Texas State Hotel

The 1928-29 Texas State Hotel, one of Houston's early twentieth-century skyscrapers, is an example of the Spanish Plateresque style made popular through a major city planning effort that was never fully adopted. The building was designed as the "San Jacinto Hotel" by noted Houston architect Joseph Finger for the Miller Investment Company but was purchased before completion by prominent businessman and philanthropist Jesse H. Jones. When Jesse Jones purchased the hotel in January of 1929 although the exterior was complete, the rooms had never been furnished and it is assumed the hotel never opened. The hotel opened as the "Texas State Hotel" in the spring of 1929. The building is nominated to the National Register under Criterion C at the local level of significance as an important example of the early twentieth-century Spanish Plateresque revival style of architecture and as a work of architect Joseph Finger.

Development of the neighborhood

Previously, this southeast corner of Block 80 was the home of the First Baptist Church (1883 - ca. 1905). The church was built in 1883 and served the surrounding residential neighborhood. In the late nineteenth century this block, with the exception of the church and a small three-story commercial building on the corner of Main and Capitol, was residential in use. The residential structures were one and two-story, wood-framed structures with front and side porches typical of the era. Outbuildings, stables, and outhouses also appear on the 1885 and 1890 Sanborn maps. There were two large residential structures on the block: one facing Capitol and the second adjacent to the church facing Rusk. These two large houses remain as the last residential hold-outs as the block changes to commercial use in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. In 1896 the entire Main Street block face had turned commercial and by 1924 the entire block followed suit. City Directory lists a photographer, Art L. Edwards, as having his studio and residence at 712 Fannin from 1908- 1915. The Houston Gas Company briefly had an office at 702-08 Fannin in 1910 and the BR [sic] Goodrich Company had an office briefly in 1915 in the 700 block. Dolly Skinner, the widow of Fred E., ran a rooming house on Capitol and one at 712 Fannin.

From 1907 to the late 1920s, the lots where the Texas State Hotel was located were vacant. The December 1925 Texas General Contractors Association Bulletin shows Joseph Finger as "making plans" for the San Jacinto Hotel, a 16-story, 125,000-square-foot hotel for N. Nauman with estimated costs projected at 1.5 million. Six months later the same source has Finger "making plans" for a 10-16-story hotel for B. V. Christie for an estimated $600,000 with no mention of the hotel name. There is no mention of the hotel project from 1926 to 1928 in the Texas General Contractors Bulletin.

A Houston Chronicle article from 1950 tells the story of two New York investment bankers coming to Houston "to look around." Noting a shortage of hotel rooms, the two acquired the northwest corner of Fannin and Rusk and "wrecked a couple of rooming houses." This is unlikely since the Sanborn maps show the northwest corner as vacant land in 1907 and no new development until the hotel. Miller Investment Company hired Joseph Finger to design a 381-room fireproof building to be known as the San Jacinto Hotel. Construction began in 1926 with C. R. Berry as general contractor. The structural steel was fabricated and erected by Orange Car and Steel Company of Orange, Texas. Estimated costs were $1,600,000. Miller Investment Company did not complete the project and the steel structure stood unfinished for two years.

In a related event, Jesse H. Jones traveled to Washington D.C. in the winter of 1927 with a $200,000 certified check to secure Houston's bid for the Democratic National Convention of 1928.' There was a concern of the lack of hotel rooms in the city and a hospitality committee, formed mainly of Houston women, set to work to guarantee accommodation of the delegates in available hotel rooms and private residences.
In January of 1928, George Sears, attorney for the hotel general contractor C. R. Berry, reached an agreement with local businessman and attorney Will C. Hogg who agreed to finance the construction of the hotel and arrange for its operation with the intent of completing the building in time for democratic national convention scheduled to open on June 26th of that same year. Hogg did complete the building but failed to furnish and staff it in time to receive convention guests. This is substantiated by a photograph appearing in the Quarterly Review of Houston (January-June 1928) where the hotel appears completed."

Jesse H. Jones announced he was purchasing the hotel in January of 1929. Jones' option included all outstanding bonds against the building including $700,000 of first lien bonds help by Will C. Hogg. At the time of the sale, Jones predicted it would take several months to furnish and open the hotel and the anticipated opening in late spring or summer. The building remained Jones' or his philanthropic organization's (Houston Endowment) real estate portfolio until the early 1970s along with the Rice Hotel (extant, now residential rental), the Lamar (demolished 1985), and McKinney in Houston; The Worth in Ft. Worth (demolished) and the Mayfair (now high-end condos) in New York City."

