Highland Park and River Oaks: The Origins of Garden Suburban Community Planning in Texas 9780292748378

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Hig hland Park an d Rive r Oak s

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Frontispiece. Bayou Bend’s North Façade by E. M. (“Buck”) Schiwetz, 1967. Lithograph of the 1954 charcoal drawing, 8 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Archives.

Roger Fullington Series in Architecture

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by C h e ry l Ca l dw e l l Fergu s o n

HIGHLAND

PA R K A N D

R I VER

OA K S The Origins of Garden Suburban Community Planning in Texas U ni v ersi t y of T e x a s Pre ss Aust in

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Publication of this book was made possible in part by support from Roger Fullington and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Frontispiece: Bayou Bend’s North Façade by E. M. (“Buck”) Schiwetz, 1967. Lithograph of the 1954 charcoal drawing, 8 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Archives. In 1967, Schiwetz’s lithograph of Bayou Bend was donated to the Friends of Bayou Bend, the Ima Hogg House in the Homewoods section of River Oaks, 1926–1928, John F. Staub and Birdsall P. Briscoe, architects. Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in China First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, Cheryl Caldwell, 1953– Highland Park and River Oaks : the origins of garden suburban community planning in Texas / Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson. — First edition. pages  cm. — (Roger Fullington series in architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-74836-1 (hardback) 1. City planning—Texas—History. 2. Garden suburbs—Texas—History. 3. Highland Park (Tex.) 4. River Oaks (Tex.) 5. Architecture and society—Texas—History. I. Title. HT167.5.T4F47 2014 307.1′21609764—dc23   2013048678 doi:10.7560/748361

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For my mother, Joan Parker Caldwell, and in memory of my husband, John Clarke Ferguson

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C O N T E N T S

P re face  ix Ackn ow l e dgm e n ts xi Ch ap t e r on e  1 City Planning in Dallas and Houston: The Genesis of Large-Scale Suburban Community Planning and Architecture in Dallas and Houston Ch ap t e r two 27 The Planning and Development of Residential Communities in Dallas and Houston, 1850s–1920s Ch ap te r th re e  65 Highland Park: “Just Beyond the City’s Dust and Smoke” Ch ap te r f our 111 Highland Park West: “The Crowning Achievement of Highland Park” and the Highland Park Shopping Village Ch ap te r f iv e  165 The Hogg Brothers, Hugh Potter, and the Development of River Oaks: “Homes to Last for All Time” Ch ap t e r six  239 Highland Park and River Oaks: Their Texas Influence and Permanence E p ilogue  267 N ote s 275 B ibl iograp h y  313 In de x  323

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P R E FA C E

The research I conducted in 1997 on the William Clifford Hogg Papers and the Ima Hogg Papers at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, led to my interest in River Oaks, a Texas garden suburban community. Documents in these collections reveal that the developers, Will and Mike Hogg, along with their business associate, Hugh Potter, took painstaking care to make River Oaks one of the finest garden suburban communities in the United States in the early twentieth century. During my research on River Oaks, I became seriously interested in early twentieth-century American suburban community planning and architecture and became aware of the scarcity of material published about this topic on Texas. It became apparent that, in addition to River Oaks, reference should also be made to other important Texas suburban communities—beginning with Highland Park, the first garden suburb in the state—to present a more in-depth analysis of this subject for my 2004 dissertation. Developed by Edgar L. Flippen and Hugh E. Prather, Highland Park and its later section Highland Park West (now collectively known as The Town of Highland Park) were similar to River Oaks. Both the Dallas and the Houston developers were influenced by the suburban communities of Roland Park, then outside the city limits of Baltimore; the city of Beverly Hills, California; and the Country Club District in Kansas City. In addition to the Hogg papers, I found the architectural drawings of the Highland Park Shopping Village deposited at the

Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin. These never-before-published drawings contain a wealth of visual information that cover the project from its genesis to its completion. The drawings, which have never before been published, represent a major contribution to my book. To support my analyses and arguments, I examined correspondence between the developers, booklets and pamphlets produced by their companies, neighborhood newsletters, city and suburban records and collections, newspaper and journal articles, advertisements, national register nominations, and meeting and conference documentation, notably the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, held from 1917 to 1919. Using these sources, I have presented a detailed description of how the concept of the American garden suburban community was adopted successfully—and in some cases not—in Texas and how various developers achieved their goals. The complex stories of the development of the Town of Highland Park and River Oaks provide important insight into how these Texas suburban communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their respective cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities in the state. This book begins with an exploration of the paradox that Progressive Era civic planning initiatives were not fully implemented in Dal-

