Houston Heights · Texas

The Full Timeline

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1100 Harvard · 1891 to today

One corner of Houston Heights, year by year. Select any entry for the full story and an image of the source. The six-chapter narrative begins here.

1891–1929Before the Temple

  1. 1891 The Omaha and South Texas Land Company plats Houston Heights: 1,756 acres of high ground, its streets named for colleges. “Harvard” was aspiration from the first day. more →
  2. 1896 The Heights incorporates as its own city. more →
  3. 1904 The corner is house lots. E. L. Rugg, an Alvin fruit farmer turned Houstonian, makes his home at 1102 Harvard. more →
  4. 1905 An eight-room house with a stable stands at 1100 Harvard, offered furnished at $35 a month. more →
  5. 1908 The corner makes the Chronicle for the first time when a wolf raids a henhouse and eats eighteen hens. more →
  6. 1910 Reagan Lodge No. 1037 is chartered on December 12. James Helms carries the charter home from Waco, and the first officers are installed on December 31. more →
  7. 1911 The young lodge meets over the volunteer fire station at 910 Yale Street, next to Dr. Olive’s drugstore. more →
  8. 1912 One year old, the lodge officiates a public cornerstone ceremony for a Baptist church. In November, a Heights judge travels in the honor party escorting Houston’s old Masonic cornerstone to Waco. more →
  9. 1913 When the wreck of the “Owl” train kills engineer John Latchford, Heights Masons carry his pall from his Yale Street home. more →
  10. 1914 With no hall of their own yet, the lodge and its Eastern Star chapter install their officers together at the public playground. more →
  11. 1915 The lodge’s public installation picnic draws “fully 1000 people,” in a town of nine thousand. more →
  12. 1916 A building association incorporates, and the lodge’s first hall rises at Eleventh and Harvard. Its first recorded event is a New Year’s Eve watch party. more →
  13. 1917 The hall enters regular use. Soldiers from Camp Logan are invited guests at the December 31 watch service, and the Grand Lodge grants a special dispensation to confer degrees ahead of schedule on a soldier bound for France. more →
  14. 1918 Worshipful Master W. H. Lynn halts lodge business and marches the brethren to the funeral of Oscar Grubbs, age 21. The Heights votes to join Houston the same year. more →
  15. 1921 Lodge officers are elected directly off a Friday afternoon basket picnic. more →
  16. 1923 A gas explosion at Lawlor’s Cafe on the block injures a worker lighting the water heater. Commerce reached the corner before the cornerstone did. more →
  17. 1925 The lodge lays the cornerstone of John H. Reagan High School, with schoolchildren delivering addresses at the ceremony. more →
  18. 1925–26 Between degree nights the hall belongs to teenagers: Rainbow girls on Saturday afternoons, DeMolay boys in the evenings. more →
  19. 1927 The lodge calls a cornerstone ceremony for a proposed new Heights Masonic Temple. The project waits three more years. more →
  20. 1928 The Houston Heights Garden Club begins staging its flower shows in the hall at Harvard and Eleventh. more →
  21. 1929 In November a bid notice from architect Lamar Q. Cato’s office seeks contractors for “a two-room hall and stucco addition to the present hall,” perhaps at this corner. On December 31 the lodge holds its nineteenth-anniversary watch party, the last event in the old hall. more →

1930Building the Temple

  1. Feb 1930 An all-day degree marathon fills the old hall: candidates report at 8:30 a.m., 1 p.m., and 7 p.m., with dinner served at noon. more →
  2. Mar 23, 1930 Both Houston dailies announce a $140,000 lodge building designed by architect Lamar Q. Cato: three stories and a basement, an auditorium with a stage, a library, quarters for the youth orders, and bowling alleys below. more →
  3. 1930 By a later local history, the corner house is not demolished but rolled north up Harvard Street; no period record confirms it. more →
  4. Jun 20, 1930 The city issues the building permit, printed for “1101 Harvard,” the wrong side of the street. The building rose at 1100 anyway. more →
  5. Jul 26, 1930 The cornerstone is leveled with full Masonic ceremony under Grand Lodge dispensation. Judge Ewing Boyd, who once rode into Houston on a locomotive cowcatcher, delivers the oration. more →
  6. Fall 1930 The pink Tennessee marble arrives slowly from Knoxville and the finish runs late, for the best possible reason. The Chronicle’s October verdict: “the latest and most imposing structure in Houston Heights.” more →
  7. Dec 1930 The formal opening is planned for December 31, the lodge’s birthday. Grand Lodge returns record 855 members; the completed cost is carried at $110,700. more →

