Houston Heights · Texas · est. 1930
The 1930 Reagan Masonic Temple · today Harvard House
Built in 1930 by architect Lamar Q. Cato, a former Houston City Architect, onetime partner of Joseph Finger, architect of Houston City Hall, and designer of the original University of Houston quadrangle and Texas Southern University’s first halls. Built of concrete, brick, and steel, the temple has anchored its corner for ninety-five years, housing a Masonic temple, civic hall, wartime armory, mid-century offices, and today fourteen homes.
800+ Masons, a stage, a library, a basement bowling alley: the civic living room of the Heights.
A 7,000 sq ft dance academy, a wartime armory, Teamsters headquarters.
A federal war-housing lease turned the lodge floors into 24 apartments for war workers.
The shop row kept working through quieter decades, and the building came through them unaltered.
A $3 million conversion is announced: “antiquity with modern class.”
Fourteen luxury condominiums inside the fortress. A grown up Heights begins to preserve its rich history.
Smilax wound around the chandeliers, the orchestra played from a dais dressed as a small forest, and the punch bowl was frozen around fruit and flowers. Among those assisting the hosts: Houston mayor Walter E. Monteith and his wife.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 28, 1932; Houston Post, Dec. 29, 1932 · full story →
The temple’s boys’ order was a dynasty: “the largest and one of the most active in the state,” and Texas champion in competitive degree work two years running. Founded 1921, it grew into Houston’s oldest chapter.
Houston Post, Jan. 1, 1933 · full story →
The young people of Oliver Methodist Church and the Hebrew Temple Club of Reagan High School presented the comedy “An Arizona Cowboy” together at the temple. The lodge itself counted Jewish brethren among its members.
Houston Chronicle, Apr. 5, 1933; Houston Chronicle, June 15, 1969 · full story →
Church comedies, school plays, a musical revue, and a mock wedding staged by a Heights music teacher with seventy children. The period titles alone are a show: “The Marriage of Jack and Jill,” “Eighteen-Carat Boob,” “Listen to Leon,” “Chintz Cottage.”
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 9, 1933 (digitally restored) · full story →
For a stretch of years the corner of Harvard and Eleventh smelled like a florist’s tent. The Houston Heights Garden Club staged its flower shows in the hall, prize lists in the papers, and the spring show moved into the new temple’s exhibition hall.
Houston Post, Nov. 23, 1929; Houston Post and Chronicle, 1930–31 · full story →
The builders missed their Thanksgiving 1930 deadline for the best possible reason: the pink Tennessee marble of the entrance came slowly out of Knoxville. The delay gave the building its signature material, still greeting everyone who walks in.
Houston Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1930 · full story →
The morning Houston read of Pearl Harbor, an inside page carried this corner: “yeggs” had cracked two safes in the building over the weekend. The Teamsters’ own safe held. One clipping, three eras of tenants.
Houston Chronicle, Dec. 8, 1941 (digitally restored) · full story →
At 2:30 a.m., intruders pushed open the door of a 1102 Harvard apartment and set off the tenant’s homemade burglar alarm: a booby trap that spilled a clatter of knives and forks across the floor. The break-in failed on the spot.
Houston Chronicle, Sept. 16, 1948 · full story →
The greatest quarterback of football’s first half-century ran his insurance company from the shop row, between coaching at Hardin-Simmons and ranching 6,400 acres in Rotan. The offices: “one of Houston’s most beautiful office interiors.”
Best’s Insurance News, Feb. 1955; Houston Post, Apr. 4, 1954; birth register, Mar. 23, 1954 · full story →
The 1951 addition was designed by Arne G. Engberg, lately chief draftsman for the Empire State Building’s architects, and engineered by Walter P. Moore, whose firm went on to engineer the Astrodome. Even the smallest chapter drew serious talent.
Houston Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1951 (digitally restored) · full story →
When the condominium conversion introduced Harvard House to Houston, it sold exactly what the building was: homes with French doors, terraces, and wine cellars inside a 1930 landmark, “in the shadows of downtown Houston.” The pitch still holds.
Houston Post classifieds, Mar. 1982; Houston Chronicle display ads, Oct.–Nov. 1982 · full story →
Eleven stories from a catalog of several hundred. The full timeline · the full history →