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las and Houston but were successfully achieved in The Town of Highland Park and River Oaks. During my research, it became apparent that the developers of these two suburban communities studied the concepts of long-term residential community planning, believing the implementation of aesthetic designs and the layout of landscapes and gardens to be important elements of their comprehensive planning. How to maintain financial stability and offer affordable lots for investors to encourage ownership in their communities were key considerations, as was the employment of legal mechanisms, mainly through restrictive covenants and property owners associations, to better manage and control their properties. They studied current, sophisticated designs for domestic architecture, especially the introduction of the single-family suburban country house type, and gained scientific knowledge of modern-day equipment and appliances for their housing stock. Their own company houses presented models of tasteful residential architecture deemed appropriate and ageless. They wished to avoid what they felt were unusual architectural styles, especially Moderne or anything associated with Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries. In their pursuit of elevated status, the developers em-

ployed some of the most highly trained and respected local architects, who produced a quality of work that rivaled any in the country. In The Town of Highland Park, the developers created a shopping complex that was stylistically and technically on par with any concurrently planned and built. Subsequently, the Highland Park Shopping Village gained national recognition. The book also examines other Texas neighborhoods in their respective cities at the end of the nineteenth century into the first four decades of the twentieth in order to compare various methods of suburban planning and architectural designs and to explore the difficulties and instabilities of real estate development in the state at that time. Other prosperous Texan towns and cities, whose developers adopted this new form of American urban residential development, merit a discussion in the final chapter. Hopefully, this broad and extensive study will be a significant contribution to the history of Texas garden suburban community planning and its architecture up until the years when the Great Depression approached and halted expansion of this phenomenon until the aftermath of World War II.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

For this protracted study, I have incurred more debts than I could possibly acknowledge, but I shall attempt to name those who were particularly resourceful and generous with their time and interest in my research. I greatly appreciate the encouragement of my academic advisor at the University of Delaware at Newark, Damie Stillman, the John W. Shirley Professor Emeritus of Art History and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Buildings of the United States series, whose guidance and thoughtful criticism of my dissertation resulted in a number of significant improvements. Professor Stillman introduced me to the study of American architecture and expanded my knowledge of this subject, using numerous methodologies. For my devotion to the study of American architecture, I wish to thank Professor Stillman, a challenging mentor who inspires me to continue research in the field. Stephen Fox, Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas, introduced me to this subject by suggesting that I study the William Clifford Hogg and Ima Hogg Papers. He very generously supplied me with valuable information on Texas garden suburban communities across the state and the architects whose careers were associated with them. Stephen served as the second reader of my dissertation and made copious comments and suggestions based on his extraordinary knowledge of Texas architectural history. Without his advice, my interest in this study may not have warranted such an extensive ex-

amination, and my indebtedness to him is fully acknowledged. Bernard L. Herman, the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David L. Ames, director, Center for Historic Architecture and Design, and professor of Public Policy and Administration, Geography, and Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware at Newark, also served as dissertation readers and presented helpful and much-appreciated recommendations and criticisms. I also thank Kenneth Hafertepe, chair of the Department of Museum Studies and Graduate Program Director, Baylor University, who read a section of my manuscript revised from my dissertation and made thoughtful suggestions for its improvement for submission to my publisher. In Dallas, Carol Roark, former manager of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division at the Dallas Public Library, was a cheerleader and a great supporter of the topic. I have enjoyed working with her over the years and cannot thank her enough. Her colleagues, Brian Collins, C.A., and Adrianne Pierce, library associate, have followed in her path by providing me with helpful assistance in using the collection and in obtaining images for my book. I thank them for their time and energy. Susan Richards, former archives manager of the Dallas Historical Society, and her successor, Samantha Dodd, were equally resourceful in finding materials