The General Manager of the Texas State Hotel was R. Bruce Carter, who also managed the Lamar Hotel where he and his family lived. The Texas State had a barber shop in the basement managed by Salvador Guercia and a Beauty Salon on the third floor managed by Mabel Hubbell and Alma Berg. The cigar stand and coffee shop were in the lobby. The double-height sixteenth floor housed a ballroom, dining room, and large banquet kitchen. A 1929 advertisement for the Texas State Hotel from the Houston city directory announces the city's newest hotel with 400 guest rooms and baths with rates of $2 and up. The ad also boasts the hotel is "one of the most perfectly appointed hostelries in the south."

In 1930 there were 19 hotels listed in the city plus two apartment hotels: The Warwick and Plaza. Texas State ranked third in the number of rooms behind Rice with 1,000 rooms and Lamar with 500. The Rice, Plaza, and Warwick are all still standing. Of the three, only the Warwick, now called Hotel Za Za is still a hotel. The Plaza was recently remodeled and its exterior preserved yet its interior completely gutted and reconfigured for medical offices. The Rice is rental apartments and condos.

The evolution of the twentieth-century hotel in Texas

Stagecoach travelers were accommodated by inns and taverns in pre-railroad Texas." Once rail travel was established, hotel accommodations improved and provided lodging to business travelers. With the establishment of the National Highway Act in 1923, there was a three-fold increase in the number of registered cars in the country and families began to travel for leisure. Early 20th-century highway development focused on the improvement of existing roads that lead travelers directly into the center of small towns and cities.

In addition to the railroad, technological advances such as the elevator and the structural frame, also played a large part in the development of the urban hotel building form. These advances paved the way for hotels with hundreds of rooms on a relatively small urban footprint. These technological advances also allowed for the skyscraper. Prior to air conditioning, one of the design challenges was to provide light and air circulation to all the interior rooms. This was accomplished by the building plan and gave rise to the letter plan buildings where the building footprint
corresponds to an E, U, C, or T. The Texas State Hotel is a C-plan building with the first two floors forming a rectangular base and the upper floors (three to sixteen) rising up in a C-shape. The C-shape is formed by the central portion on the western side of the building with two symmetrical wings jutting forward to the east. The first two floors and basement accommodated the necessary kitchen, laundry, and staff back-of-house services as well as guest amenities such as the barbershop, cigar stand, beauty parlor, and coffee shop. The ballroom, banquet kitchen, and dining room were located on the sixteenth floor.

In the Southwest, the Revival Styles were popular for ornamenting steel-framed skyscrapers and reinforced concrete mid-rise buildings. These styles included Renaissance Revival, Classical Revival, Spanish Plateresque and Mission Revival, and Gothic Revival. In 1922 Houston established its first Planning Commission to address civic issues such as establishing a beautiful civic center, planning for growth and increased traffic needs, planning park space, and establishing zoning. The Planning Commission brought in outside consultants to assist in this effort. The city center plan was directed by landscape architect S. Herbert Hare of the Kansas City firm Hare and Hare and included five major buildings: a post office, library, criminal courts, municipal courts, and a large city and county building. By 1925 the Julia Ideson building (the original central downtown library and now the city archives), designed by Cram and Ferguson of Boston, was under construction. After the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent depression, the plan was largely abandoned and the Julia Ideson building was the only building constructed from Hare's plan for the civic center. Renderings from the Hare plan as well as a 1906 plan depicted buildings in the Spanish Mediterranean style although the plan did not dictate any one architectural style. Subsequent buildings, including the Texas State Hotel, paid lip service to these two plans as well as the popularity of variations of the Spanish Mediterranean style in the southwest during this era.

Spanish Plateresque was popular during the 16th century in colonial Mexico. It is characterized by a mixture of decorative elements from the Gothic, Mudejar, and Spanish Renaissance styles. The style is said to have been inspired by the platero or silversmith. Cyril Harris defines the style as, "silversmith-like; the richly decorative style of the Spanish Renaissance of the 16th century." Plateresque differs from the Baroque of the same century in Mexico and is less decorative. The Plateresque has an element of applied flatness as seen in the porticos-in-antis on the hotel. This flatness is more than compensated for with elaborate decorative elements including the window and door surrounds on the second and sixteenth levels and the fanciful and ornate treatment of the entire second floor. The Plateresque differs from the Baroque which was much more liberal with ornamentation and culminated in the Churrigueresque, a style where every visible surface was covered with garlands, swags, putti or some sort of relief ornamentation.