1930–1935The Golden Age

  1. 1931 Membership peaks at 894. The Rainbow Girls hold their first public installation in the new hall, and the Garden Club’s spring flower show moves into the exhibition hall. more →
  2. 1932 Charter member and longtime secretary James F. Helms dies; his funeral fills the temple’s own auditorium. Helms School carries his name today. more →
  3. Dec 1932 Houston’s mayor, Walter E. Monteith, helps host a December dance in the temple’s DeMolay ballroom. The orchestra plays from a dais dressed as a small forest, and the punch bowl is frozen around fruit and flowers. more →
  4. 1932, 1934 Six Masonic bodies hold their joint public installations on the temple grounds: picnic at six, ceremony after. more →
  5. 1933 Reagan Chapter of DeMolay is the largest in Texas and a two-time state champion in competitive degree work. more →
  6. 1933 The Letter Carriers’ auxiliary stages a comedy at the Reagan Masonic Hall, one of dozens of productions in the temple’s golden years. more →
  7. 1933 Members mount a public debt drive, team by team and dinner by dinner, and raise more than $57,000. more →
  8. 1933 The young people of Grace Methodist Church and Reagan High School’s Library Science Club present the comedy “An Arizona Cowboy” on the temple stage. more →
  9. 1933 More than 100 couples fill a graduation dance, with a tap dancer performing between songs. more →
  10. 1934 The Rainbow Girls stage an “Old Time Style Show” of 35 vintage costumes, and an August carnival takes over the lawn. more →
  11. 1934 On Easter morning the lodge walks from the temple into Norhill Methodist Church “in a body.” more →
  12. 1934 Ten or eleven Eastern Star chapters, depending on the clipping, essentially every one in Houston, converge on the temple for a grand matron’s visit. more →
  13. 1935 Frank E. Anderson delivers an address on John H. Reagan in the lodge rooms, the temple’s last recorded oration. more →
  14. 1935 The Depression closes the temple era. The lodge moves to rented quarters at Eighth and Harvard by May and never misses a meeting; the building passes to its lender in August. It serves the neighborhood as a polling place to the very end. more →

1935–1943The Legal Reserve Building

  1. 1936 The directories say vacant; the record says otherwise. An electrical contractor is said to have kept a shop in the building until his death that November, and two men give the old temple as their home address that summer. more →
  2. 1938 A Seventh Day Adventist school appears at “11th and Harvard” (which building at the corner it used is not settled), and 3,000 square feet of commercial space is offered to Heights businesses. more →
  3. 1939 Insurance man Lester A. Miller buys the building from Houston National Bank. Home Life Assurance Company, of which he was general manager, moves in, and the papers begin calling the corner the Legal Reserve Building. more →
  4. 1939 The Mary Jane Studios dance academy takes 7,000 square feet of the old lodge floors. more →
  5. 1940 A Texas Defense Guard post drills at “the 111th Engineers’ Armory, Harvard and Eleventh.” Which building at the corner served as the armory is unproven. The lodge, meanwhile, buys its future home site on Heights Boulevard for $3,600. more →
  6. 1941 The lodge At the lodge’s rented hall at Eighth and Harvard, superintendent P. H. Obenour, about seventy, dies of a heart attack on the roof while watching a work crew. The notice gives what is probably the exile hall’s address: 801 Harvard. more →
  7. 1941 Houston’s Teamsters, Joint Council No. 58, make the building their headquarters. more →
  8. Dec 8, 1941 As Houston reads of Pearl Harbor, the Chronicle reports two safes cracked in the building over the weekend. Only the Teamsters Joint Council’s safe held. more →
  9. 1942 James P. Rogers, a two-term state legislator, is buried from the lodge’s rolls. more →

