The Houston Lodging Project is an examination of various forms of lodging available in Houston from 1837 through 1907. Since this is very close to the timeline for the reign of Queen Victoria of England, this broad period can be fairly characterized as Victorian Houston. Throughout Victorian Houston, different forms of lodging—hotels, boarding houses, “lodging houses,” furnished rooms, and restaurants—served as residences for a critical mass of Houstonians. As a result of the breadth of sources, both primary and secondary, this research will be broken up into two books.
A fragment of an 1877 Sanborn Map of Houston depicts the boarding house of Pauline Rosenfield (yellow building) next to the IOOF Hall (magenta shaded building). These buildings were located on Congress Avenue facing the Harris County Courthouse.
Book I: Lodging in Houston: Residential Hotels, Boarding Houses, and Restaurants, 1837–1877
Houston effectively began as a town in 1837, the year its developers sold the first lot and established a capitol building for the Republic of Texas. Though Houston was a part of an independent nation, for most intents and purposes, Houston was socially Anglo-American, but economically and politically tied to the American Gulf Coast. In Republican Houston, the period prior to formal Texas statehood in 1846, most information about lodging derives from local newspapers, deed records, memoirs, and secondary sources about hotels. Little is known about the nature of boarding houses and restaurants, who operated them, and who lived in them during the Republic. However, there is enough evidence to show that boarding houses were common in Houston.
After Texas statehood, the US Census provides detailed household level information about Houston. The decennial censuses of 1850 and 1860 document the managers of the hotels and who stayed there during the census canvass. The same records reveal the operators, residents, and relative locations of boarding houses. Moreover, several characteristics of households in Houston are perspicuous: (1) household sizes are large, (2) not many households were composed solely by nuclear families, (3) single-member households were rare, and (4) neighborhoods were not well segregated by class. In general, most households were blended with some combination of nuclear families, “broken families,” extended family members, friends, business associates, and boarders. Hotels and boarding houses were themselves blended households, as were many households that were not commercial lodging facilities.
Another trend occurs in Victorian Houston. During the Republic, contemporary with the first town lots selling, people seeking opportunities in the Texas capitol city set up businesses and homes in tents, while most of the permanent shelters in construction two-room “dog-trot” houses. There were a few exceptions. In addition to the capital building, two new hotels were built before the government convened in May 1837. These were likely built of rough-hewn timber as the dog-trot houses were, but these first hotels occupied multiple lots and were two stories. A third hotel was erected on lower Main Street. Actually, its original purpose was a store, but soon it transitioned to a hotel with a saloon and a gambling room. The architecture of Republican Houston was rustic and simple and a few building types served a multiplicity of purposes. In this sense, Houston buildings during the Republic exhibited a great deal of architectural fluidity. In other words, structural appearance did not betray the use of a building, and any single building might be for multiple uses, or was repurposed within its lifecycle.
After the end of the Republic, some elite merchants built detached Greek Revival houses sited on large lots. As more of these fine houses coalesced along the Congress Avenue corridor during the 1850s, this made up the most significant collection of mansions within a small area in Houston. Later writers have referred to this area as “Quality Hill,” usually described as an elite neighborhood. There is no evidence that “Quality Hill” was a contemporary usage, but more important, there is a question of whether it was really an “elite neighborhood” as the term is understood in present-day American vernacular. Among these fine mansions were interlopers. In addition to boarding houses and households headed by persons from the lower trades, some stores and shops intruded. Some of the mansions themselves, while seldom operated as boarding houses, served blended households, some of which housed boarders or employees. As such, either Quality Hill was not an elite neighborhood, or else “elite neighborhood” must have a much different meaning as applied to 1850s Houston compared to the present-day meaning.
However, at least two of these fine mansions were leased out and managed as boarding houses. Charlotte Baldwin Allen, the “mother of Houston,” leased her large Greek Revival house on Main Street to boarding house operators as early as the 1860s, and this house was taking in lodgers until her death in 1895. During Reconstruction, a boarding house operator leased another fine Greek Revival house. This house was formerly owned by Ebenezer Nichols and later purchased by his business partner, William Marsh Rice. These fine mansions which are architecturally speaking single-family detached houses were not always used in that way. In this sense, single-family detached housing is not purely an architectural form. It is in part socially constructed.
Two sets of information are available for Reconstruction Houston (1866–1877): city directories and maps. After the first Houston directory in 1866, there are directories for 1867, 1870, 1873, and 1877. The 1870 city directory is especially important since it provides a source of corroboration with the household level data from the 1870 US Census. As a result, the locations of lodging facilities and other residences are more precise. Some approximate locations can be compared with city maps published in 1869 and 1873. The most helpful map for understanding the social geography of Reconstruction Houston is the first Houston Sanborn Fire Map, published in 1877. This map contains detailed information about building footprints, building uses, construction materials, and precise locations. These map details are compared to personal listings in the 1877 city directory.
As Houston was still a walking city from 1837 through 1877, virtually all Houstonians minimized their commutes by locating their residences in proximity to their job sites. Lodging came in three forms during this period. Hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants all offered lodging and meals. So residential lodging was a convenient and economical solution for workers in the context of a walking city who needed to keep their commutes short and did not have the means or the time to prepare their own meals. A pattern emerges imperfectly named the “Social Inversion of Eating Out.” Houston workers often toiled for ten to twelve hours per day, so they had neither the time nor the energy to shop and prepare meals. The typical Victorian had no access to a kitchen nor did he have use for one. Therefore, Houston (mostly male) workers paid for room and board in lodging houses, where someone else provisioned and prepared food for service at a common table served at a set time.
