Houston Heights · Texas · est. 1930
The 1930 Reagan Masonic Temple · today Harvard House
Built in 1930 by Houston architect Lamar Q. Cato, onetime partner of Joseph Finger, the architect of Houston City Hall, and later the designer of the University of Houston’s original Quadrangle. Built of reinforced concrete, brick, and stone, three stories over a raised basement, the temple has anchored its corner since 1930, housing a Masonic temple, civic hall, insurance office, union hall, war-worker apartments, mid-century shop row, and today the homes of the people who live here.
894 Masons at the 1931 peak; a stage, a library, a basement bowling alley as drawn: the civic living room of the Heights.
A 7,000 sq ft dance academy, an Army office and an armory at the corner, Teamsters headquarters.
A federal war-housing lease turned the lodge floors into 24 apartments for war workers.
The shop row kept working while the building passed from offices toward condominiums. The 1951 addition was already in place; no further construction is recorded.
A $3 million conversion is announced: “antiquity with modern class.”
The homes inside the 1930 temple, renovated unit by unit from 2000. This is the building as it is lived in now.
At the northeast corner of Harvard Street and Eleventh Avenue in Houston Heights stands a three-story brick building over a raised basement, trimmed in pink Tennessee marble, that has lived at least six lives. It was built in 1930 as the Reagan Masonic Temple for Reagan Lodge No. 1037, chartered in the Heights in 1910, to the design of Houston architect Lamar Q. Cato, and it opened with more than 850 members on the lodge's rolls at the very crest of America's fraternal age. The Depression took it in five years: the lodge had retreated to rented rooms at Eighth and Harvard by May 1935, and a bank held the temple by August. In 1939 the insurance man Lester A. Miller bought it, and the company he managed, Home Life Assurance, gave it a new name, the Legal Reserve Building. A dance academy, a union headquarters, and a rotation of other lodges passed through before a 1943 federal war-housing lease carved the building into twenty-four apartments for war workers. For two decades after, it was a walk-up beside a neighborhood shop row whose tenants included, for two or three years, an insurance company run by the football legend Sammy Baugh. The Heights hit bottom around 1970 and the corner dropped out of the city directories, though other Masonic bodies went on renting the old lodge room. Then the sixth life: from 1979 a developer rechristened it Harvard House, converted it to condominiums as the oil boom peaked, lost it to the bust and the savings-and-loan collapse, and after a 1992 workout the units passed one by one into ordinary ownership. The lodge that built it never died. It dedicated a new hall half a mile north on Heights Boulevard in 1948, furnished Texas with a Grand Master for 1968, and holds a state historical marker at that hall today. The building is the thing the whole century happened to, and it is still standing.
Underlined names open a cropped source clipping. Names without a link rest on city directories or on notices not yet cropped to the article. Baugh’s company sat at 207 E. 11th, most likely in the 1951 addition.
Underlined names open a cropped source clipping. Job’s Daughters remains a single 1935 directory photograph, uncorroborated in the newspapers.
The corner’s first appearance in the Houston press had nothing to do with architecture: a wolf raided a henhouse at Eleventh and Harvard, and eighteen hens were “pulled from the roost and eaten.” Twenty-two years later the same lots held a marble-trimmed temple.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 1, 1908 (pictured in a digitally restored copy) · full story →
For a stretch of years the corner of Harvard and Eleventh smelled like a florist’s tent. The Houston Heights Garden Club staged its flower shows in the hall, prize lists in the papers, and the spring show moved into the new temple’s exhibition hall.
Houston Post-Dispatch, Nov. 23, 1929, p. 11; Houston Post-Dispatch and Chronicle, 1930–31 · full story →
Both Houston dailies carried the news on the same Sunday: a three-story brick and stone lodge building at the northeast corner of Eleventh and Harvard, Lamar Q. Cato architect, with an auditorium and stage, a library, quarters for the Eastern Star, Rainbow Girls, and DeMolay, and bowling alleys in the basement. Ready, the lodge said, by Thanksgiving.
Houston Chronicle, Mar. 23, 1930, p. 61; Houston Post-Dispatch, Mar. 23, 1930, p. 21 · full story →
The builders missed their Thanksgiving 1930 deadline for the best possible reason: the pink Tennessee marble of the entrance came slowly out of Knoxville. The Chronicle called the rising building “the latest and most imposing structure in Houston Heights.” The delay gave the temple its signature material, still greeting everyone who walks in.
Houston Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1930 · full story →
The death of the lodge’s longtime secretary made the Chronicle’s front page, and his funeral filled the temple’s own auditorium. Helms had also spent thirteen years as president of the Heights school board while the Heights was its own city. Helms School on Eighteenth Street still carries his name.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1932, p. 1, and Sept. 14, 1932, p. 4 · full story →
Six Masonic bodies held their joint public installation on the grounds of Reagan Lodge at Eleventh and Harvard, picnic at six o’clock and the ceremony after. The lawn that hosted watermelon parties and carnivals doubled as the stage for the year’s most formal fraternal event.
