“Antiquity with modern class”

Price the ad honestly: $318,600 in 1982 is roughly a million dollars in today’s money, asked for a Heights address years before the Heights was fashionable again. The 1981 tax act offered nothing for homes like these. Its 15 and 20 percent rehabilitation credits for buildings thirty and forty years old excluded residential rental property; only the 25 percent credit for certified historic structures reached residential rentals, and this building was never certified, while condominium homes sold to their occupants earned no credit at all. The building’s age was a line in the ads, not a tax benefit.

Developer T. S. Terry’s announced $3 million conversion sold the building on its own terms. The display ads, placed by Turner Owens Properties beneath a drawing of the 1930 facade, offered “prestigious mid-rise condominium homes” with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.” The oil bust arrived mid-campaign and bent the project toward leasing for a stretch; the building itself did not bend.

Four decades on, the copy needs no forgiveness. Antiquity, modern class, and the shadows of downtown are now simply the listing facts, and the homes the campaign created are still here.