Book II: Lodging in Houston: Residential Hotels, Boarding Houses, “Lodging Houses,” and Furnished Rooms, 1878–1907
While this research and the thesis for this time period are both under development, this later period reveals a great change in lodging choices and residential choices in general. The development of the streetcar system induced larger commutes and suburbanization, therefore Houston transformed from a walking city to a streetcar city with suburbs by the end of the Victorian period.
Many Houstonians still resided in lodging facilities after Reconstruction, but the array of choices changed significantly. Where lodging had previously implied room and board with meals served at a common table at a set time, lodging facilities broadened the array of choices. An increasing number of hotels unbundled room and board, and increasingly distanced themselves from the table d’hôte traditions which were legacies of old public house styles of service. Boarding houses continued to increase in popularity among Houston workers through the 1890s. However, around the turn of the century, fewer workers demanded board as a bundled service with their lodging. New options, so-called “lodging houses” and “furnished rooms,” offered rooms for rent without meals provided. As such, restaurants evolved into their present-day forms. Eventually restaurants no longer offered lodging and only served food and drink, though they often sold “commutation tickets” for meals by the day, week, or month. So boarding contracts still existed, but restaurants increasingly replaced boarding houses in this role.
As Houston suburbanized, it grew increasingly segregated economically, socially, and racially. Essentially, streetcars provided a technological means for Houstonians to attenuate their residences from distasteful land uses and undesirable people.
City directories were published in 1879, 1880, 1882, 1884, 1886, 1889, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1895, 1899, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1905, and 1907. Sanborn published maps in 1885, 1890, 1896, and 1907. Houston grew in population by about seventy percent every decade. As the city grew in population, it grew more densely in its center at the same time it suburbanized. Lodging facilities of all types were much larger in scale after Reconstruction. More important are the nexus years between two sources. These include 1880, the year of a decennial census and a city directory; and 1890, the year of a Sanborn map and a city directory. There are no extant household level census records for Houston in 1890 as they were destroyed by fire, denying us the opportunity to compare information from a nexus of three sources. Two other important years for local historical sources are 1892 and 1900. In 1892, the city of Houston rationalized its street addressing system such that the location of a block face can be surmised with nothing more than a street address. This removed the uncertainty of street address locations that existed before 1892. While a decennial census was recorded in Houston in 1890, a fire later destroyed these records in Washington, DC along with most other census manuscript returns from all over the country. Aggregate statistics for 1890 are recorded, but there is no personal information about households still available. The 1900 census records Houston households, when the city had increased in population by about 1.5 times compared to 1880. The 1900 census records much more personal information about residents: it records relationship to the head of house (just as in 1880), birthdate, year of naturalization, whether the home was owner occupied, and whether the home was mortgaged or free of debt.
Throughout Victorian Houston, there are some interesting patterns to the business of lodging. First, the owners of hotel properties rarely managed them. Rather, they leased them to tenant proprietors. Most often, these hotel operators did not persist at any hotel for long. Though less is known about boarding house proprietors, they also leased houses to run. The lodging business was a heavily gendered one. Hotels were almost always run by men; boarding houses were often run by widowed women. There are some examples of hotel and boarding house operators who persisted in the period of time in the same business, but less often at the same location. Such turnover indicates that it was a hard way to make a living. The hotel developers sought to generate passive income through rents, while the hotel tenant proprietors may have paid rents which included the developers’ investment returns. Most likely, there was not enough profit in the hotel business to satisfy both the developer and the operator. In general, the businessmen with the capital required to buy or develop a hotel property had no desire to engage themselves in the hospitality industry; and the businessmen with the inclinations and personalities suitable for managing hospitality lacked the capital to develop their own hotels.
Compared to architecture in Republican and Reconstruction Houston, post-Reconstruction buildings were built to intentional designs, they were more individuated in design, and their interiors and exteriors were built of finer materials. Architectural fluidity, however, was still in evidence during this later period, but building types and purposes became much more rigid over time. For example, William J Hutchins removed the ruins of the Old City Hotel in 1860 and started building a new hotel on the same property. However, this five-story hotel with ground leases probably did not reach its finished state until 1867. This was the first hotel in Houston to be recognizable as a hotel in terms of architectural form. Hutchins House was the finest hotel in Houston and one of the finest in Texas. On the contrary, Schulte House, though used as a lodging house during Reconstruction, started listing itself as a hotel in the city directories after 1877. Schulte House occupied a partial block on Commerce Avenue overlooking Buffalo Bayou. Sanborn Maps reveal that Schulte House included as many as five distinct buildings, though the main structure was a brewery and storage facility. Other cases of architectural fluidity persisting after Reconstruction were detached houses which were leased and operated as boarding houses. The Allen house at the corner of Main and Rusk streets and the Nichols-Rice house across from Courthouse Square persisted as boarding houses. There is no evidence of buildings that were constructed for the purpose of being used as boarding houses. Often they were operated out of detached houses. This brings under the question the use of the expression “single-family” housing as applied to Victorian Houston. Since these detached houses were often used as boarding houses or else housed blended families, they were in fact being inhabited as multi-family housing. So there is no evidence that Victorian Houstonians distinguished single-family and multi-family in an architectural sense. These were all just “dwellings” or “dwelling houses.” Our present-day understanding of a single-family house is an invention of post-planning America, first shaped by building codes, Euclidian zoning, and early-twentieth-century social reformers.