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in their collection, and I appreciate their assistance. Kirk Smith, Development Services Manager of The Town of Highland Park, provided me with important information and assistance in obtaining primary documentation. Mary Shoemaker was a great supporter and her kindness and knowledge on this topic are deeply appreciated. Madeline Hutsell Boe­deker, daughter of the designer and builder Clifford Hutsell, graciously made her wonderful collection of her father’s drawings and photographs available for me to study at great length. Hillary Artzt Gilbert, formerly with HP Village Management, LLC, sent numerous copies of historical photographs of the Highland Park Shopping Village, which were a significant addition to the manuscript, and Becki Snow, the manager of HP Village Management, LLC, was helpful in finding one additional image of the Village for my book. I greatly appreciate their time. I am most grateful for the assistance and cooperation of the following individuals, who were invaluable to my research and aided me in locating illustrations: Joan Prather and the Prather family; Mark Fooshee Clayton; J. Wilson Fuqua of J. Wilson Fuqua & Associates Architects; Cole Smith, FAIA, of Smith Ekblad Architects; Willis Winters, director of the Dallas Park and Recreation Department; Douglas Newby of Architecturally Significant Homes; Muriel Quest McCarthy; Mrs. Doc Swalwell; Craig Rekerdres; Ann and Lee Hobson; Amy W. Davis; Jackie and Christopher Converse; Pat Dilbeck Correl; Joanne Fay of the Dallas Country Medical Society Alliance Foundation; Jennifer Deaver of the University Park Development Office; and Bonnie Case, librarian, Highland Park Public Library. In Houston, Gary C. Mangold, general manager, River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. (ROPO), graciously allowed me full access to their collection and contacted River Oaks prop-

erty owners about permission to use their floor plans housed at ROPO, and I want to express my deepest gratitude to him for his long support and friendship. Amy S. Mobley, C.A./archivist, and Sarah Shipley, digital archivist, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Archives, were extremely attentive and their advice was most welcome and helpful. Even though their building was being renovated during most of the time I was collecting images for my book, Timothy Ronk, library service specialist, and Joel Draut, Photo Archives, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, diligently worked to locate and copy requested material. Gerald Moorehead, FAIA, although busy with various projects, kindly sent me excellent photographs from his collection in a timely manner, and I appreciate his contributions. Alice Picton Craig, Joan Potter Hazelhurst, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew McFarland, and Mr. and Mrs. Michael Weill all provided valuable documentation and images. Nancy Sparrow, curatorial assistant, Alexander Architectural Archives, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, granted me access to the Fooshee & Cheek collection of drawings of the Highland Park Shopping Village and produced excellent images of them for publication. Daniel Orozco, library assistant, Architecture Library, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, provided valuable assistance in obtaining images from journals and books, and I appreciate his interest in my project. Aryn Glazier of Photo Services at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, also deserves recognition for his assistance in producing outstanding scanned images from their collections. James Susman of STG Austin was surprised that I found a floor plan of the Proctor-Hogg House in Houston that he drew for his 1979 Master of Architecture thesis for the University

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of Texas at Austin and permitted me to illustrate it. Since the house has been demolished, its distinctive plan is a significant addition to my book. Other contributors to my project in Texas are Paul Hester Photographer; Killis Almond, FAIA, San Antonio; Ruth Resurreccion, Preservation Resource Center, Historic Fort Worth, Inc.; Susan Pritchett, former archivist, Tarrant County Historical Commission; James P. Gaines, research economist, Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University; Linda Salitros, assistant to the director of Texas A&M University Press; Dick Bundy, AIA, Wichita Falls; Robert Froman, director of Reference/Special Collections at the Amarillo Public Library; Judy and Wayne C. Nelson and Billie Love Robinson McFerran, Corsicana; and Peter Flagg Maxson, Austin. The very personable William S. Worley, former professor of history, University of Missouri–­Kansas City, offered a wealth of information on the Country Club District and the Country Club Plaza, and I am indebted to him for the knowledge that he shared on the subjects. David Boutros, assistant director, State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–­Kansas City, and his staff were also helpful, answering questions and sending information and photographs over the years that I have been working on this project. I thank Richard Cheek for his excellent photograph of the Martha and E. E. Bewley House in Fort Worth. In California, Gail Stein, archivist, Historical Collection, Beverly Hills Public Library, was always prompt and polite in finding and sending journal articles and images. Marjeanne Blinn, a volunteer at the Palos Verdes Library District Local History Collection, was equally helpful and personable. Erin Chase, assistant curator of Architecture, Photographs & Urban Planning Collections, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Jocelyn Gibbs, curator, Architecture