1943–1965The War Apartments and Midcentury

  1. 1943 Under a seven-year lease to the National Housing Agency through the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the building becomes twenty-four three-room apartments at $45 a month for war workers, and the Chronicle prints the earliest known photograph of the building. The first classified ad from the new apartments sells off an office desk and a leather swivel chair. more →
  2. 1946 The city directory lists the building as the “1102 Apartments,” its 24 homes recorded tenant by tenant. more →
  3. 1948 A tenant’s improvised burglar alarm, a door rigged to spill knives and forks, foils a 2:30 a.m. break-in. more →
  4. 1948 The lodge The lodge dedicates its own new hall at 1606 Heights Boulevard on December 31, designed by past master L. R. Hayes. Its membership has doubled across the decade. more →
  5. 1949 A Post lodge column lists Woodland Lodge and Heights Lodge at the old temple, though it still lists Reagan Lodge at Eighth and Harvard, months after its move. more →
  6. 1951 A $50,000 masonry addition goes up. Its architect was Arne G. Engberg; its structural engineer was Walter P. Moore, whose firm later engineered the Astrodome. more →
  7. Feb 1953 The Post’s lodge column lists Reagan Lodge at its own hall on Heights Boulevard; whether other Reagan bodies still met at the old temple that week is unconfirmed. more →
  8. 1954 Sammy Baugh, charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, opens his insurance company in the shop row. That March the city’s birth register lists a new daughter for the Mullin family of Apartment 22. more →
  9. 1955 The temple itself serves as the Precinct 30 polling place, and a grocery market is offered for sale at 1100 Harvard. more →
  10. 1956 Southwestern Fidelity’s chairman announces a $600,000 four-story office building at 207 E. 11th, “the first building of its size in the Heights area.” It is never built, and the strip stands unchanged. more →
  11. 1957 The company advertises its offices at 207 E. 11th for lease as “one of Houston’s most beautiful office interiors”: paneled oak and mahogany, wall murals, parking for sixty cars. more →
  12. 1958 The State Highway Department moves into the former insurance offices. more →
  13. 1964 A Dallas insurer has the existing building drawn by Houston architects; the renovation the full set is reported to propose is never carried out. The sheets remain the earliest detailed architectural portrait of the building. more →
  14. 1965 The building is offered for sale: three stories of 3,842 square feet each, over a leased shop row. more →

1965–1979The Transition Era

  1. 1966 The lodge Reagan Chapter of DeMolay, founded in 1921, marks its 45th anniversary at the lodge’s hall on Heights Boulevard, not this corner. more →
  2. Dec 1967 The lodge J. W. Chandler, raised in Reagan Lodge, is installed Grand Master of Masons in Texas for 1968. The lodge marches up to present his hat. His recorded reply: it still fits. more →
  3. 1969–73 The Masonic column keeps filling. By the early 1970s, more than a dozen bodies list meetings at the Heights Masonic Temple, 11th and Harvard: lodges, chapters, councils, commanderies, and Eastern Star. more →
  4. Jan 1972 The Grand Lodge of Texas announces cornerstone ceremonies “on the corner of 11th and Harvard Sts.” Thirty-seven years after the lodge left, what that notice referred to remains an open question. more →
  5. 1977 A Post lodge column places Melrose Commandery, which had called the old lodge room “Melrose Temple, 1100 Harvard” in 1963, on Chrisman Road. more →

1979–2000Harvard House

  1. 1979 In April the property is deeded to “Harvard House”; developer T. S. Terry leads the conversion that follows. more →
  2. 1980 The Heights waits out its unfashionable years. Even then, the National Register paperwork for the house across the street locates itself “adjacent to the old Masonic Lodge.” The building never stopped being the landmark. more →
  3. 1981 The name “Harvard House” appears in print, and a teaser ad promises “TOTALLY MODERN LIVING” in a “52 YEAR OLD” structure. more →
  4. 1982 A $3 million condominium conversion is announced. The campaign sells exactly what the building is: “ANTIQUITY with modern class, and prestige,” homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.” more →
  5. 1985 The condominium declaration is recorded (File No. K060751): fourteen units in one building, with Harvard House Condominium Association, Inc. as the association and UnitedBank-Houston as consenting lienholder. Masonic notices still run “In the Temple, 1100 Harvard” that September. more →
  6. 1987–92 The oil bust runs its course through the project’s lenders. A federal workout settles the title in 1992, the units pass to individual owners, and the building comes through intact, as it always has. more →
  7. 1990 A film production chooses the 1100 block of Harvard to stand in for California of seven decades earlier. The corner’s period character was that convincing. more →
  8. 1998 The lodge At the lodge’s hall half a mile north, the Christmas notice invites the brethren to stop by after dinner “to see our new carpet.” more →

2000–todayThe Homes Inside the Temple

  1. 2000–01 The campaign’s ad copy, from June 2000: “14 units now being renovated. Pick Colors. Some Ready Now.” more →
  2. 2000 The building is renovated, and sales run brisk under the Harvard Place Lofts banner, built by Silvestri Homes and marketed by Ray Allison, Realtors: a four-story foyer with a chandelier, rooftop views of downtown, 13-inch masonry walls, and 12-inch concrete floors between homes. more →
  3. 2008 The City of Houston designates the Houston Heights East Historic District, which includes this corner, inventoried as “potentially contributing” under the city’s erroneous 1918 date and, since the city’s 2010 ordinance, a contributing structure. more →
  4. 2010 The lodge Reagan Lodge No. 1037, active to this day, receives an Official Texas Historical Marker at its Heights Boulevard hall. more →
  5. 2013 CNN Money ranks the Heights fourth among big-city neighborhoods in America. The neighborhood caught up to its most imposing building. more →
  6. Today The homes inside the temple’s bones: pink Tennessee marble at the entrance, steel columns in the masonry, and a faint square and compass above the door, in the right light. more →