Houston Chronicle, June 22, 1932; Houston Post, June 24, 1934 · full story →
Smilax wound around the chandeliers, the orchestra played from a dais dressed as a small forest, and the punch bowl was frozen around fruit and flowers. Among those assisting the hosts: Houston mayor Walter E. Monteith and his wife.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 28, 1932; Houston Post, Dec. 29, 1932 · full story →
The temple’s boys’ order was a dynasty: “the largest and one of the most active in the state,” and Texas champion in competitive degree work two years running. Founded 1921 in the lodge’s first hall at this corner.
Houston Post, Jan. 1, 1933 · full story →
Church comedies, school plays, a musical revue, and a mock wedding staged by a Heights music teacher with seventy children. The period titles alone are a show: “Will Lookum Matrimonial Bureau,” “The Marriage of Jack and Jill,” “Eighteen-Carat Boob,” “Listen to Leon,” “Chintz Cottage.”
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 9, 1933, p. 10 · full story →
Facing $100,000 in building obligations, the members organized a public debt campaign: named teams, a women’s division, a past masters’ committee, and progress dinners in the temple dining room. The fund passed $37,100 by mid-May and $57,000 by the end of the month. The drive is the clearest record of how much the Heights loved this building.
Houston Chronicle, May 16, 1933, p. 9 (pictured in a digitally restored copy) · full story →
Four years after the bank took the temple, Houston insurance man Lester A. Miller bought it for about $40,000. The sale story called it “the former home of the Reagan Masonic Lodge.” Home Life Assurance Company, of which he was general manager, moved in, and the papers had a new name for the corner: the Legal Reserve Building.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 10, 1939, p. 43 · full story →
The morning Houston read of Pearl Harbor, an inside page carried this corner: “yeggs” had cracked two safes in the building over the weekend, the Army engineers’ and a truck drivers’ union’s; only the Teamsters Joint Council’s safe held. One clipping, three eras of tenants.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 8, 1941 (shown in a re-typeset copy) · full story →
The government leased the Reagan Lodge Building for seven years and remodeled its lodge floors into twenty-four three-room apartments for war workers, $45 a month with utilities, “the largest apartment house on the North Side.” The Chronicle ran a photograph with the story: the earliest known picture of the building.
Houston Chronicle, spring 1943 · full story →
At 2:30 a.m., intruders pushed open the door of a 1102 Harvard apartment and set off the tenant’s homemade burglar alarm: a booby trap that spilled a clatter of knives and forks across the floor. The break-in failed on the spot.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 16, 1948 · full story →
The 1951 addition was designed by Arne G. Engberg, by a 1955 account once a draftsman for the Empire State Building’s architects, and engineered by Walter P. Moore, whose firm later engineered the Astrodome. Even the smallest chapter drew serious talent.
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1951, p. 62 (pictured in a digitally restored copy) · full story →
The greatest quarterback of football’s first half-century ran his insurance company from the shop row, between coaching at Hardin-Simmons and ranching 6,400 acres in Rotan. At the office opening he greeted the crowd “with fountain pen palmed, just like he once did a pigskin.”
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1954; Houston Post, Apr. 4, 1954; Best’s Insurance News, Feb. 1955 · full story →
Southwestern Fidelity’s chairman announced a $600,000, four-story, air-conditioned office building for 207 E. 11th, “the first building of its size in the Heights area,” and the Chronicle printed the architects’ sketch. It was never built, and the corner kept its original street wall.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 23, 1956, p. 72; Houston Post, Sept. 23, 1956 · full story →
In January 1957 Southwestern Fidelity advertised its shop-row offices for lease with a remarkable claim: paneled oak and mahogany, wall murals, a 60-car parking lot, and interior photographs to prove it. They are among the only period interior images of the building yet found.
Houston Chronicle, Jan. 27, 1957, p. 32 · full story →
The property was deeded to “Harvard House” in April 1979, and developer T. S. Terry spent three years on the conversion before the Post reported it under way: a $3 million project funded by an interim loan, one- and two-bedroom homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars, “retaining the ornate architecture of the original building.”
Houston Post, Aug. 8, 1982 · full story →
When the condominium conversion introduced Harvard House to Houston, it sold exactly what the building was: homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars inside a 1930 landmark, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.” The display ads ran beneath a drawing of the 1930 facade. The pitch still holds.
Houston Post classifieds, Mar. 1982; Houston Post, Aug. 28–29, 1982, p. 10DD; Houston Chronicle display ads, Oct.–Nov. 1982 · full story →
Twenty stories from a catalog of several hundred, each opening from its own clipping. The full timeline · the history in six chapters →