& Design Collection, University Art Collection, University of California, Santa Barbara; Robert D. Montoya, Public Services Division, Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collection, UCLA University Archives, Los Angeles, California; and Stelca A. Somerville, former president, Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society, all contributed significant information and illustrations. Kelly Spring, manuscript archivist, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, located an image of the Roland Park Shopping Center that I had found in the Roland Park Company Papers at Cornell University. The collection was later moved to Johns Hopkins University, and I was pleased that she was able to find it and granted me permission to use it. Christopher Shields, archivist, Greenwich Historical Society, Greenwich, Connecticut; Mitchell Cohen, president, Forest Hills Gardens Corporation; William E. Coleman, professor of comparative literature, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York; and Barry Cenower, publisher, Acanthus Press, LLC, all contributed information and illustrations, as did Mary Jo Groppe, former volunteer at the Shaker Historical Museum Library. I express my sincere thanks to them for their generosity and interest in my work. Finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Senior Editor Jim Burr and to my manuscript editor, Lynne Chapman, and their professional staff at the University of Texas Press for all of their labor on my behalf. It was an extraordinary undertaking, particularly with the loss of my husband during this project. I am deeply indebted to their sensitivity and support during the period and what we were able to accomplish under such dire circumstances. My heart goes out to them for their kindness and understanding.

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C h a pt e r one

CIT Y I N

P LANNI NG

DA L L A S

A N D

HOUSTON The Genesis of Large-Scale Suburban Community Planning and Architecture in Dallas and Houston I n 1 9 2 4 , the p ow e r f u l H o u sto n o i lma n, law y e r , city planner, real estate developer, art collector, businessman, and philanthropist William Clifford Hogg (Will Hogg) learned that his brother Michael (Mike Hogg) and his friend Hugh Potter had an option on two hundred acres of suburban property four miles west of downtown.1 He asked, “Why stop at two hundred acres? Why not buy 1,000 acres? Why not buy out the [River Oaks] country club? Why not make this something really big, something the city can be proud of?”2 The eldest son of James Stephen Hogg, the Progressive Era two-term Texas governor (1891–1895), Will Hogg aggressively took over the project, eventually expanding their River Oaks suburban development to twelve hundred acres. Potter remarked that the three developers had “a desire to do something of lasting benefit for Houston,” and in order to achieve this, they needed “a big spot . . . in a single continuous piece.” This was key in creating “the kind of improvements and environment that the community needs.”3 From its inception, “River Oaks was designed to be a complete [highly restricted] neighborhood unit,” reserving areas for

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Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, cover, ca. 1910. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

a country club, schools, parks, and playgrounds, with easy access to churches, stores, and shopping centers.4 The paradox of their approach was their successful application of the concept of comprehensive planning, originally intended

River Oaks Corporation advertisement, “River Oaks, The Fountain in Sleepy Hollow Court,” Houston Chronicle, April 11, 1926, CN 10633. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

for cities, to a smaller geographic area, as would be demonstrated in the Texas garden suburban communities of Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks.

Dallas and Houston Become the Most Populous Texas Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, American cities faced tremendous pressure to

manage more efficiently the impact of increased growth on quality of life. City leaders in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco endeavored

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to restructure their cities along new lines, promoted by advocates of the City Beautiful Movement, the first major endeavor to control escalating growth. These efforts were only partly successful, due in large part to the immense cost and the displacement of inner-city residents. The second major feature of American urban growth in this period was the emergence of the planned residential garden suburban community. While Texas cities are generally thought to be creations of the post–World War II era, Dallas and Houston were struggling at the turn of the twentieth century with the questions of how to properly plan a growing city and protect residential areas from degradation by changes in land use. As was the case in Chicago, the impetus for these changes came not from city government but from prominent city leaders who saw the need to bring the state’s two largest cities up to par with their counterparts around the country. George Bannerman (G. B.) Dealey and Will Hogg led these efforts in Dallas and Houston, respectively.5 However, given the fact that nineteenth-­century leaders of these cities had failed to regulate their appearance and unbridled growth, Dealey and Hogg both faced a colossal task. The economy of Dallas, founded in 1841, began to grow rapidly following the arrival of the Texas and Pacific, the Houston and Texas Central, and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroads in 1873, enabling Dallas entrepreneurs to build a cotton merchandising industry by reaching cities in the Midwest and East more rapidly and economically than their competition in Galveston and New Orleans.6 The railways brought an influx of gamblers, prostitutes, hustlers, and other “undesirables.” These floaters gave Dallas the distinction of being one of the “most disorderly, reckless, and outrageous frontier town[s] in Texas.”7

