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Houston Lodging Project: Abstract
Boarding Houses, Households, Homes, and Families
Residential Hotels and Boarding Houses
Restaurants in Victorian Houston
A common present-day way of thinking about housing can be summarized by the equation, house=home=single-family, detached house. One time I interrogated a technician on this theme. Quite innocently, he claimed, “in X____, where I live, we have normal houses.” He was clearly distinguishing the normal houses of his neighborhood from my row house, which was in his eyes, not a normal house. I asked, “What do you mean by a normal house?” That was pretty cruel, but I could not help it. This is part of the thesis of the book I have been writing for the past two years. I really wanted to hear his explanation. But he remembered that I was his client, and he retreated into customer service mode.
As far as present-day American usage, he was correct. The detached single-family houses in his neighborhood are indeed normal houses, and my row house is not a normal house. His equation was probably (normal) house=home=single-family, detached house. The United States has a tidy normative theory of housing. We expect to own a single-family, detached house. A majority of Boomers and Xers grew up in such housing. We learn that when we come of age, we get a job, leave the home of our parents, and find temporary housing. Fully forming as an adult entails leaving temporary housing and buying a detached house. This bears out in present-day housing vernacular. While measuring housing inventory, sometimes these are reported under the sterile conflation term “units,” but many other times, housing is counted as apartments and homes (single-family detached). In this manner of classification, an apartment is not a home. One local land use and transportation advocate quips, “are they claiming that people who live in apartments are homeless?”
Apartment dwellers, therefore, do not live in homes according to present-day vernacular. Apartments are not proper housing for families. They are simply stop-gap solutions until they can afford their own home. Houstonians, however, have not always talked about housing in this way. Although there are no meaningful housing data for nineteenth-century Houston, there is some anectodal information through advertisements, journals, and other secondary accounts. Newspapers provide an abundance of evidence for modes of speech about housing. First, there is no evidence of people living in what we call “apartments.” On the other hand, there was a diversity of multi-family housing arrangements. Many were of these were informal private arrangements. There were also commercial hotels and boarding houses.
While scholars such as Elizabeth Blackmar and Wendy Gamber point out the prescriptive literature on housing and note progressive trends in housing playing out in the major cities of the northeast, there is ample evidence that Houston was retrograde in these trends. This bears out in language used in Houston newspapers. Through the end of Reconstruction, but especially during the Republic, a house was a conflation term for any building for human use. Thus, a store was a house, a hotel was a house, a tavern was a house, and a warehouse was a house. When a Houstonian distinguished a building used as a residence, the terms were “dwelling” and “dwelling house.” But it was more common to conflate residential use with any other kind of building use, and say “house” instead of dwelling. So this period in Houston does not reveal much evidence for Blackmar’s “rhetorical attenuation between work and home.”
Houstonians conflated buildings in speech. They also conflated buildings in practice. In other words, their language matched their habits. Although there were some exceptions, the most common building type during the early Republic was the simple two-room dog trot house. This was deemed appropriate housing for no less of a figure than President Sam Houston, who for a time, took in Dr Ashbel Smith as a roommate. The first newspaper office in Houston was in a dog trot. As finer building supplies were more readily available (and as Houston moved past an economic depression), newer architecture was more refined. Even while elite local merchants commissioned fine mansions after Texas statehood, these houses were somewhat fluid in function. Present-day observers call some of these “single-family homes.” But this is not how they were commonly used. At least, not the “single family” part. Even elites tended to fill up their houses. Even a merchant heading (patriarchy reigned) a nuclear family often housed servants, employees, business partners, or extended family. In other words, blended families were common, even if closed, nuclear families were also common.
Charlotte Allen operated her house at the corner of Main Street and Rusk Avenue as a boarding house. By all appearances to our eyes, her Greek Revival was a single-family residence. However, it was a commercial boarding house from 1866, and perhaps even earlier. For this reason, single-family, detached house is a not purely an architectural type. The form of the building is not sufficient to identify the type. Instead, single-family detached housing is a type which is a combination of architectural form and social construction. The single-family detached house is partly architectectural form, partly social practice, and partly land use planning. In Victorian Houston, the architectural form is evident, but the characteristic social expectations were lacking and land use planning did not yet exist.
