National Register Listing

West Eleventh Place Historic District

1--8 W. 11th Pl., Houston, TX

The West Eleventh Place Historic District is one of the most architecturally consistent and spatially coherent of Houston's early 20th-century planned, elite neighborhoods. The community plan, architecture, scale, materials, and design of the district reflect trends characteristic of Houston in the decade of the 1920s when it became the largest city in Texas. The 1920s was a period of economic expansion in Houston based on oil exploration, processing, and marketing, as well as the processing of cotton, timber, and agricultural commodities. It was a period of swift population expansion because of the economic opportunities that Houston offered. This expansive economy created a market for the development of new residential neighborhoods. New neighborhoods for affluent white families in the 1920s were especially marked by an emphasis on community planning and the establishment of new standards of domestic architecture and landscape design. The West Eleventh Place District reflects these attributes to an unusual degree. Evaluated within the context of Suburban Development in Texas, 1881-1945, the district is nominated to the National Register (NR) under Criterion C in the areas of Architecture, Community Planning and Development, and Landscape Architecture at the local level of significance. In a secondary capacity, it is nominated to the National Register under Criterion B at the local level of significance as the home of Margaret Perkins Slaughter, doyenne of the Garden Club of Houston from the 1920s through the mid-1960s and her husband Dr. J. Willis Slaughter, an internationally prominent sociologist and psychologist who taught at the Rice Institute from 1919 until 1948.

Houston grew during the decade of the 1920s to become 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). Economic expansion was accompanied by urban growth that spread outward from the center of the city at low density. Together with an unusual degree of reliance on the motorcar as the basic means of personal transportation, urban expansion prompted the evolution of what Peter Papademetriou called a "new urban form" in Houston's patterns of real estate development after 1920.

In Houston, civic and business leaders embraced the idea of a progressive, modern, "Greater Houston." Civic planning had first been initiated here by large donations of property in Houston's South End-in what became the Main Street/Museum/University area from William Marsh Rice (227 acres) for the building of Rice Institute in 1907 and from George H. Hermann (285 acres) in 1914 for a city park. As the earliest, planned civic improvement in Houston, with its adjacent residential enclaves, it has never been surpassed or even equaled.

One of the most visible aspects of this new urban form was the development of planned suburban neighborhoods for affluent white families. Between 1920 and 1930, such Houston subdivisions as Chelsea Place (1922), Colby Court (1922), Waverly Court (1922), Shadowlawn (1923), the Broadacres Historic District (1923, NR 1980) all in Houston's South End, and River Oaks (1923-48), Riverside Terrace (1923-48), and Braeswood (1928-1941) were developed at increasingly larger scales to appeal to this elite market. These developments drew upon a series of planned, elite neighborhoods in Houston-the Westmoreland Historic District (1902, NR 1995), the Courtland Place Historic District (1906, NR 1980), and Shadyside (1916)—to emphasize coordinated improvements; restrictive covenants to address land use, racial exclusion, site coverage, architectural control, and enforcement; and community identity. Also in the South End, the West Eleventh Place Historic District (1920), despite its small size and upper-middle-income status, was significant in this sequence of elite neighborhood development. Because of its coordinated community planning and the design of many of its houses by the distinguished Houston architect, Joseph Walter Northrop, Jr. (1886-1968), West Eleventh Place treated community identity as a critical feature for establishing a neighborhood of houses that were substantial but never grand. Northrop used site planning and architectural style to assert neighborhood stability in the midst of an urban condition of real estate unpredictability. However he manipulated spatial scale within the neighborhood to assert variety, rather than uniformity, and intimacy rather than large scale, as the identifying attributes of West Eleventh Place.

