The Temple on Harvard Street

Houston Heights was laid out in 1891 as one of Texas’s first streetcar suburbs — a planned town on high ground above Houston, its boulevard modeled on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, its streets named for colleges: Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Oxford.¹ This corner began quietly. In 1908 it made the Chronicle because a wolf raided a henhouse here — eighteen hens “pulled from the roost and eaten.”²

The neighborhood had grander plans for the corner. Reagan Lodge No. 1037, A.F.&A.M. — named for John H. Reagan: U.S. Senator, first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission — was chartered December 12, 1910, the first Masonic lodge instituted in Houston’s suburbs.³ Its public installation picnics drew crowds the Post put at “fully 1000 people” — in a town of nine thousand.⁴ By 1917 the lodge was meeting in a hall built on this corner; by 1930 it counted more than 800 members and had outgrown it completely.⁵

On March 23, 1930, both Houston dailies announced a $140,000 lodge building for the corner: three stories and a basement by Lamar Q. Cato — the former Houston city architect who would later design the original University of Houston quadrangle — with an auditorium and stage, a library, quarters for the Eastern Star, Rainbow Girls and DeMolay, and a bowling alley in the basement.⁶ Bace Construction Co. built it. The cornerstone was leveled with full Masonic ceremony on July 26, 1930, under a Grand Lodge dispensation, with District Judge Ewing Boyd as orator.⁷

The finish ran late for the best possible reason: the pink Tennessee marble of the entrance came slowly out of Knoxville.⁸ The completed cost was $110,700 — real money in the first year of the Depression, in brick, steel and stone that has now stood for ninety-five years.⁹ The Chronicle’s verdict that October: “the latest and most imposing structure in Houston Heights.”⁸

For five years the temple was the Heights’ living room. The Eastern Star met twice a month and served turkey suppers in the club rooms; the Rainbow Girls staged a carnival on the lawn; church youth groups played comedies on the auditorium stage; the Reagan High “Red Coats” danced until midnight for band uniforms; a wedding was solemnized in the hall.¹⁰ In 1932 and 1934, six Masonic bodies held their joint public installation on the temple grounds — picnic at six, ceremony after.¹⁰

Then the Depression closed in. The members fought for their building the way neighborhoods fight for what they love — in teams, in public, dollar by dollar: by May 1933 the temple debt fund stood at $37,100.¹¹ It was not enough. In 1935, in the same years that cost fraternal orders their halls across Texas and the nation, the temple passed out of the fraternity’s hands.¹²

The lodge itself never missed a meeting. It moved to rented quarters three blocks south, doubled its membership through the 1940s, and dedicated a new hall of its own on Heights Boulevard in 1948. In 1967 one of its own, J. W. Chandler, was installed Grand Master of Masons in Texas; in 2010 the lodge received an Official Texas Historical Marker. It is active to this day.¹³

The building, meanwhile, began the second of its many lives.

In September 1939 Houston insurance man Lester A. Miller bought the building from Houston National Bank for about $40,000 — “the former home of the Reagan Masonic Lodge,” the Chronicle noted.¹⁴ His Home Life Assurance Company moved its home office in, and by 1940 the papers had a new name for the corner: the Legal Reserve Building.¹⁵

The old lodge floors filled fast: a dance academy with “7,000 square feet of space,”¹⁶ a civic federation in the assembly room, and — by late 1940 — the armory of Company F, 111th Engineers, Texas National Guard, the Houston company of the 36th Division. Major General Claude Birkhead inspected them here that December, two weeks after the regiment entered federal service for the war.¹⁷

We know the rest of the wartime tenant roster because of a burglary. On the morning Houston read of Pearl Harbor, the Chronicle reported that “yeggs” had cracked two safes in the building’s offices over that same weekend — $25 from the 111th Engineers, $316 from the truck drivers’ union. The Teamsters’ safe held.¹⁸

In 1943, under a seven-year lease to the federal government, the upper floors became two dozen apartments for wartime workers; by 1946 the city directory lists “1102 Apartments,” thirty-five units.¹⁹ The shop row along East Eleventh worked straight through: pharmacies, cleaners, barbers, a watchmaker, a community newspaper office, a U.S. post office substation.²⁰ In 1951 the building grew — a $50,000 addition by architect Arne G. Engberg, lately chief draftsman for the Empire State Building’s architects, engineered by Walter P. Moore, whose firm would later engineer the Astrodome.²¹

Then the building’s most famous tenant: from 1954 to 1957 the office block at 207 East 11th was the headquarters of Southwestern Fidelity Life Insurance Company — president, Sammy Baugh, charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, running his company from the old temple’s shop row between coaching at Hardin-Simmons and ranching in Rotan.²² When the company moved to Montrose in 1957, its lease ad called the space “one of Houston’s most beautiful office interiors” — paneled oak and mahogany, wall murals, parking for sixty cars.²³

In July 1964 a Dallas insurer commissioned the Houston firm Wirtz, Calhoun, Tungate & Jackson to draw a complete renovation study of the building. The renovation never happened — but the drawings survive, and they are the earliest known detailed architectural portraits of the building: every elevation and floor, the storefronts, the steel columns in the masonry, even the faint outline of the Masonic square-and-compass the draftsmen recorded on the frieze above the entrance.²⁴ They are a record of how solidly the building was made — and how little the essentials have changed.

The Heights spent the 1960s and 70s out of fashion, and the corner went quiet with it. The comeback began here early. A developer acquired the property in 1979; by January 1981 it carried the name it holds today — Harvard House — and the 1982 sales campaign sold exactly what the building was: “ANTIQUITY with modern class, and prestige” — condominium homes with French doors, terraces and wine cellars inside a 1930 landmark, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.”²⁵ The condominium declaration was filed in 1985, adding the landscaped gazebo courtyard.²⁵

The oil bust made the 1980s hard on every ambitious Houston project, and this one changed hands through the era’s bank failures and workouts like much of the city’s best real estate. The building did what it has always done: it held on. By the 1990s its units were selling to individual owners; by 2000, Harvard House traded as what it remains — some of the most distinctive homes in the Heights, inside the most storied building on the block.

A survey of six comparable fraternal buildings put it plainly: this building’s survival is unusual not because it escaped change, but because it absorbed all of it — Depression foreclosure, insurance home office, dance academy, armory, union hall, federal war housing, shop row, condominium rebirth — and it is still here, three stories of brick and pink Tennessee marble on its original corner.²⁶ The square-and-compass outline is still faintly visible over the Harvard Street entrance in the right light. The basement that held the 1930 bowling alley holds a home. The lodge that built it thrives two miles away and left its cornerstone here, dates intact.

Houston Heights is now among the most sought-after historic neighborhoods in Texas. Most houses around this corner are protected for being old; Harvard House is documented — in newspapers from 1905 to 2000, Grand Lodge proceedings, city directories, and original architectural drawings — as one of the most fully-storied buildings in the neighborhood. Few homes anywhere come with a biography like this one.