The first hall rises at the corner

In September 1916 a charter was filed for the Reagan Lodge Masonic Building Association, with C. I. Voss, Helms, and A. C. Bernard among the incorporators. A two-story hall, brick by the one period description, rose at Eleventh and Harvard, the lodge’s first home on the corner it would occupy for the next half century. One map does not fit: the Sanborn fire-insurance sheet corrected to June 1919 shows only a frame dwelling on the corner parcel and no hall at any corner of the intersection. Whether the hall was a converted house, stood elsewhere, came later or was already gone is an open question.

The first recorded event in the new hall was a New Year’s Eve watch party seeing in 1917, with a full cast of Heights names in attendance.