West Eleventh Place derives significance from its place in the history of community planning and development in Houston. The origin of the neighborhood was the subject of an illustrated article, "A Texas Residential Development," in the nationally-circulated professional journal The Architectural Forum in August 1921. According to the article, J.W. Northrop, Jr. persuaded three clients, Dr. and Mrs. J. Willis Slaughter (No. 4), Mr. and Mrs. Willard C. Averill, Jr. (No. 6), and Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Henderson (No. 5), to purchase a block in the N.P. Turner Addition in early 1920 and re-plat it "to accommodate seven dwellings grouped around a private driveway and developed in such a manner as to form a modern residential unit" (The Architectural Forum: 1921, 73). Northrop's three clients were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Blake (No. 7), who owned a portion of an adjoining block in the Turner Addition. Northrop's clients' block faced West Eleventh Street in the Turner Addition. There was no named developer.

In-depth research at the Harris County Courthouse archives seems to confirm that there was no developer but does tell a slightly different story. A reading of the original documents suggests that in April 1920 the three clients and the Blakes jointly purchased Block 4 of the Turner Addition for the sum of $18,000 from the Trustees of the Hermann Hospital Estate described as: "a tract of land 250 feet width from east to west and 240 feet length from north to south and being bounded on the north by 11th Street, on the east by Sycamore Street, on the south by 12th Street and on the west by Chestnut Street."
In May 1920 Thomas W. Blake began to assemble two adjacent properties on behalf of the group: one purchased from Pearl and W.J. Wingate (an irregular, rhomboid-shaped property of 0.58 acres located due south of the above-described property and tucked-in between J.S. Cullinan's back garden in Shadyside and the east-west oriented 12th Street); the other purchased from the City of Houston (a narrow strip known as 12th Street) in order to make the property larger and much more private with its back-door, so to speak, accessing the rear of Shadyside.

In November 1920 Block 4 and the additional properties which had been assembled by Blake were partitioned by their Trustee R.W. Franklin, of Franklin & Picton, Attorneys at Law, between the Blakes (No. 7), Averills (No. 6), Slaughters (No. 4) and Hendersons (No. 5) (Harris County Deeds: vol.451, page 282). The deed restrictions included the requirement that any new building had to be used for residential purposes only; that it could not cost less than $7500.; that only those of the "white or Caucasian race" could buy or rent property there; and the predictable set-back provisions. J.W. Northrop Jr.'s name does not appear on any of the documents.

According to the 1921 article in The Architectural Forum, the project of building these three earliest houses was left entirely to Northrop. Under his supervision, separate contracts were made for the upgrading of the land, curbs, and gutters, extension of sewer and water lines, etc. The central drive and driveway returns were laid in concrete, and handsome, classical brick and stone piers were erected at the entrance. Separate plans and specifications were made for each of the three new houses, and separate contracts were made for each of the houses to the lowest reliable bidder. Each owner had complete freedom in creating his own residential property although they had restrictions on the supply of light and air and lawn space which gave the whole community a sense of openness. The Blake house was built in 1922 and the Bowles house was built in 1923.

West Eleventh Street (renamed Bissonnet Avenue in the early 1920s), was a major east-west thoroughfare whose importance increased as the general area was suburbanized during the 1920s. Two cross streets in the Turner Addition-Sycamore (now Bayard) Street and Chestnut (now Yoakum) Street-bounded the east and west sides of the two blocks. Both cross streets were dead-ended at the property line of the Shadyside subdivision on the south, which the Blake property also abutted. West Eleventh Place derives significance from its name, which is the only place name in current use that recalls the original numbered street names of the Turner Addition.

The Turner Addition was platted in 1871 as a grid of blocks and streets. However, it was not developed until the 1910 decade because of its distance from the center of Houston. Because of the early date of its platting, the Turner Addition lacked restrictive covenants, whose use became common for elite residential neighborhoods in Houston after the turn of the 20th century. Restrictive covenants sought to ensure real estate stability by legally proscribing land uses incompatible with single-family residential neighborhoods. In 1914, six blocks of the Turner Addition were re-platted as the Rossmoyne Addition (Sterling-Berry House, NR 1983), reconfigured with an esplanade, central boulevard, and restrictive covenants. After the oil man J.S. Cullinan developed Shadyside (Peden House, NR 1990; Wray House, NR 1992) in 1916, he bought the block in the Turner Addition just east of West Eleventh Place in 1919 to bring it under Shadyside's restrictions. West Eleventh Place derives significance from its participation in these real estate trends. It represents the reconfiguration of a typical, 19th-century American urban gridiron street plan in order to create spatial definition and thereby achieve community identity and real estate stability.