Stylistically the Julia Ideson is similar to the Texas State Hotel with its elaborate façade composed of arched door surround, or a portico-in-antis, executed in marble with engaged columns, arched upper-level windows, and gothic-inspired delicate pierced tracery at the parapet. The Spanish Plateresque style of ornamentation is seen on other Houston buildings including the Gulf Publishing Building (b. 1928, demolished); Palmer Memorial Church and Autry House (b. 1928, NR 1984) located between Main and Fannin near Rice University; the original 1925 Hermann Hospital (extant) at the corner of Fannin and Outer Belt in the Texas Medical Center; the Federal Land Bank (1929, extant) and St. Anne Church (1924, 1940, extant). Other buildings constructed in the similar and less elaborate Spanish Mediterranean style included Star Engraving (b. 1930, extant) and many residential buildings in the South Hampton and River Oaks neighborhoods.

The columns seen on the Texas State Hotel are very similar to those found in 16th Mexico convents, specifically the cloister of the Convento del la Merced in Mexico City (photo page 32). The columns are decorated with ribbons of garland that form a diamond pattern. In each of the diamond shapes are fleur-de-lys or other decorative elements.

Architectural Plans

The original architectural drawings for the building are dated 1925 from Joseph Finger's office and the project title block states: "San Jacinto Hotel: A Hotel Building in Houston, Texas." The drawing title block shows the plans drawn by B.L.B and W.L.B and checked by J.F. [Joseph Finger]. The drawings are signed by four representatives of the San Jacinto Hotel Co. yet their signatures are not decipherable. The original unique floors include the basement level where the Barber Shop, Tailor Shop, various storage vaults (furniture, blanket, and linen), and back-of-house functions (boiler, transformer vault, machinery space kitchen stores, and ice machine) were located. There were two toilets, one public located next to the Barber Shop and the other for the staff was segregated and labeled on the drawings as "WHITE WOMEN HELPS TOILET, COLORED WOMEN HELPS TOILET, WHITE MEN HELPS TOILET AND COLORED MEN HELPS TOILET."

The ground floor lobby had a central entrance off of Fannin and a secondary side entrance off of Rusk. On either side of the primary entrances four individual commercial storefronts each with individual entrances are shown. The Coffee Shop was located in the southwest corner of the building and had an entrance onto Rusk. The three elevator bays and the staircase are visible on the drawings. The second floor or mezzanine had a balustraded central open well in the center, a dining room to the west, and sample hotel rooms along the northern wall. The third floor begins the main shaft of the building and the C-plan is visible with a small appendage on the northwest corner. The extant smoke stack is visible on the drawings. The last unique floor was the sixteenth with the ballroom, dining room, and large kitchen.

Air conditioning in Houston

In 1934 Ben Milam became the first hotel to have air conditioning (a central washed air system) for its coffee shop, manager's office, and barber shop. In May 1937 the hotel rooms and lobby followed. The William Penn Hotel followed and was completely air-conditioned in 1938. The first hotel in Texas to be fully air-conditioned was the St. Anthony in San Antonio. The rush to air conditioning started a competition and the Houston Chronicle boasted that by the early 1950s, Houston had more air-conditioned hotel rooms "than any other city of comparable size." A list of Houston's premier air-conditioned hotels included: The Shamrock, The Rice, Texas State, Lamar, Lamar Annex, Warwick, Ben Milam, William Penn, Hotel Cotton, and The Plaza.

Joseph Finger (1887-1953)

Joseph Finger was Houston's foremost architect from 1910 through the 1940s. He was born and educated in Beilitz, Austria, and immigrated to the United States in 1905 to New Orleans. He arrived in Houston in 1908 "with a canceled railway ticket, $10 in his purse, and looking for a job." By 1929 Finger's Houston commissions included the Bender Hotel, South Texas Commercial National Bank, First Church of Christ, Scientist, The Plaza Hotel, Auditorium Hotel, William Penn Hotel, the American National Insurance Building of Galveston, the 10-story Charleston Hotel in Lake Charles, LA, the Vaughan Hotel in Port Arthur. His residential work included the James Marion West mansion in Clear Lake, about 25 miles south of downtown Houston.

