, Buffalo Bayou Park, and Allen Parkway in the mid-1920s. Although Hogg had no legal authority to regulate development on the parkway, his concern that new buildings (and the purposes they served) contribute to the civic dignity of Allen Parkway seems to have prompted the Gulf Publishing Co. and the Rein Co. to ensure that their plants were designed so that their light industrial use does not detract from the hoped-for character of the parkway, which was practically undeveloped in 1925. The Star Engraving Co. followed their precedent. All three buildings exhibit strong similarities in architectural style, reinforced concrete construction, spatial organization, and environmentally conditioned planning.

The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from its Spanish Mediterranean-style architecture. This associated the building with a collection of similarly styled Houston buildings that were symbols of high culture, civic dignity, and suburban propriety. Architecture associated the building with similarly styled buildings statewide that housed printing and engraving businesses. Architecture associated the building with a broader pattern of integrating manufacturing buildings into suburban settings through the use of eclectic (and particularly Spanish Mediterranean) styling and hierarchical composition in the 1920s. And architecture associates the building with circumstances that influenced the development of Houston's most important civic landscape of the 1920s.

The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from its multiple layers of hierarchical composition. The placement of the 2-story office building in front of the 1-story manufacturing wing gives the Star Engraving Co. Building a more imposing scale from the parkway and minimizing its identity as a manufacturing plant. Hierarchical composition spatially represents the division of labor within the company between the white-collar administrative, sales, and design workforce, and the blue-collar artisanal workforce. The distribution and size of openings on the two sections of the building represent the differing purposes the building was designed to serve. The principal facade is organized according to principles of symmetry and decorum relating to the external, urban scale of the parkway; the rear wing is according to a pattern of uniform repetition relating to internal requirements for wide structural spans and plentiful ventilation and illumination. The building derives additional significance from the hierarchical distinctions visible in the building's surfaces.
The office portion is faced with multiple coats of stucco, concealing the marks of the wood shuttering used in casting the concrete walls. The manufacturing wing is faced with a light coat of stucco, through which the horizontal striations of the wood shuttering are clearly visible. The building derives significance from its Spanish-style ornament, which is most liberally applied to the principal facade, facing Allen Parkway, to reinforce the desired associations with civic dignity, artistic production, and suburban propriety. The building additionally derives significance from its fine crafts work, typical of the 1920s, visible in the cast concrete classical ornament of the central portal, the wood double-leaf entrance doors, and the pair of wrought iron lanterns, which give material substance to the neo-Spanish theme. The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from its cast-in-place concrete construction and steel sash windows. These represent its industrial use in the provision of economical, durable, fireproof construction and generous provision for daylighting and passive ventilation. The building derives additional significance from the single-level, loft-type organization of the rear wing, where the wide-span structural bays facilitated flexible use of horizontally continuous space.

The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from the contrast between its entrance foyer, ceremonial stairway, and second-floor vestibule, which continue internally the architectural theme of the exterior, and the non-decorated surfaces of the remainder of the interior shell of the building, which demonstrate what was considered the appropriate limits of thematic styling for a respectable, but not prestigious, manufacturing and sales workplace in the 1920s. The interior of the rear manufacturing wing derives significance from the exposure of its reinforced concrete frame and un-draped steel sash windows, which demonstrate the surface finishes considered appropriate for a light industrial workplace. The Star Engraving Co. Building derives significance from its sloped front lawn and its suburban landscaping, which signaled its vicarious participation in the designed public landscape of Buffalo Bayou Park, and represents the introduction of cultivated natural features into an industrial workplace in a suburban setting in the 1920s.

The Star Engraving Co. purchased the approximately one-acre tract on Allen Parkway in April 1929 for $14,616. Construction of the building was first announced in April 1929. It was announced again, one year later, in April 1930. A construction contract for $96,815 was awarded to Joseph B. Townsend in April 1930. No publicity seems to have attended the building's completion, although a photograph of the new building was published in the Houston Post-Dispatch in September 1930. The Star Engraving Co. occupied the Star Engraving Co. Building until 1965, when its offices were moved to the Bayou Building next door. The Star Engraving Co. was last listed on Allen Parkway in the 1972 issue of the Houston City Directory and ceased to be listed altogether after 1981. Roy J. Beard was president of the company until the early 1960s when he became its chairman. He was last listed in the 1967 issue of the Houston City Directory. In the early 1980s, the vacant building was acquired by the Mainland Building and Development Group. In 1975, the parent organization of this corporation, Mainland Savings Association, bought and remodeled the Rein Co. Building as its headquarters. Mainland Building and Development Group also bought the Gulf Publishing Co. properties and the Bayou Building. The group's chairman, Raymond M. Hill, hoped to use the historic properties as the nucleus for a high-density, mixed-use urban development. Under his direction, the Star Engraving Co. Building was rehabilitated in 1984-85 by W. O. Neuhaus Associates to serve as a cultural center and professional office building. Mainland Savings Association was declared insolvent in April 1986 (Lang; Brewton). In 1987, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation sold the Star Engraving Co. Building to a group of investors. These investors determined to sell the property in 1991 to the developer Jenard M. Gross, who planned to demolish most, if not all, of the Star Engraving Co. Building and build apartments on the site. The Board of Directors of Stages Repertory Theater, led by its president Emilie S. Kilgore, persuaded Mayor Robert H. Lanier of the extraordinary public value of this property as a cultural center. Mayor Lanier was instrumental in the City of Houston's acquisition of the building in 1992. The building was purchased by the city in order to preserve it and use it as a cultural center. In 1992, Stages commissioned the architects Cisneros+Partners, with Robert Robinowitz, to prepare plans for remodeling the interior and repairing the exterior of the building. When this remodeling and rehabilitation are completed, the Star Engraving Co. Building will house Stages Repertory Theater, the offices of the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and other non-profit arts groups.

The Star Engraving Co. Building is worthy of preservation because it spatially represents a complex of associations characteristic of American architecture, community planning, and business enterprise of the 1920s. By virtue of its prominent siting along a major civic parkway, its Spanish Mediterranean architectural style, its proximity to a group of similarly designed printing plants, its linkage of business and manufacturing with suburbanization during the 1920s, its association with a regionally important business enterprise, and its high degree of external integrity, the Star Engraving Co. The building is eligible for listing in the National Register. The building's association with local cultural institutions, urban real estate manipulation and the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s, and the politics of historic preservation in Houston are areas of future historic significance. Its rehabilitation and conversion to a cultural center in 1985 have enhanced the Star Engraving Co. Building's public identity, confirmed its original aspiration to artistic status, and for it sufficient local recognition to ensure its preservation.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1995.