West Eleventh Place derives additional significance from the way that Northrop reconfigured a city block to produce a private street spatial arrangement. This reconfiguration had symbolic and practical consequences. The Westmoreland and Courtlandt Place historic districts established the St. Louis-inspired "private place" as the most prestigious type of elite residential neighborhood in Houston during the 1900s decade. Although Shadyside was developed with a curvilinear street plan rather than the orthogonal boulevard plan typical of St. Louis' private streets, it was designed by the St. Louis landscape architect and city planner, George E. Kessler. As its earliest property owners began to build large, architect-designed country houses there in 1919, Shadyside emerged as the most prestigious new neighborhood in Houston. By adapting the site plan arrangement and architectural symbols of the private place (the brick and cast stone gate piers flanking the Bissonnet entrance to West Eleventh Place), Northrop endowed the economically more modest West Eleventh Place with the symbolic attributes and, by extension, the prestige of the adjacent Shadyside.

West Eleventh Place also derives significance from the practical consequences of its spatial organization. Northrop radically inverted 19th-century conventions of urban house siting by backing all the house sites in West Eleventh Place onto the dedicated streets-Bayard and Yoakum-in order that they face an exceedingly narrow lane that he cut through the center of the block. This lane ends in a circular turnabout. West Eleventh Place represents Northrop's creative expediency. He compacted the more expansive street plan of Shadyside (which also had a wider street that terminated in a grander, landscaped traffic turn-about) into a single-block site. By sacrificing a few feet of depth shaved from each lot, he turned the subdivision protectively in on itself. The public streets were treated as rather wide service alleys, toward which auto garages, with servants' apartments above, were oriented. A new community space was shaped along the very narrow center lane of the block, toward which houses faced. The Blake House at 7 West Eleventh Place was symmetrically composed by its architect Einar H. Stubee so that it spatially framed the terminus of the street. It architecturally monumental, in a modest way, the fact that the central lane was a distinctive community space rather than merely a public street (which Northrop's plan reduced to the status of an alley or lane).

The lack of an efficient road system for those passing by also lent to the significance of West Eleventh Place's layout. The cul-de-sac was calculated from the beginning to be for the benefit of those living within the community, not those living outside it, thus offering great safety for children (Creese: 1967).

Northrop's planning had curious sociological consequences. The restrictive covenants of West Eleventh Place, like almost all covenants enacted in Houston until 1948 when the practice was declared legally unenforceable, excluded African-Americans from owning property in the subdivision and from living there, unless they were servants. The public streets flanking West Eleventh Place therefore came to be occupied by people whose race disqualified them from participating in the "community" life of the neighborhood. In a Southern city, the degree of visibility a neighborhood like West Eleventh Place, as a "planned" (often a code term for rigorously exclusionary) elite, white neighborhood, accorded African-American residents was paradoxical. Therefore, African Americans lived in the neighborhood in the servants' quarters over the garages that faced the rear alleys but could not own or rent property on the cul-de-sac. This arrangement also gave a privileged position to the family motorcars, which were essential for giving the middle-income families of West Eleventh Place mobility in the expanding city of Houston as servants were in maintaining the household (Fox: 1996).