In the 1930s his buildings represented a shift from the popular revival styles of the 1920s to a more modernistic and streamlined style as seen in the second Jefferson Davis Hospital (1937, demolished), Houston City Hall (1939, NR), and the Houston Municipal Airport Terminal and Hangar (1940). He designed numerous grocery stores for the Weingarten family chain based in Houston in the Moderne and Art Deco styles. Finger died on February 6, 1953. At the time of his death, the Harris County Courthouse was under construction, a building he designed with George W. Rustay, his business partner since 1944.

Jesse Holman Jones (1874-1956)

A native of Robertson County, Tennessee, Jesse Jones began his lifelong business career upon completing the ninth grade and went to work managing one of his father's tobacco factories near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. In 1891 his family moved to Dallas and Jones enrolled in Hill's Business College. Four years later he went to work for T. Jones Lumber Company in Hillsboro, Texas, owned by his uncle. He returned to Dallas to manage that firm's branch office, the largest lumber operation in town. He came to Houston in 1898 as general manager for the company and in the first decade of the twentieth century established his own firm, the South Texas Lumber Company. As head of this company he began to expand his interests into real estate, commercial buildings, and banking and in a short time became the city's largest developer. His building construction projects included over 100 buildings in Houston as well as projects in Fort Worth, Dallas, and New York City. Jones eventually sold all but one of his lumber interests and focused on banking and real estate. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he was active in many of the banking and real estate transactions in the city. Jones organized the Houston Hotel Association in 1912 a year before construction of The Rice, one of his hotels.

Jones served as the director general of military relief for the American Red Cross upon the request of President Woodrow Wilson. He became sole owner of the Houston Chronicle in 1926, starting from his initial interest purchased in 1908. He was the director of finance for the Democratic National Convention and it was his personal $200,000 donation that secured Houston as the venue. Jones was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation upon the recommendation of John Nance Garner. He served as chair of the organization, a government entity designed to pull the country out of the Great Depression, by an appointment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He held the chair position from 1933-1939 under his leadership the RFC "became the leading financial institution in America and the primary investor in the economy. The agency also facilitated a broadening of the Texas industry from agriculture and oil into steel and chemicals."

Jones refocused his efforts in Houston following his resignation as Secretary of Commerce after his relationship with FDR deteriorated. By 1979 the Houston Endowment, Jones' philanthropic organization started in 1939 and became the fifteenth largest in the country. The organization is still in existence and provides grants to educational and charitable organizations in the greater Houston area. Jones died in Houston on June 1, 1956.

The Decline and Rehabilitation of the Texas State Hotel

Like urban areas across the nation, Houston's downtown experienced a downturn beginning in the 1950s as the population moved farther from the town center to new suburbs. All of the downtown hotels experienced a steady decline along with the rest of downtown. The Houston Chronicle ran a story of two "strippers", one blonde and one brunette, who was arrested at a stag party at the hotel in 1960. To continue to attract guests and coffee shop customers the hotel was completely remodeled in 1962. The general contractor for the remodel was Gene Murphree, Corp. with Arnold Hendler as architect and designer. The planned work was to redecorate the lobby, modernize the coffee shop, and install a new exterior canopy to extend the original. A total of 350 guest rooms were remodeled. The new remodel removed the original horseshoe dining counter of the coffee shop and introduced sand vinyl to the lobby walls with the columns covered in white with gold foil panels.

In February of 1972, the Houston Endowment, Jesse Jones' philanthropic organization, gave the hotel and the adjacent Houston Bar Center to the Texas Methodist Conferences Moody House, Inc. and Moody House Life Care Trust of Galveston, respectively. The donation was accompanied by $160,000 in cash for operating expenses. The Methodists sold the two buildings in June of that same year.

The current owner purchased the building in 2002 after it had sat empty for at least two decades. The rehabilitation started in 2003 was certified by the Department of the Interior and followed the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. Architects for the rehabilitation were Page Southerland Page of Houston with Peter Mance of Mance Design + Architecture, London, UK for interior lobby restoration and design. The 1960s remodeling was removed from the storefront and lobby and the guest rooms were repaired. The building opened in 2005 and was renamed Club Quarters.

The Texas State Hotel is an important Houston example of the Spanish Plateresque style of architecture designed by Joseph Finger and exemplifies the technological shift of structural framing that allowed for skyscrapers to punctuate the city skyline in the early twentieth century. It is nominated to the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion C at the local level in the area of Architecture.