Despite the Panic of 1873, almost $1.4 million in new construction was reported in Dallas that year, and by 1875, “the city was already beginning to develop urban sprawl” when a number of businessmen and professionals flocked to the city.8 These included Alfred H. Belo, who established the Dallas Morning News in 1885 as a vehicle for promoting and drawing national attention to the city, and Alex and Philip Sanger, who opened a dry goods and clothing store, part of a chain of stores their older brothers had opened along the railroad line between Houston and Dallas.9 Thriving cattle, grain, and lumber industries developed in Dallas by the end of the nineteenth century, and the city was also a major distribution center for farm machinery. In 1914, the Eleventh District Federal Reserve Bank opened in Dallas, which gained approximately forty thousand new residents as it became the financial center not only of the state of Texas but also of most of the Southwest and northern Louisiana.10 The establishment of the bank boosted the local economy, already prospering with the arrival of the oil industry following initial discoveries in northwest Texas and Oklahoma. Similar in character to Dallas, Houston had the distinction before the Civil War of being “the greatest sink of dissipation and vice that modern times have known,” with its reputation for extreme lawlessness, along with a lack of city services and an unhealthy environment due to its hot, humid climate and poor drainage.11 In a January 14, 1892, letter to the editor of the Houston Daily Post, a former resident complained that “Houston is an overgrown dirty village, seemingly blundering along without any policy or defined government or management. .  .  . I am compelled to say that Houston is the most dirty, slovenly, go-as-you-please, vagabond appearing city of which I have knowledge.”12

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Around the turn of the twentieth century, Houston’s reputation improved when public desire combined with organized police department efforts and the support of churches to keep the city’s crime and vice in check. Cotton, a network of railways, lumber, rice, the construction of the Houston Ship Channel, and—in the first decade of the twentieth century—oil spurred rapid growth. The discovery of oil at Spindletop on January 10, 1901, dramatically changed the city’s economy in the twentieth century. The Houston Ship Channel, which opened in 1914, provided a deepwater port and a haven from Gulf storms and for oil refineries. Subsequently, pipelines were built from every major oilfield in Texas and Oklahoma to Houston. By 1929, forty oil companies had located their offices in Houston, making it the business center for the industry. Such successful businessmen as William L. Clayton, co-founder of the cotton exporting firm of Anderson, Clayton, and Company, soon to become the world’s largest, moved their companies to Houston. Bank deposits per capita in the United States in 1920 were $392, but in Houston they were $617, indicative of the success of local businesses and their means of supporting capital improvements.13 As Dallas and Houston became major regional metropolitan centers in the first half of the twentieth century, city planning combined with suburban development were issues that required civic attention. Local businessmen were the primary advocates for city planning and civic improvements to encourage economic growth. They viewed their cities as competing with others as part of a “national urban network.”14 Many of these proposals for small cities along the West Coast, which had begun to experience unforeseen growth at the turn of the twentieth century, were also relevant to Dallas and Hous-

ton because of similar conditions in these cities, where businessmen “hoped to reunite their spatially dispersed metropolises.”15 Both Texas cities had populations of more than ten thousand in 1880. These numbers had quadrupled by 1900 and continued to spiral upward, with Houston surpassing Dallas as the most populous city in the state by the late 1920s.16 G. B. Dealey and Will Hogg tried to implement intelligent city planning and became the principal proponents of planning in the first three decades of the twentieth century in Texas. As Jesse Clyde (J.  C.) Nichols, the developer of the Kansas City Country Club District, pointed out: unless a city has a beautiful, appealing residential district . . . many families will not be attracted to that city or State to live. Cities are competing more and more with one another as desirable places to live. Many a business man places even a higher value upon family opportunity than upon commercial gain. Many cities lose a number of their best citizens on account of inferior residential districts.17 Like Nichols, the developers of Highland Park and River Oaks were trying to create better living conditions in a pastoral atmosphere away from the uncontrolled industrial, commercial, and working-class residential development that had “blighted” late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century urban neighborhoods. Yet, despite strong campaigns in Dallas and Houston for the city-wide adoption of a comprehensive plan in the 1920s, such practices gained only limited acceptance in Dallas and failed in Houston, which still has never adopted a zoning code. Where comprehensive planning was embraced was in the middle- to upper-income suburban communities of Highland Park and River Oaks.