West Eleventh Place is significant for its influence on subsequent residential real estate developments. Waverly Court, adjoining West Eleventh Place to the west, was developed in 1922 as a modified version of the West Eleventh Place layout. Shadowlawn, laid out in 1923, to the west of Waverly Court, has a street plan based on an expansion of the circular turn-about to subdivision scale. Northrop was involved to some extent in another planned subdivision nearby, Cotswold Court (1925), whose central lane is a miniature boulevard faced by moderately-sized houses and apartment buildings in a picturesque manorial style. Northrop's technique of subverting the grid of urban blocks to distill a private place subdivision had particular resonance in Galveston. Caduceus Place (1925) was the first elite Galveston subdivision in which house sites faced an aggrandized central alley and abutted dedicated streets. This arrangement was reproduced in the neighboring Westmoor and Denver Court additions, and in a more geometrically adventurous way in Galveston's Cedar Lawn addition (1926). Other elite Texas subdivisions of the 1920s used the street arrangement of cul-de-sacs with circular turnabouts to insert "private place" neighborhoods into gridded town sites, notably the Morningside Park Historic District in Witchita Falls (1920-35). Because these Texas developments were later, West Eleventh Place seems to be significant as the progenitor of a series of small-scale elite Houstonian and Texas cul-de-sac neighborhoods of the 1920s that sought to achieve private place status within existing grid-iron street plans. Further research could possibly clarify its importance. The district's spatial layout represents the desire of elite city dwellers in the early 20th century to protect themselves and their investments from real estate volatility in a rapidly expanding city.

West Eleventh Place is also significant for the quality of spatial intimacy that Northrop achieved. This spatial attribute contrasts with the earlier generation of Houston private place neighborhoods. The Courtlandt Place Historic District, for example, emphasized uniform setbacks and large lot sizes to create a sense of spatial expansiveness within the district. Courtlandt Place's central boulevard has an almost public scale, despite its residential nature. The central lane at West Eleventh Place is perceptibly narrower than Bayard and Yoakum, the street alleys that parallel it. Northrop's plan called for the houses at No. 1 and No. 2 (to either side of the main entrance) and No. 5 and No. 6 (to either side of the turn-about) to be set closer to the lane than No. 3 and No. 4. Northrop even rotated the Averill House at No.6 so that its front elevation faced into and spatially framed the deep front yard of the Slaughter House at No. 4. This creates a sequence of varied spaces along the line of the central lane rather than a single, focused point of view. (The only tree on the block was a mature loblolly pine tree at No. 4. Northrop seems to have determined the rather deep setback to protect the tree, as it appears on his subdivision site plan.) The Blake House at No. 7 symmetrically terminates the vista down the lane. The historian Mark A. Hewitt, in his book The Architect and the American Country House, noted of Bayou Bend, the Hogg House in Houston (1928, NR 1980), that though it was a suburban country house, it was disciplined architecturally by its underlying urbanity (Hewitt: 1990 p. 254). A similar observation can be made of West Eleventh Place. Northrop balanced the spatial variety of the central lane with the symmetry and "monumentality" of the Blake House's siting. A fascination with spatial intimacy, balanced by an underlying urbanity, was characteristic of American eclectic architects of the 1920s. The fascination with spatial intimacy, like the defensive walling-out of the surrounding city portended in West Eleventh Place's spatial organization, can be interpreted as a sub-urban compensation for the fact that Houston's garden subdivisions of the 1920s, even when built on the city's periphery, were city neighborhoods rather than rural retreats (Fox: 1996).

West Eleventh Place's extremely narrow cul-de-sac design, its low density, and its village-like atmosphere are significant because they appear to be in the English tradition of the architect, planner, and visionary Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940). Unwin believed that older villages alone retained the set of social and architectural values that could offer useful suggestions for the future. He liked to arrange his cottages firmly and picturesquely grouped on winding roads. In London the cul-de-sac had played an important role in Great Britain's garden suburb development: In 1907 Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker (1867-1947) planned the new 243-acre Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London with cul-de-sac, groups of cottages, a village green, and allotment gardens. Unwin's books and pamphlets were widely published and read in America, so it is likely that someone as well-read as Northrop might have known about his work. Unwin also lectured in America from 1911 onwards. In England, Unwin had played an important role in the preparation of a special Act of Parliament passed in 1906 which allowed him to vary the building line and plan economic closes and short cul-de-sacs. Unwin took full advantage of the new act in Hampstead Garden Suburb, where he achieved variety, much like Northrop did later in West Eleventh Place, by setting some houses on the frontage line and others behind it and by placing houses so that they enjoyed views from different angles within the cul-de-sac. Unwin was also involved in the Housing and Planning Act which passed in London in 1910; in that same year, there was a highly important, international town planning conference held in London (Creese: 1967).

