The “vacant” years that were not

The city directories list 1100 and 1102 Harvard as vacant from 1936 through 1938, and the record immediately contradicts them. In June 1936 two men gave 1102 Harvard as their home address to police investigating a fatal-injury case. That November the electrical contractor Walter Cavender, 57, who had come to Houston from California eleven years before, died at his home on Kingston Drive; an unread Chronicle page is said to place his shop in the building at 1102 Harvard.

The building never truly emptied; it simply stopped being written down.