Charlotte Allen was one of many boarding house owners in Houston. A person who resided in a boarding house rented sleeping quarters and enjoyed access to common areas. Like the older public house arrangement, boarding houses often bundled room and board into a single price. “Board” is an old word for a meal plan, as they are offered by college dormitories today. Before streetcar rides were available or economically accessible to workers, they walked for transportation. Workers toiled long hours for six to seven days per week. A long commute was almost out of the question. Workers either sought a boarding house near their job site, or chose job sites a short walk from their boarding house. Specific boarding house arrangements are unknown. However, boarding houses in other cities offered a variety of meal arrangements. Some boarders took their meal breaks at home. Some boarding house operators prepared portable lunches for their boarders. In any case, the typical Victorian was overworked, lacked kitchen skills, and the economic means to set up their own house. Therefore, Victorians used boarding houses as holistic living solutions.
Some Houston boarding house operators served meals to non-residents. These customers were called “day boarders.” All the boarders, the residents and the non-residents, dined “family style” which was another old public house tradition. This custom was known as table d’hote, literally “table of the host.” The boarding house keeper served the various foods on large dishes set out on a large table. The host normally dined with the boarders. Arriving late might mean missing out on the most popular food. The common meal was an important part of boarding house culture and fostered social bonds between some of the “inmates.” Sometimes people formed lasting friendships with members of their boarding house family. In other cases, intimacy between keeper and boarder emerged. In one notable example, San Antonio hotelier, William Menger, met his wife at a boarding house. The future Mary Menger was a boarding house keeper where William resided.
In short, we can better understand the language of housing in Victorian Houston by contrasting it with our own. Present-day housing language is the result of the advocacy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social reformers. Emergent disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and land use planning promoted new norms for housing. These dove-tailed with moral reformers who promoted the closed, nuclear family. Since the ideal household was a household of a closed, nuclear family, these diverse reformers developed a single coherent theory for reordering human settlements and housing.
If an ideal household was one of a closed, nuclear family, and housing was purposed for protecting and promoting these favored households, physical separation from corrupting influences was the strategy. Architecture and architect landscape theorists imagined semi-bucolic homesteads which physically separated the family house from other structures. They even theorized about gardens. The emergent American planning profession promoted other types of physical separation. The question about nuisance industries was a long-standing urban problem. It was a genuine problem to reside near an industry that used copious quantities of urine or feces as solvents. Another bad urban land use was a stable. However, planners did not stop with noxious industries. Frederick Law Olmstead insisted that grocers ruined fine residential blocks. The planners embarked on a program to separate all land uses.
Henry Ford said, “We will solve the problem of cities by leaving them.” While nobody expressed American anti-urbanism with the same candor and elegance as Ford did, many people were already acting on this principle. Suburbanism was already firmly established as an ideology. The ideal household needed a protected environment, distant from commercial centers where the husband earned a living. A good family domo stood alone on a large lot. In addition, the only other find of acceptable land use were residences. Eventually, it was determined that respectable households could only be located near other respectable households. This implied the same functional purity as the closed, nuclear families who resided in the detached houses. A respectable household must be detached, and it must be located near other detached households. These subdivisions could not be corrupted by interloping stores, boarding houses, or apartment buildings. And what would be the purpose of all of this purity if we did not keep these subdivisions racially pure as well?
Understanding the language of housing in Victorian Houston requires stripping away post-planning filters. At least though 1877, even elite merchants lived near retail and industrial uses. William Marsh Rice moved into his matrimonial house in the 1850s, across the street from the Harris County Courthouse. While it is difficult to understand detail about this neighborhood while Rice still lived in this house, many of the Houston merchant elite lived in mixed-use neighborhoods. A few resided near a brewery and a gas works. While there were some clusters of elite households, none of these were elite neighborhoods comparable to present-day River Oaks. Houstonians did not dwell on hard distinctions between buildings used as residences compared to buildings for other uses. To many Houstonians, all building were “houses.” Social arrangements within residences were more varied. There is no reason to believe that a closed, nuclear family conveyed special status within this period. Instead, blended households were much more common than now.
1877 Sanborn Map show part of Schulte’s Brewery on Commerce Avenue between Fannin and San Jacinto. The brewery property included Schulte House, a hotel. “House” was often part of the name of a hotel, perhaps because Victorians thought of a hotel as a type of house.