There is also a more direct connection to this British source via another route: J. Willis Slaughter, Ph.D., Northrop's client at No. 4 West Eleventh Place had spent seven years in London where he had been appointed Secretary of the Sociological Society in 1905 under the Presidency of Viscount James Bryce, who later became U.S. Ambassador. The Sociological Society was founded in 1904 and one of its principal concerns was town. planning issues: it was a new, cutting-edge organization developed during the period when town planning was the buzzword in London. At this time, town planning was part of the newly emerging sociology field and Dr. Slaughter was an esteemed social psychologist with an international reputation. The early town planning movement in Britain was a miscellaneous episode; the idea of a separate profession with specific skills did not emerge quickly. The people involved did not even share the same definition of what town planning actually was about: some were social reformers and others talked of "garden cities" and "garden suburbs" (Crawford: 1985 and 1996).

The Sociological Society's Second Annual Report, 1906 lists J.W. Slaughter, Ph.D. as Secretary, and notes the following: "In the summer of 1905, the Council appointed a committee consisting of Sir Edward Brabrook, Mr. J. Martin White and Mr. V.V. Branford to secure a secretary specially trained in the Social Sciences, and familiar with contemporary work in the sociological field in Great Britain and abroad. To find anyone with such a combination of qualities required considerable search, but the committee was fortunate in at length securing the services of Dr. J.W. Slaughter, lecturer in Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Slaughter commenced his work as Secretary of the Society in the autumn term of 1905, and the Council has every reason to be gratified with the way in which Dr. Slaughter has conducted the Society's affairs, whilst at the same time forwarding sociological interests and studies by his courses of lectures in the University of London, and under the Extension system." The above-noted committee member Victor Branford was the founder and early moving spirit of the Sociological Society and a close associate of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) the Scottish sociologist, planner, and polymath on whose ideas many of the principles of town planning were founded. For Geddes, there was an art of town planning and a corresponding science of civics. An educational revolutionary, he arrived in London from Edinburgh in 1906, a year after Slaughter arrived there. The Sociological Society and Patrick Geddes were closely involved during this period. Geddes' disciples included Raymond Unwin (Crawford: 1985 and 1996).

A close inspection of annual reports, the quarterly journal of the Sociological Society, and other primary sources from this period (1905-1912) indicates that J. Willis Slaughter, Ph.D., later known as Dr. Slaughter of West Eleventh Place, was rubbing elbows with highly influential people like Raymond Unwin and Patrick Geddes on a regular basis and was living and teaching in London when some of the most important town planning and cul-de-sac issues were being resolved by Parliament. Slaughter was also associated with Lord Avebury and Arthur Balfour in his work, Balfour having been Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1903- 1905.

By 1909 the Sociological Society's Annual Report announced that Dr. Slaughter had given up his position as the Secretary of the Society, but mentioned that he had been elected to the more honored and elevated position on the Council of the Society. In the List of Members for 1909 Raymond Unwin's name is first shown; by 1910 he and Slaughter are both members of the Council. In 1911 Unwin is still on Council, but there is no mention of Slaughter. After that Slaughter disappears from the record.

The journal of the Sociological Society, The Sociological Review was quarterly. Each of the four covers for 1908 lists Slaughter as the Secretary of the editorial committee for the Review. In vol. 1 (1908), p. 148-57 there is an article on "Psychological Factors in Social Transmission" by Dr. J Willis Slaughter. In vol. 3 (1910), Slaughter reviews four books but there is no article by him. In January and April 1910, he was also on the editorial committee but by this time had relinquished the post of Secretary. This is no doubt because his teaching commitments were taking up more of his time. For example: a 1910 issue of the journal has the following notice: "A sessional course of University Extension Lectures on "The Life of Society," by Professor Patrick Geddes and Dr. J.W. Slaughter, has been arranged at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, Tavistock Place, WC, beginning on Oct 14. The session's work is divided into two parts. In the Michaelmas term, Professor Geddes gives ten lectures on Evolution in Mind, Morals, and Society, and in the Lent term, Dr. Slaughter gives fifteen on Social Education. Dr. Slaughter's course will deal generally with the psychological factors involved in social relationships, and describe their development during individual growth."

