National Biscuit Company Building

Constructed in 1910, the National Biscuit Company (N.B.C. or Nabisco) Building housed the N.B.C.'s southwest regional headquarters for the baking, packing and shipping of the company's famous variety of baked treats. A prominent industrial landmark in Houston, the building dominates the city's warehouse district just northeast of the central business district. N.B.C. occupied the building until the 1950s when the company chose to build a larger factory building southeast of downtown, selling the 1910 facility to a wholesale carpet dealer. N.B.C. architect A.G. Zimmerman designed the building, which was the second constructed in Houston by N.B.C. The 1910 building reflects typical building patterns for industrial facilities in the early 20th century, seen in the building's brick construction and the architect's use of steel framing in the structural columns and trusses, which abandoned the heavy timber frame construction of the first N.B.C. building and became one of the first warehouse-type buildings in Houston to do so. Not only significant architecturally, the 1910 National Biscuit Company Building, as the regional headquarters of an important national company, also played a significant role in the economic growth of Houston during the early 20th century, thus meeting both Criterion A in the area of Industry and Criterion C in the area of Architecture at the local level of significance.

In 1887 the Lone Star Cracker & Manufacturing Company, under local leadership, opened in Galveston, then the largest city in Texas with approximately 22,000 people in 1880 and 29,000 in 1890. The 2-story cracker factory sat close to the bay-side harbor on the island, only a few blocks away from the Gulf of Mexico. During the 19th century, Houston's population lagged behind Galveston's by over 6,000 despite superior rail connections to the rest of the country.

In 1890 the local owners sold the factory to the American Biscuit & Manufacturing Company of Chicago, which became one of the consolidating firms that founded the National Biscuit Company (N.B.C.) in 1898. Thus, when the devastating hurricane of September 8, 1900, hit Galveston, it was N.B.C. employees who fled to the building's second story as rising water from the bay and the Gulf slowly covered Galveston streets. When the hurricane blew the roof off the building, killing several employees, some managed to escape through a window, over a ledge, and into an adjoining building. After the storm, the company cleared debris, rebuilt, and resumed baking the first week in January 1901. Within two weeks, however, a fire destroyed the factory.

Like several other Galveston businesses after the hurricane, N.B.C. company officials decided to locate inland to the growing city of Houston, whose population (pre-storm) in 1900 was 44,000 to Galveston's 37,000. By the next decade, Houston's population outstripped Galveston's 78,000 to 36,000 due in part to the 1900 hurricane and also to the burgeoning oil boom which began in 1901. During this critical period in Houston's economic development, N.B.C. chose a site for its new factory close to Buffalo Bayou, which had been dredged sufficiently for small vessels and was also close to the many rail lines that connected this area with major railroad lines serving Houston. This combination of rail and water transportation attracted many warehouse and industrial plants to the area around Buffalo Bayou during the early 20th century, establishing industrial opportunities that created a crucial economic base for Houston's growth and development. The establishment of the regional headquarters for a national company like N.B.C. in this area further increased Houston's growing status as a prime location for industrial facilities at the beginning of the 20th century.

N.B.C. acquired all of Block 113, South Side Buffalo Bayou, eight blocks east of Main Street (the primary north-south artery) and just south of Buffalo Bayou, which divided Houston in a generally east-west direction. Commerce Street on the south, Chenevert on the east, and Magnolia (now Ruiz) on the north, and Jackson on the east bounded the block. The company built a utilitarian 2-story brick building designed by local architect Ollie Lorein on the southeast corner of the block. The building opened on January 8, 1902, with two small bake ovens. Within eight years, however, the facility proved too small. The company soon began plans for a proper bakery that combined the functions of baking, packing, and shipping for the regional production and distribution of N.B.C. products throughout the southwest. The new building was planned for the northeast corner of the lot while the old building (still standing), would become company offices and warehouse space. Both buildings would feature access to a rail spur with a covered shed to protect the loading docks.
The new building's design mirrored other N.B.C.'s bakery buildings throughout the country and reflects the company's early adoption of Progressive Era ideology addressing business issues of efficiency and uninterrupted production, as well as the growing new awareness about the health and safety of employees. W.F. Wilmoth in The American Architect magazine of June 19, 1912 (vol. 14:270-78) lauded the N.B.C. leadership in designing safe and efficient workplaces in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City (see Figures 8-1 through 8-4). The company employed Chicago-born architect, Albert G. Zimmerman (c. 1866-1947), who moved to New York soon after 1900, to design these factories. All were almost identical in style but adapted to the specifics of the local site. The Houston facility built in 1910 strongly resembles photographs of those in the northern cities. According to the Houston Chronicle on December 4, 1910, the time of the dedication of the Houston building, the New York N.B.C. factory opened first in 1909 followed by the Houston building one year later.

