The historic district arrives

On February 20, 2008 the City of Houston designated the Houston Heights Historic District East (Resolution 2008-4). This corner sits inside the district. The city’s inventory line reads “1100 Harvard · Harvard House Condo · 199 · 1918 · PC · Neo-Classical Masonic Lodge,” under a year column headed “circa yr blt,” PC meaning potentially contributing. Heights West, designated December 19, 2007, lies west of Heights Boulevard and does not include 1100 Harvard.

Three things follow. The building is a contributing structure today: the city’s 2010 preservation ordinance defines a contributing structure to include “any structure that was identified as ‘potentially contributing’ in any historic district” (Sec. 33-201), a rule the city’s preservation manual limits to districts designated before October 13, 2010, and the city has applied it to Heights East buildings classed PC in 2008. The inventory’s 1918 is wrong, but the correct date also falls inside the period of significance: the city’s design guidelines treat the 1940s as the end of that period for the Heights districts, and say a building constructed during it “could be considered contributing.” And no local preservation law stood in the way of the 1982 gutting: Houston had no preservation ordinance until 1995. The city’s preservation pages also credit the building to L. R. Hayes; the architect was Lamar Q. Cato, and the lodge’s first hall here rose in 1916.