The formal inauguration of the new Department of Sociology at the University of London was on 17 December 1907. It was founded by J. Martin White, Honorary treasurer of the Sociological Society and member of the search committee that had hired Slaughter in 1905. The two first professors in the Sociology Department were Leonard T. Hobhouse and Dr. E. Westermarck. Hobhouse was a key figure in the early history of sociology in Britain, editor of the Sociological Review, and generally very important. In the Second Annual Report of the Sociological Society the following is noted: "The course given by Mr. L.T. Hobhouse ("Psychology") in the autumn term of 1905, has been continued in 1906 by Dr. Slaughter." Slaughter later taught in the new Sociology Department, so he clearly had a lot to do with Hobhouse (Crawford: 1996).

The Post Office London Directory lists Slaughter as living at 4 Harcourt Buildings, Middle Temple Lane, EC in 1910, 1911, and 1912. Harcourt Buildings is part of the Inns of Court and 90% of the occupants were barristers. It is almost certainly a bachelor chamber, and an obvious place for a single, male, expatriate academic to have lived (Crawford: 1985 and 1996).

West Eleventh Place also derives significance from its architecture. J.W. Northrop, Jr., made his reputation in Houston in the 1920s as a domestic architect especially known for his Colonial Revival style houses. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1886, the son of the Bridgeport architect Joseph W. Northrop, J.W. Northrop, Jr., was trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation in 1910, he joined the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, which sent him to Houston in 1911 to serve as Clerk of Works at the Rice Institute in Houston, which Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson designed. Northrop remained associated with the Cram firm until 1919. As early as 1914 he began to design houses independently in Houston. His first Houston house was for three members of the Rice faculty: (later Sir) Julian S. Huxley, Griffith C. Evans, and Arthur L. Hughes. During the 1920s Northrop designed houses for such Rice faculty members as Professor Herbert K. Humphreys, Samuel G. McCann, registrar of the institute, and Professor Joseph H. Pound in the Turner Addition, where he built his own house at 5220 Bayard Lane and Bissonnet, just north of West Eleventh Place, about 1921. In 1925, Northrop was one of three Houston architects hired to work with Ima Hogg to design a series of model houses in various historic American architectural styles to promote the development of her brothers' River Oaks Country Club Estates. Ima Hogg had proposed the notion of a unifying architectural style to J.S. Cullinan when he commenced the development of Shadyside in 1916. In 1919 Miss Hogg and her brother, Will C. Hogg, anticipated having the Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe design all the houses in what became Colby Court in a unifying style. The three Colonial Revival houses that Northrop designed in West Eleventh Place represent the first occasion that architectural coordination was achieved in a Houston subdivision. In the latter 1920s, he designed a series of large Colonial Revival-style houses in the 1700 and 1800 blocks of South Boulevard nearby. Northrop also designed the Public Library in Marshall, Texas (1926) in the Colonial Revival style.

The earliest buildings were all designed in Colonial Revival styles, but Northrop was particularly interested in adapting these styles to southern living through the use of larger and more numerous exterior openings, creation of cross drafts, and providing air circulation and protection from exposure with L-shaped wings and careful orientation. Most of the houses had detached garages, some with staff quarters above or adjacent. Often they were a simplified version of the main house and were usually accessed from the rear service streets along the eastern and western perimeters of the sub-division. In order to protect the houses and their inhabitants from traffic and noise on adjacent streets, the houses were arranged to turn their backs to the city thoroughfares and face inward toward the cul-de-sac rather than out toward the main streets: Only garages and servants' quarters faced these parallel service streets.