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George Bannerman Dealey and a City Plan for Dallas Dealey, vice president and general manager of the Dallas Morning News, was the first prominent Texas civic leader to promote a comprehensive city plan. He worked to control his rapidly growing city and to instill the progressive spirit that aimed “to establish or restore a sense of community—that is, feelings of civic responsibility, of commitment to a common purpose, and of municipal patriotism” through reform and philanthropic causes.18 In 1909, Dealey delivered a speech before the Critic Club, a group of fifteen prominent Dallas businessmen who met once a month. Club members took turns presenting informal papers about local and topical issues, mainly as a proving ground for new ideas. In his speech, Dealey noted: Like a good many other towns or cities, Dallas has developed in a haphazard sort of way, the absence of a purpose or plan in the minds of its founders being clearly seen. . . . To correct such conditions, many cities are developing the City Plan . . . so that when the purpose is finally carried out, the city so treated becomes more attractive to the eye, healthier, and generally a better place to live in.19 Though Dealey was not a real estate developer, he was a strong advocate for city planning. John Nolen, the noted American city planner, called Dealey “the father of planning in the southwest,” and historians have compared him to Charles H. Wacker, the chairman of the 1909 Plan of Chicago.20 As Theodora Kimball Hubbard and Henry Vincent Hubbard stated in their 1929 publication Our Cities To-day and To-morrow, “Lack of constructive local leadership is perhaps the most insurmountable

obstacle of all [in the process of developing a comprehensive plan for cities]. . . . Chicago had its Wacker and Dallas its Dealey.”21 Wacker promoted the 1909 Plan of Chicago through numerous newspaper articles and pamphlets and in his 1912 Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago: Municipal Economy, Especially Prepared for Study in the Schools of Chicago, a textbook written for eighth-graders.22 Crusading journalist Dealey, influenced by Wacker, boosted his platform through newspaper editorials and articles and public broadcasts on WFAA, the radio station begun by the Dallas Morning News in 1922. Later, through the Kessler Plan Association (formed in 1924 to continue George Kessler’s 1912 comprehensive plan for Dallas), they underwrote a children’s textbook based on the Wacker manual, Our City—Dallas. It was written in 1927 by Justin F. Kimball, professor of education at Southern Methodist University and a member of the Dallas City Plan Commission. Obviously impressed, Will Hogg purchased an autographed copy of Kimball’s textbook and ordered twenty-two additional copies to distribute to fellow Houstonians.23 With Dealey’s support, the Dallas chapter of the American League for Civic Improvement had succeeded in convincing Dallas citizens in 1904 to authorize the purchase of the State Fair grounds so that they could be enlarged to accommodate larger fairs as well as a city park, both maintained by an annual tax. The city park board overseeing the project made a crucially important decision to hire George Kessler, the landscape architect and city planner, to redesign and landscape Fair Park, which he completed in 1907.24 Kessler had gained a national reputation as a city and suburban planner

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through his previous work in Baltimore, Kansas City, Memphis, Denver, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Toledo, among others, and for his design of the grounds for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.25 Kessler’s most important project began in 1893, the same year that the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, when he submitted his system of parks linked by boulevards to the Kansas City park board. His park and boulevard system with extensions was completed in 1920, when “Kansas City enjoyed 1,999.25 acres of parks, 676 acres of parkways, and almost 90 miles of boulevards and drives.”26 The timing of Kessler’s arrival in Dallas was providential. City leaders were just beginning to realize that theirs was no longer a small town and that accommodations had to be made to contend with its continuing growth. Dealey, in collaboration with the five-­member Chamber of Commerce, of which he was a member, invited J. Horace McFarland, president of the American Civic Association, to speak about the merits of a city plan to the citizens of Dallas. On February 25, 1910, McFarland presented his lecture, “A Crusade Against Ugliness,” in which he strongly urged Dallasites to adopt a comprehensive plan.27 McFarland’s speech prompted the creation of a committee of the Chamber of Commerce to establish the City Plan and Improvement League. Dealey served as vice chairman of the committee, which retained Kessler to draft a comprehensive city plan following his visit to Dallas on May 23, 1910.28 In A City Plan for Dallas of 1912, Kessler suggested adopting a zoning code for the separation of industrial, commercial, and residential sections of the city; the widening of many of the city’s principal streets to relieve traffic congestion; and the creation of an elaborate network of wide, landscaped boulevards and greenbelt

