Clarke & Courts Building

The Clarke & Courts Building, built in 1935-1936, is one of the foremost examples of modernistic architecture in Houston. Built to house the general offices and production plant of the then 79-year-old Clarke & Courts printing and stationery company, it exemplified state-of-the-art design, planning, services, and construction for a light industrial operation in depression-era Houston. Contextually, the Clarke & Courts Building relates to the development of commerce and the dissemination of modernistic architecture in Houston in the 1930s and 1940s. The building meets Criterion A, significant at a local level in the area of Commerce as the base operations of an established, regionally important printing and lithography company. It meets Criterion C in the area of Architecture as a work of the prolific Houston commercial architect, Joseph Finger and as a fine example of Moderne design.

The Clarke & Courts Building was constructed in 1935-1936 for the general offices and production operations of Clarke & Courts, a printing and stationery business organized in Galveston in 1857. Known as the "Texas House," Clarke & Courts was the major producer of printed blanks, record forms, bank checks, and commercial letterhead stationery in the state between the second half of the 19th century and the third-quarter of the 20th century. In 1890, partners Robert Clarke, the printer, and George M. Courts, the stationer, constructed a 5-story headquarters building and production plant on Mechanic Street in downtown Galveston, designed by the prominent Galveston architectural firm, N.J. Clayton & Company. During the 1890s, the brothers Robert K. Hutchings and Sealy Hutchings of Galveston became partners in the firm. In 1926 they expanded operations to Dallas.

By the early 1930s, a new plant was required to maintain the company's competitive standing. Expanded markets in other states and the need to modernize with electric machinery played a part in the decision to relocate the main plant. In addition, central air conditioning became important to the company in order to keep production quality high. Air conditioning would allow control of humidity to ensure uniform atmospheric conditions. Such conditions would control consistency of paper thickness and avoid crinkling and drooping. In order to maintain the Clarke & Courts standards of service, workmanship, and prices and still serve new and growing markets in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Mexico, and Cuba, viable transportation to these markets became a concern. Houston was a central transportation hub in the 1920s, with nearly all major ships docked at the Port of Houston, bypassing Galveston's port at that time. Major rail and trucking lines further boosted Houston as a hub, leaving Galveston a tributary to established trade and transportation networks.

Houston in the mid 1930s experienced a boom in new construction, dramatically reversing the decline in construction that followed the onset of the Great Depression (McComb; 1969). Much of this new construction was for manufacturing operations related to the city's oil industry, which affected a broad range of other business endeavors. Clarke & Courts' decision to transfer its headquarters from Galveston to Houston, and Houston's ascendancy as the largest city in Texas and a regionally dominant trade and distribution center occurred simultaneously.

By the time planning began for the Houston headquarters building, Clarke & Courts served customers in Texas and the aforementioned new and growing markets (Houston, 1936). It concurrently expanded its range of services; in addition to the production of lithography, steel engraving, printing, binding, and the sale of stationery products, Clarke & Courts also specialized in the sale of office supply products, office equipment, and office furniture. The firm offered its customers a direct advertising mail department, in which advertising letters, folders, and booklets were designed, produced, and distributed (Houston, 1936). This range of services, for which various spaces in the building were allotted, represents the development of American clerical culture during the first decades of the 20th century and demonstrates how an entrepreneurial business expanded its services in response to new requirements for conducting and housing a "modern" commercial enterprise.

The decision to transfer Clarke & Courts' headquarters from Galveston to Houston was made by Sealy Hutchings (1869-1936), the Galveston businessman who became president of the company in 1917. A son of Galveston banker and wholesale merchant, John H. Hutchings, and a great nephew of the pioneer Texas financier, Robert Mills, Sealy Hutchings was president of the Hutchings-Sealy National Bank of Galveston, the Galveston City Company, and the American Indemnity Insurance Company. Despite the impact of the Depression, Hutchings presided over expanding businesses. In 1934-1935 he erected a new building for Hutchings-Sealy National Bank on Market Street in downtown Galveston (demolished), moving the institution from the site it had occupied since 1854 (and the N.J. Clayton & Company-designed building it had occupied since 1894) in the Strand Historic District (National Register, 1970). And despite his connection to some of Galveston's most venerable business institutions (Hutchings House, National Register, 1994), Hutchings transferred Clarke & Courts to Houston to assert its commercial competitiveness. Hutchings died in January 1936 while the Houston building was under construction. He was succeeded by his son Sealy Hutchings, Jr., who served as president, and then chairman of the board of directors, of Clarke & Courts until the 1980s. Clarke & Courts occupied the building until its dissolution in 1990.

The Clarke & Courts Building derives significance from its suburban setting and its 1story spatial organization. The site that Clarke & Courts purchased from Houston investor H.E. Deterring in 1935 was one-half of a block in the Harlow Addition, which faced West Clay Avenue between Van Buren and Eberhard streets. The Harlow Addition consisted of a mixture of multiple lot tracts and individual house and apartment sites. The band of territory bounded by West Clay Avenue on the south and Buffalo Bayou on the north developed in the 1920s and 1930s as a discontinuous mixture of moderately priced middle income housing and light industrial and warehouse uses. The mixture distinguished this zone from neighborhoods south of West Clay that tended to be more consistently residential in character. Such a mixed use zone was characteristic of Houston's 20th century development, in as much as the city consistently rejected attempts to adopt a zoning code, beginning in 1929. Perhaps occasioning the anomalous development of this 1.4-mile long corridor, in an otherwise homogeneous new middle class residential sector of Houston, was the fact that the historic African American neighborhood in Fourth Ward (Freedmen's Town Historic District, National Register, 1985) bracketed it on the east and a suburban satellite of Fourth Ward, called Green Pond, on the west. Photographs taken of the Clarke & Courts Building at the time of its construction indicate that Van Buren was unpaved, and that West Clay was uncurbed. Thus, the present lack of curbing and the mixed-use character of the surrounding neighborhood are attributes of the building's historic setting.

Clarke & Courts' location in a suburban neighborhood enabled the company's building to spread out in a 1-story spatial configuration, originally encompassing 40,000 square feet. This allowed customer automobile parking along West Clay, as well as truck access from Eberhard Street. Thus, by virtue of its location, the Clarke & Courts Building represents the desire for efficiency and economy in terms of single-level industrial organization and vehicular accessibility that prevailed in Houston after 1930. Older warehouse and manufacturing areas, such as the Fifth Ward Factory District, north of downtown, with tightly compacted groups of multiple story loft buildings adjacent to railroads, gradually became obsolete.