West Eleventh Place also derives significance from Northrop's use of a Colonial Revival architectural style and its application to compact versions of the country house type for elite, but not exceptionally wealthy, families. An attempt at an archaeologically conscientious rendition of Colonial Revival architecture was made in Texas as early as the 1890s by the San Antonio architect J. Riely Gordon (1864-1937) in a design for his own house (Robinson: 1981, 232). In 1900, the Michael W. Shaw House in the East End Historic District in Galveston (NR 1975) was designed in an academically correct interpretation of Colonial Revival detail and composition. In Houston, the Colonial Revival acquired special prestige with the design of the Donoghue House in Courtlandt Place (1915, NR 1979) by the New York architects Warren and Wetmore. Not only did the Donoghue House adhere in scale, composition, materials, and decoration to 18th-century English Georgian precedent, but it did so in the typological context of the country house. The country house type was predicated on reciprocal spatial relationships between interior living spaces and external gardens. It often was architecturally composed with separate entrance and garden elevations, rather than assigning primacy to a street-facing entrance elevation, as had been customary for city houses. Early 20th-century American country houses tended to reject the front porch in favor of open-air living spaces that were externalizations of interior space, often collected in a terrace or loggia projected from the side or rear of the house. The Donoghue House embodied these characteristics. It had an extraordinary influence on Houston's domestic architecture between 1915 and 1925, as can be seen in the Montrose and South End neighborhoods, where many versions of the Donoghue House are visible. Northrop did not attempt to replicate the Donoghue House in any of the houses in West Eleventh Place. But they are all compact examples of the country house type, faced with a mixed blend of red, gray, and black bricks (all but No. 1 now painted), exhibiting Georgian versions of painted wood classical detail, with shuttered, multi-paned sash windows. The Slaughter House at No. 4 (which, with its elliptical entrance portico, most closely resembles the Donoghue House) and the Bowles House at No. 2 (although Northrop's authorship of this house is now in question in light of recent information supplied by Mary Frances Bowles Couper, daughter of the original client) are five-bay wide, symmetrically composed, side-gable roofed houses with centered front entrances and offset side wings, the arrangement most characteristic of Northrop's work. The Henderson House at No. 5 is a Dutch Colonial variant of the five-bay wide house, with a rear L- wing. The Averill House at No. 6 is the most picturesque, because emphasis is given to a tall chimney on the side-facing front of the house, and the cased front door is pushed to one edge of the front elevation rather than centered. In the design of individual houses, Northrop used architecture to reinforce community identity as seen from without, while emphasizing variety and intimacy from within the neighborhood. West Eleventh Place derives significance from Northrop's adroit handling of type, style, and scale.

West Eleventh Place derives additional significance from the contributions of two other Houston architects, Einar H. Stubee (active Houston 1918-1937) and William Ward Watkin (1886-1952). Stubee, a Norwegian-American who arrived in Houston in 1918 from Minnesota, designed the Blake House at 7 West Eleventh Place as a stucco-faced, Italian Renaissance house. By designing the Blake House with symmetrically organized, arched loggias framing a central entrance, Stubee endowed Northrop's community plan diagram with a spatial dimension. William Ward Watkin, the first professor of architecture at the Rice Institute and, like Northrop, a former employee of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson. He designed the Hail House at No.1 West Eleventh Place, with classical French manorial massing and roof details. To this, he added a very prominent front door, with split pediment. Because it is a cubically proportioned, symmetrically composed country house faced with brick and a classically detailed entrance portal, the Hail House is compatible with Northrop's Colonial Revival style houses. Stylistic eclecticism was the rule rather than the exception in American domestic architecture during the 1920s. Typically, as with the Blake and Hail houses, it was careful site planning and orientation, and a tacit consensus on the issue of scale, that gave elite neighborhoods a typologically implicit, rather than stylistically explicit, sense of unity. The Blake and Hail houses contribute to the significance of the West Eleventh Place Historic District by virtue of their stylistic eclecticism and their respect for convention of siting, scale, and orientation established in Northrop's community plan.