parkways connected to a system of parks based on the Olmsted–City Beautiful Movement model. He also proposed the construction of parkways along Turtle and Mill Creeks, a system of boulevards for Dallas east and north of the Trinity River, with an inner system for Oak Cliff “planned for the immediate needs of Dallas” and an outer one “for further requirements and to give proper direction to the growth and development of each section of the city.”29 He advised that large city parks could be located between the connecting parkways and that “to have the full benefit of outdoor recreation, parks and playgrounds must be provided within easy walking distance of their home, as often [they are] not so located as to be of the greatest usefulness to the general public.” Kessler further remarked that Dallas’s “municipal officers have not kept firm control of street platting and this has led to a lack of long and continued thoroughfares.” He encouraged suburban planners to connect their streets in accordance with the established proportions of city streets and sidewalks of uniform materials and the planting of uniform lawns and shade trees. He called for “the elimination by various means of railroad grade crossings [especially along Pacific Avenue] in the downtown districts [to relieve traffic congestion], the straightening of the Trinity River, and the building of levees to secure flood protection for the entire city” and to provide more areas for downtown commercial development. Other proposals included the erection of a union passenger station to serve all the railroads, additional playgrounds, a civic center, a freight terminal, and a railroad loop around Dallas and a second around Oak Cliff. However, few of the recommendations for civic improvements were adopted. Among those that were realized were the 1916 Classical-style Union Station, designed by the Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt; the

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Plan for the Development of Turtle Creek Parkway, Dallas, 1912, George Kessler, landscape architect.

Ward Parkway, Country Club District, Kansas City, Missouri, 1917. Upper portion of the Parkway from Fifty-ninth Street, George Kessler, landscape architect, 1891; the remainder of the parkway, Hare & Hare, landscape architects. State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City.

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removal of the Pacific Avenue railroad tracks in 1923; and the completion of the Trinity River levee project in 1929.30 Kessler’s most successful contribution to the character of Dallas was his 1912 design for Turtle Creek Parkway, a winding, one-hundredfoot-wide boulevard suitable for automobiles. It was patterned after his Ward Parkway in Kansas City, Missouri, which served as a grand entrance to J. C. Nichols’s Country Club District. For Turtle Creek Parkway, Kessler suggested constructing “on each side of the stream a forty-­ foot driveway with accompanying sidewalks and grass spots, which will serve to connect adjoining park areas.”31 When completed in 1917, Turtle Creek Parkway extended from Maple Avenue downtown, northwest through the suburb of Oak Lawn to Highland Park at the juncture of Lakeside Drive and Armstrong Avenue, which was a major boost to adjacent real estate development and “stood as one of the most picturesque sections around Dallas.”32 Kessler stated in his plan that Turtle Creek Parkway would provide a “direct means of conserving the high class character of an important residential section [Highland Park] and of furnishing it with a direct and convenient thoroughfare [especially for automobile traffic] to the heart of the city.”33 Kessler and Dealey exerted great influence on the developers of Highland Park, who adopted many of their city planning ideas for suburban planning.

In 1924, a year after Kessler’s death, John E. Surratt, co-founder of the Texas Town and City Planners Association, suggested to Dealey that they establish the Kessler Plan Association to aggressively promote the thorough completion of Kessler’s original plan in addition to some revisions.34 Dealey’s interest in the planning of the city of Dallas would continue through the 1920s and 1930s as a member of the association. He also endorsed the mayor’s appointment of the five-member Ulrickson Commission in 1925, named for its chair, Charles E. Ulrickson, general manager of the Trinity Portland Cement Company.35 The Ulrickson Commission introduced a comprehensive program for a variety of public works. Published in 1927 in the fifty-five-page Forward Dallas!, the Ulrickson Report laid out a nine-year plan to raise $23.9 million in bonds to finance the proposed public improvements. It passed that same year. Dallas adopted its comprehensive zoning ordinance on September 9, 1929, but the plan ran into difficulty when other incorporated entities in Dallas, notably Highland Park and University Park, would not agree to merge with Dallas.36 On December 22, 1913, Highland Park had incorporated as a separate township, and on April 17, 1924, University Park also incorporated. Although Dallas tried several times to annex the Town of Highland Park and the Town of University Park, the attempts were never successful and the matter was finally dropped in 1968.37

Will Hogg and Houston City Planning The geographical direction of upscale residential growth in Houston would change direction after 1924, the year that Will and Mike Hogg, through their Varner Realty Company (in partnership with the Houston real estate developer

and baking corporation executive, Henry W. Stude), purchased 873 acres of wooded property—formerly Camp Logan, the World War I training center—north of Buffalo Bayou and west of the city limits of Houston.38 They then

