Houston Heights · Texas · est. 1930
The 1930 Reagan Masonic Temple · today Harvard House
Built in 1930 by architect Lamar Q. Cato, a former Houston City Architect, onetime partner of Joseph Finger, architect of Houston City Hall, and designer of the original University of Houston quadrangle and Texas Southern University’s first halls. Built of concrete, brick, and steel, the temple has anchored its corner for ninety-five years, housing a Masonic temple, civic hall, wartime armory, mid-century offices, and today fourteen homes.
894 Masons at the 1931 peak; a stage, a library, a basement bowling alley as drawn: the civic living room of the Heights.
A 7,000 sq ft dance academy, a wartime armory, Teamsters headquarters.
A federal war-housing lease turned the lodge floors into 24 apartments for war workers.
The shop row kept working while the building passed from offices toward condominiums. The 1951 addition was already in place; no further construction is recorded.
A $3 million conversion is announced: “antiquity with modern class.”
Fourteen homes inside the 1930 temple. This is the building as it is lived in now.
Underlined names open a cropped source clipping. Names without a link rest on city directories or on notices not yet cropped to the article.
Underlined names open a cropped source clipping. Job’s Daughters remains a single 1935 directory photograph, uncorroborated in the newspapers.
The corner’s first appearance in the Houston press had nothing to do with architecture: a wolf raided a henhouse at Eleventh and Harvard, and eighteen hens were “pulled from the roost and eaten.” Twenty-two years later the same lots held a marble-trimmed temple.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 1, 1908 (digitally restored) · full story →
For a stretch of years the corner of Harvard and Eleventh smelled like a florist’s tent. The Houston Heights Garden Club staged its flower shows in the hall, prize lists in the papers, and the spring show moved into the new temple’s exhibition hall.
Houston Post, Nov. 23, 1929; Houston Post and Chronicle, 1930–31 · full story →
Both Houston dailies carried the news on the same Sunday: a three-story brick and stone lodge building at the northeast corner of Eleventh and Harvard, Lamar Q. Cato architect, with an auditorium and stage, a library, quarters for the Eastern Star, Rainbow Girls, and DeMolay, and bowling alleys in the basement. Ready, the lodge said, by Thanksgiving.
Houston Chronicle, Mar. 23, 1930; Houston Post, Mar. 23, 1930 · full story →
The builders missed their Thanksgiving 1930 deadline for the best possible reason: the pink Tennessee marble of the entrance came slowly out of Knoxville. The Chronicle called the rising building “the latest and most imposing structure in Houston Heights.” The delay gave the temple its signature material, still greeting everyone who walks in.
Houston Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1930 · full story →
The death of the lodge’s longtime secretary made the Chronicle’s front page, and his funeral filled the temple’s own auditorium. Helms had also spent thirteen years as president of the Heights school board while the Heights was its own city. Helms School on Eighteenth Street still carries his name.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1932; Houston Post, Sept. 14, 1932 · full story →
Six Masonic bodies held their joint public installation on the grounds of Reagan Lodge at Eleventh and Harvard, picnic at six o’clock and the ceremony after. The lawn that hosted watermelon parties and carnivals doubled as the stage for the year’s most formal fraternal event.
Houston Chronicle, June 22, 1932; Houston Post, June 24, 1934 · full story →
Smilax wound around the chandeliers, the orchestra played from a dais dressed as a small forest, and the punch bowl was frozen around fruit and flowers. Among those assisting the hosts: Houston mayor Walter E. Monteith and his wife.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 28, 1932; Houston Post, Dec. 29, 1932 · full story →
The temple’s boys’ order was a dynasty: “the largest and one of the most active in the state,” and Texas champion in competitive degree work two years running. Founded 1921 in the frame hall that stood here before the temple.
Houston Post, Jan. 1, 1933 · full story →
Church comedies, school plays, a musical revue, and a mock wedding staged by a Heights music teacher with seventy children. The period titles alone are a show: “Will Lookum Matrimonial Bureau,” “The Marriage of Jack and Jill,” “Eighteen-Carat Boob,” “Listen to Leon,” “Chintz Cottage.”
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 9, 1933 (digitally restored) · full story →
Facing $100,000 in building obligations, the members organized a public debt campaign: named teams, a women’s division, a past masters’ committee, and progress dinners in the temple dining room. The fund passed $37,100 by mid-May and $57,000 by the end of the month. The drive is the clearest record of how much the Heights loved this building.
Houston Chronicle, May 16, 1933 (digitally restored) · full story →
Four years after the bank took the temple, Houston insurance man Lester A. Miller bought it for about $40,000. The sale story’s parcel, 200 feet on Harvard by 132 on Eleventh, matches the condominium’s legal description to the foot. His Home Life Assurance Company moved in, and the papers had a new name for the corner: the Legal Reserve Building.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 10, 1939 (digitally restored) · full story →
The morning Houston read of Pearl Harbor, an inside page carried this corner: “yeggs” had cracked two safes in the building over the weekend. The Teamsters’ own safe held. One clipping, three eras of tenants.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 8, 1941 (digitally restored) · full story →
The government leased the Reagan Lodge Building for seven years and remodeled its lodge floors into twenty-four three-room apartments for war workers, $45 a month with utilities, “the largest apartment house on the North Side.” The Chronicle ran a photograph with the story: the earliest known picture of the building.
Houston Chronicle, spring 1943 · full story →
At 2:30 a.m., intruders pushed open the door of a 1102 Harvard apartment and set off the tenant’s homemade burglar alarm: a booby trap that spilled a clatter of knives and forks across the floor. The break-in failed on the spot.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 16, 1948 · full story →
The 1951 addition was designed by Arne G. Engberg, who had been a draftsman at the Empire State Building’s architects in the 1940s, and engineered by Walter P. Moore, whose firm later engineered the Astrodome. Even the smallest chapter drew serious talent.
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1951 (digitally restored) · full story →
The greatest quarterback of football’s first half-century ran his insurance company from the shop row, between coaching at Hardin-Simmons and ranching 6,400 acres in Rotan. At the office opening he greeted the crowd “with fountain pen palmed, just like he once did a pigskin.”
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1954; Houston Post, Apr. 4, 1954; Best’s Insurance News, Feb. 1955 · full story →
Southwestern Fidelity announced a $600,000, four-story, fully air-conditioned office building for 207 E. 11th, “the first building of its size in the Heights area,” and printed the architects’ sketch. Five months later the company moved to Montrose instead. The tower would have replaced the shop row; its cancellation preserved the corner’s original street wall.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 23, 1956; Houston Post, Sept. 23, 1956 · full story →
When Southwestern Fidelity left for Montrose, the lease ad for its vacated space made a remarkable claim for a Heights shop row: paneled oak and mahogany, wall murals, parking for sixty cars, and interior photographs to prove it. They are among the only period interior images of the building yet found.
Houston Chronicle, Jan. 27, 1957 (digitally restored) · full story →
Developer T. S. Terry acquired the property in April 1979 and spent three years on the conversion before the Post reported it under way: a $3 million project funded by an interim loan, one- and two-bedroom homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars, “retaining the ornate architecture of the original building.”
Houston Post, Aug. 8, 1982 · full story →
When the condominium conversion introduced Harvard House to Houston, it sold exactly what the building was: homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars inside a 1930 landmark, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.” The display ads ran beneath a drawing of the 1930 facade. The pitch still holds.
Houston Post classifieds, Mar. 1982; Houston Post, Aug. 29, 1982; Houston Chronicle display ads, Oct.–Nov. 1982 · full story →
Twenty stories from a catalog of several hundred, each opening from its own clipping. The full timeline · the full history →