The article in The American Architect praised N.B.C.'s goals of designing buildings that offered: (1) the highest efficiency as a manufacturing unit, (2) minimum maintenance, (3) the greatest safety for employees, (4) freedom from interruption of business, and (5) the best light, ventilation, and sanitation. While comfort and safety for its workers constituted the primary concern of the company, their building's designs did not ignore aesthetics either, aiming to create "a pleasing architectural quality and dignity...a source of pride for its directors, stockholders, and employees, and...express to the public the purpose and ideals of the Company." Red bricks encased the exterior of the N.B.C. bakeries with window sills, lintels, band courses, cornices, and ornamental features in dull enameled light buff terra cotta.
White brick accented the vertical lines on the towers adding to the beauty of the factories. Zimmerman, who hailed from Chicago, designed the N.B.C. buildings to reflect trends in commercial architecture in Chicago during the late 19th century as the result of advances in construction technology. Referred to as the Chicago School and most successfully mastered in the designs of Louis Sullivan, the N.B.C. buildings display characteristics of the Chicago style somewhat adapted for industrial/warehouse facilities, evidenced in the Houston building's arched entrance, the rhythm of large window openings framed by a grid of intersecting piers and horizontal spandrels, and a flat, terminating cornice.

Each N.B.C. factory had stories averaging fourteen feet between floors except the baking floor which measured twenty-two feet. The ovens occupied the upper floors, and in the case of Houston, five huge ovens filled the fourth floor and part of the fifth. Because of this heavy load, the company used steel columns with tile fireproofing instead of the less costly but more cumbersome reinforced concrete. The N.B.C. building became one of the first warehouse-type buildings in Houston to this technology, abandoning the heavy timber framing of the 1902 N.B.C. building. Specially moulded tile with double air spaces protected all structural steel and plaster covered the exposed tile giving the interiors a smooth, finished appearance. All dividing walls were brick and all openings had "standard Underwriters' fireproof doors." Maple floors, used also in the New York factory, consisted of 1" thick maple boards set in concrete. The architect placed freight elevators and staircases along exterior walls to avoid interfering with production lines.

Each N.B.C. factory, including the Houston building, featured completely enclosed smoke-proof fire-escape stairway towers usually on a corner, a signature of their buildings, plus at least one second, similar brick-enclosed stairwell elsewhere. The towers included open loggias or balconies looking to the outside at each floor opposite the fire door to prevent the accumulation of smoke, one of the causes of panic on crowded stairways. Employees used these comfortable, safe, and well-lighted steel staircases within the brick towers daily coming and going to their stations so there was no chance for confusion about exits. The towers also extended above the roof line forming an enclosed and accessible place for the pressure water tanks supplying the automatic sprinkler systems and also for water used in manufacturing and restrooms (still extant on the Houston building). The tanks could easily be inspected or repaired through a small stair crawl space accessed from the top of the stair tower.

December 4, 1910, Sunday editions of The Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle vied for the best coverage of the opening ceremonies for the N.B.C. Building, described as "the most complete and finest equipped" in the world (see Figures 8-5 and 8-6). The new $400,000, 5-story building with sixth story clear- story loggia, opened on December 3, 1910, with a gala luncheon for 113 Houston and New York businessmen, including the presidents of the two newspapers, as well as the entire sales corps of the Nabisco Company in Texas. N.B.C. president A.W. Green, his wife, and daughters arrived in Houston the previous day from New York in their private rail car.