The residents and families of West Eleventh Place also lend to the district's significance, including the contributions of the women of the households who cooperatively developed the subdivision and built its houses. The original property owners were tied to the economic forces that decisively shaped Houston in the 1920s.

Willard C. Averill, Jr. was the manager of the Texas Exploration Company, and William Victor Bowles (No. 2) was the general regional superintendent of the Texas Exploration Company. Robert Wilson Henderson (No. 5) was president of the Henderson Cotton Company and later also branched out into cattle, oil, land, and real estate, but his obituary referred to him as the "Cotton King." Thomas Walter Blake (No. 7) was the founder and president of the Thomas W. Blake Lumber Company and vice-president of the South Texas Hardwood Lumber Company. The connections of these households to the oil, cotton, and timber businesses reflect the impact of such enterprises on the creation of wealth in Houston. Egbert O. Hail (No.1) who came to Houston from Kentucky and Nashville, was in the insurance business. Dr. J. Willis Slaughter (No. 4) was not a businessman but a sociologist and psychologist. He was an internationally respected lecturer in civics and philosophy at the Rice Institute; executive director of the Houston Foundation, a social service agency of the City of Houston; and served on both the City Planning Commission and the Community Chest. Thus, West Eleventh Place is not only for the business and professional connections of its original residents, but for Dr. Slaughter's international connections to scholarship, research, town planning, civics, philanthropy, and the Rice Institute. It is also significant for the connections of Mr. Blake, Dr. Slaughter, and architects Northrop and Watkin to the University Club. The University Club had been founded in Houston in July 1916: Mr. Blake, Mr. Northrop, and Mr. Watkin were founding members; Dr. Slaughter joined after his arrival in 1919; Watkin designed the club; and in the 1920s and 1930s, Dr. Slaughter often lectured there on a wide range of topics.

<h6>Contributions</h6>The West Eleventh Place Historic District is significant for contributions to Houston's business, religious, social, and cultural life by the women who lived there. They all participated in the decision to live in the subdivision and in the planning of their houses, but there also seems to have been a link during these Inter-War years between the social and economic leadership that women were beginning to offer and the set-up of the kind of idealistic subdivision that West Eleventh Place represents. Civic and planning ideas were part of an intellectual milieu to which many upper-class women were attracted and within which they offered leadership. Part of the reason why these families came together can be explained by the fact that there were many and various family relationships between a significant number of the original and subsequent clients as well as with later occupants of these houses. There were blood ties between the Bowles, Henderson, Jackson, and Moseley families and old family connections between the Jackson and Blake families from their days in Mexia, as well as between the Bowles and Averill families from their time together in Beaumont. It is not known how the Slaughters and Hails became involved in West Eleventh Place but it is possible that the connection could be through the University Club or through Rice Institute where Slaughter and Watkin taught and where Northrop was based until 1919.

The Blake, Henderson, and Bowles families all attended St. Paul's Methodist Church; the Slaughters were members of Palmer Episcopal Church. The women were all very interested in their families and children. A number of them were members of the Garden Club of Houston and they all seemed to have been interested in antiques and were patrons of Houston's first important antique shop, the Shabby Shoppe. Mrs. Blake and Mrs. Henderson had been highly educated at the well-regarded Kidd-Key College in Sherman where they had been exposed to European culture and music. All of the families were well-traveled: the Slaughters and the Blake sisters (No. 6) internationally, and the others primarily within the United States.

In some respects, this little subdivision can be studied as an idealized microcosm for the type of social, civic, and planning interest found throughout the various enclave neighborhoods of Houston, and throughout the entire country during these years. Unlike their husbands, there are no profiles or biographies in easily accessed sources such as the New Encyclopedia of Texas to learn about who the women really were except as the spouses of the above-noted men. The use of primary sources has been essential. Oral history interviews with most of the children of the original clients have been invaluable.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1997.