Houston Heights is platted

Oscar Martin Carter’s Omaha and South Texas Land Company laid out Houston Heights in 1891: more than 1,700 acres of prairie sitting roughly 23 feet above downtown Houston, with a grand boulevard modeled on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. Carter electrified the street railway and ran the line out to his new town, making the Heights arguably the first streetcar suburb in Texas.

The north-south streets were named for American colleges: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Oxford. That branding decision, made before a single house stood, is the only reason the building at the center of this history has “Harvard” in its address.