Nabisco spent over $10,000 for the luncheon's New York Roof Garden setting, designed by A.C. Mace of New York and placed on the second floor of the bakery. Luncheon guests were greeted at 1 p.m. by a latticed-screened orchestra playing a triumphal march as each guest passed through a pergola to the tables. The tables appeared to perch on the highest building on the Jersey side, looking down across the Hudson River to a "brilliantly lighted waterfront of New York City." A railing at the end of a coping framed a series of hung canvases, painted with a panorama of the exact waterfront of New York. Some parts of the canvas painting, impregnated with transparencies, caused a glimmered effect of lights in building windows, electric signs on the painted waterfront, and a bay full of all designs of launches with a great ocean steamer, all illuminated from the rear and front. The Nabisco trademark, the "Inner Seal" hung under a double cross of the middle ages which denoted a sincerity of purpose. Sound effects accompanied the canvas scene from the boat whistles on the harbor to the small river craft.

A red and white striped awning covered what appeared to be a replica of the roof garden at the Astor House and offered an illuminated panoramic view of New York City at night as if from the Jersey shore. Notable landmarks included the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Brooklyn Bridge with the illusion of street cars crossing and re-crossing, and even the 2-year-old New York N.B.C. Bakery on 15th Street topped by an electric N.B.C. sign. The Houston guests were entranced by the luncheon display which rivaled a similar occasion, the February 1909 opening of the New York, Zimmerman-designed Nabisco factory bakery, then deemed, "the largest in existence." That luncheon, the Chronicle explained, cost $12,000 and offered a Venetian setting for six hundred guests.

While there are no readily available statistics concerning N.B.C.'s direct economic contributions to Houston, the company's presence in the downtown neighborhood created some two hundred jobs and increased buying power for a number of people. The bakery's location near street car lines and within walking distance from nearby low-income neighborhoods guaranteed a large pool of workers. Moreover, the safety and sanitary workplace, as compared to some other job sites, doubtless made the bakery a favorite workplace.

After World War II, the demographics of Houston changed radically when prosperity and jobs allowed families to buy personal automobiles and move to the suburbs. At the close of 1947, N.B.C. began planning a new 1-story facility on the south fringe of the city where employees could park their vehicles and trucks could deliver supplies and carry away bakery goods. N.B.C. had already sold portions of Block 113, and by the close of 1949, the 5-story Zimmerman building became the property of a wholesale furniture company (see Figure 8- 7). Purse & Company of Houston, Inc., used most of the building to warehouse new furniture and for a brief time had the Purse Rug Company occupying the basement and lower floor. The owner lived in Dallas and employed local managers for the wholesale business. Purse & Company still occupied the site in 1982, but soon thereafter, moved out of the building.
In recent years, the vacant 5-story building became the residence of transients who scattered debris everywhere. When The Frost Family, Inc. bought the building in 1996, it began cleaning the interior and exterior in preparation for creating the fifty loft-style apartments.

This 87-year-old building, a local landmark, is one of a few downtown factories still standing and it is easily the tallest and most visible building in the downtown industrial district. Its construction in 1910 signaled the start of a building boom in the warehouse district that lasted until the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. During these two decades, more than 30 industrial buildings were constructed in the area between Buffalo Bayou, Main Street, and U.S. Highway 59. The size and detailing of the N.B.C. Building made it stand out among other industrial facilities in Houston, and the architect's use of steel framing in the structural columns and trusses, abandoning the heavy timber frame construction of the 1902 N.B.C. building, made it one of the first warehouse-type buildings in Houston to adopt this method of construction, which became almost universal for warehouse/industrial buildings after 1920.

N.B.C.'s concern for safety, efficiency, and a pleasing appearance created a building in Houston that has survived storms, aging, and recent neglect, now providing a suitable outlet for adaptive reuse in the proposed conversion into apartments. Its interior is undergoing remodeling to become an upscale fifty-unit apartment building with inside off-the-street parking to accommodate new urban-dwellers and contribute to the re- development of downtown Houston's eastern perimeter.