The War Apartments and Midcentury · 1943–1965
An addition with skyscraper credentials
1951
From the source
$50,000 ADDITION BEING BUILT TO MASONIC TEMPLE
“A $50,000 addition to the old Heights Masonic Temple Building at Eleventh and Harvard is being constructed by the Fretz Construction Company, and the building will be used for commercial purposes … 132 by 137 feet, of masonry construction … added to the four-story masonry building, the ground floor of which is occupied by the City National Life Insurance Company. Upper floors are used as apartments. Arne G. Engberg is architect; Walter P. Moore, structural engineer, and Howard & Johnson, mechanical engineers.”
Houston Chronicle, February 25, 1951, p. 62. Clip sr1198862354, research archive.
Read the credits line again. Arne G. Engberg, a Nebraskan, had spent three years as chief draftsman for Shreve, Lamb & Harmon while that firm’s Empire State Building was the tallest structure on earth, then worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before opening his own Houston office in 1949. Walter P. Moore founded his engineering firm in 1931 on the proceeds of selling his Stutz Bearcat; it had just engineered Rice Stadium and would engineer the Astrodome. Fretz Construction had lately built Congregation Emanu El’s new synagogue. That is the team a Heights insurance company hired for a one-story shop wing.
The commissioner was City National Life, president Lester A. Miller, the same insurance man who had bought the building from Houston National Bank in 1939. Twelve years into his ownership he was still investing in the corner, and the Chronicle’s headline still called the property what everyone knew it was: the Masonic Temple.
One familiar wrinkle: the article calls it a four-story building. The press never settled the question, printing two, three, four, and once six stories across five decades; the 1964 architectural drawings say three, over a basement. The addition’s shop row still defines the East 11th frontage.
The source
