Through the bust, intact

The oil bust of the late 1980s ran its course through the project’s lenders. UnitedBank-Houston, which had signed the 1985 declaration as consenting lienholder, was closed by state regulators on Thursday, April 30, 1987, with $217.9 million in assets, then the largest bank failure in Houston’s history. MeritBanc Savings, the renamed Hardin Savings & Loan, failed in March 1989 and passed into federal conservatorship, and from August 1989 into the hands of the new Resolution Trust Corporation; its former president was indicted in 1992.

The county’s deed index shows the paper moving. In January 1986 Harvard House and its partners deeded the property to new owners financed by Hardin Savings & Loan, and UnitedBank released its lien a month later. In April 1987 a deed passed the property to Hardin S&L itself, filed with an affidavit by Charles S. Parrish; the pattern is that of a trustee’s sale after foreclosure, though the instrument has not been read. On April 8, 1992 Donald L. Frame and others, MeritBanc and the Resolution Trust Corporation, as receiver, deeded it to Harvard Place Inc, which borrowed the same day from Quest Star Bank, and the units passed one by one to individual owners. The building itself did what it has done in every downturn since 1935: it came through intact, its walls and marble untouched by the paperwork moving around them.