Edited, expanded, and republished on 9 July 2024. Another essay on Bagby Street with focus on the Downtown Complete Streets Project was published by the Rice Design Alliance. This essay adds to the original essay published on What Are Streets For by describing the Complete Streets Project on Bagby in Midtown.
Introduction
Bagby Street is named for Thomas M Bagby (1814, VA-1868, Houston), who first arrived in Houston in 1837, where he worked as a clerk for the Houston Town Company, the partnership that developed the original town site.
One local historian imagines that Bagby was a keeper of one of the account books recording the sales of Houston lots.1 Bagby later worked as a cotton factor and was an investor in the Houston Direct Navigation Company.2 He served as an alderman for the Fourth Ward in 1866. This all indicates his notability through his life in Houston, but also his lack of notability when Gail Borden created street names for his 62-block survey in 1836/1837.
Bagby Street refers to a pair of discontiguous right-of-ways in Houston. One runs through Midtown, with a northern terminus at the feeder road for I-45 and dead and a southern terminus in the Chelsea neighborhood. A northern segment of Midtown Bagby was the location of one of Houston’s first Complete Streets treatment. Complete Streets is the coinage of Barbara McCann, and Smart Growth America adopted this concept as a basis for a national campaign to promote safe, multimodal urban streets. One of the results of Smart Growth America’s Complete Streets campaign was the adoption of a Complete Streets policy in Houston. Mayor Annise Parker issued Executive Order 1-15 on 1 November 2013. The executive order made Complete Streets a primary planning objective, and one that was incorporated into Chapter 42 of the Houston ordinances. The other Bagby Street, the original one, is treated in greater detail in “Taming Bagby Street.”
Midtown Bagby
Midtown Bagby was probably not laid out until the 1880s, and even as late as 1895, it was probably sparsely developed and still just a neighborhood street. Midtown Bagby was not yet named on this 1884 Map.
Image 2. 1895 Whitty & Stott Map with a close up of Bagby in present-day Midtown, but then just a short neighborhood street near Freedman’s Town and the planned location for Rice Institute. Image source: Library of Congress.
Starting in 1891, Houston Electric Street Railway Company (HESR) operated a line on Louisiana Street serving the former Fairgrounds, which was redeveloped as a suburb known as the South End. Meanwhile, developers competed to developing neighboring Montrose established the Houston & Fairview Street Railway Company, with a shuttle mule car route to connect with the South End route on Louisiana Street. After HESR absorbed the shuttle route, they electrified it and rerouted it as a non-intersecting route using Bagby and Gray streets.3 Electric streetcar service still accessed Midtown Bagby according to this 1930 Map. At that time, the street had grown to reach twelve blocks. But there a limit to Bagby as a thoroughfare because is the development in Montrose and the compass point orientation of those local street networks. In addition, it terminated at Avondale, an elite deed restricted neighborhood.
In 1954, however, the Texas Department of Transportation set in motion a plan that would ultimately re-purpose Midtown Bagby as a surface traffic sewer. In the planning of US-59, TxDOT planned through traffic from Southwest Freeway to run due east and continue east of downtown. Yet they also planned inbound and outbound access for downtown with what would be later designated as Spur 527.4 After the condemnation of some homes in the corridor, in 1962, the first phase of Spur 527 opened traffic between Southwest Freeway and Midtown.
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