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persuaded the Reineman Land Company to sell them an adjoining 630 acres. The Hogg Brothers, the family corporation, sold all of the land, 1,503 acres, at cost to the city of Houston to become Memorial Park, commemorating the Houstonians who died in World War I. Memorial Park, still one of the largest parks in Houston, serves as the northern buffer for River Oaks. When asked about his philanthropy, Will Hogg remarked, “I’m glad to. The government made a mistake originally in not reserving for its own use all the wealth below the soil. What I don’t pay back in taxes on the oil that should not have been mine, I’m glad to give away in welfare.”39 In a 1925 letter to S. Herbert Hare, of Hare & Hare, landscape architects and city planning consultants, Will Hogg commented that he was forming his organization, Forum of Civics, to expand his planning ideas to include all of Houston and Harris County in what would be considered a Regional Plan.40 Will Hogg had always intended for River Oaks to become part of the city of Houston and not an independent town like Highland Park and University Park. The publication A Forum of Civics for Houston stated the principal objective of the Forum of Civics: An organization designed to stimulate civic pride and to combine many and varied forces for the betterment and beautification of our city and county. There are numerous local civic activities with which private citizens rather than city and county officials are concerned—all of which are directed along diverse lines toward improvement of the community in its physical, social, educational, or economic aspects. . . . In thus striving, the individual citizen himself is inspired by the realization that he owes an ethical and practical duty to the public and the community as a unit.41

Will Hogg’s desire was to change Houstonians’ opinions of planning and zoning and to form a financial basis to support these efforts. “Why demand more service of the municipal government, more police, more fire protection, more schools, more adequate public improvements,” he questioned, “and not be willing to calculate the cost?”42 In order to accomplish these objectives, the Forum of Civics determined that it was to be made up of individuals representing city and county governments; cultural, economic, and professional organizations; and representatives of public utilities and civic improvement clubs. No dues or contributions were requested, only unsolicited, voluntary moral support. The organization, it was believed, would be more effective in directing Houston’s civic growth if proposals relevant to the city’s and county’s future came from such an interdependent consensus rather than from one individual. In 1925, Will Hogg purchased an abandoned country elementary school on Westheimer Road to serve as the official headquarters for his Forum for Civics, and he employed architects John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Joseph W. Northrop Jr. to remodel the red brick exterior to resemble a New England town hall.43 The remodeling was completed in 1927. The interior housed a committee and conference room; a research library for city planning, zoning, gardening, forestry, and other subjects on city beautification; and an auditorium capable of seating two hundred people for meetings and public lectures by professionals on municipal planning. The building was a veritable “stormcenter for city planning, county planning and other civic forethought.”44 From January 1928 to January 1929, the Forum of Civics published the monthly magazine Civics for Houston, edited by Hester Scott and a small staff, the costs of publication being borne

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by Will Hogg personally, although he never signed his name to the forum’s publications. Remarkably inclusive, the magazine covered many topics that had previously not received such public attention. There were general articles on gardening and planting design, including a monthly planting chart, with a focus on wildflowers and rose gardens, city government, city planning and zoning, city beautification, recreation and parks, community news, membership analysis in Houston’s civic organizations, designs for both residential and public buildings, and interior decoration, including the collecting of antiques. Staub was recruited as one of the associate editors and wrote an article on appropriate house styles for Houston and its climate, titled “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest.” Among other architects asked to contribute to the magazine, Briscoe wrote on the design of residential garages; Northrop, on the design of doorways. The last issue noted that the magazine was never a commercial venture and that, instead of monthly periodicals, the

“purpose may best be achieved in occasional brochures and pamphlets .  .  . issued as the organization sees fit, and containing no paid commercial advertising.”45 After dissolving the organization’s magazine, Will Hogg directed the staff at the Forum of Civics to promote the Affiliated Garden Clubs of Houston, an organization that had distributed oak trees, crape myrtles, and roses throughout the entire city, from the poorest to the wealthiest neighborhoods, and had sponsored annual garden and flower shows. In 1929, his Forum of Civics published the color-illustrated A Garden Book for Houston, written by Mrs. Blanche Harding Sewall, a resident of River Oaks, and Mrs. Card G. Elliot, general chairman of the Affiliated Garden Clubs, in association with Houston’s leading plant nursery operator, Edward C. Teas, with whom Will Hogg worked on the landscaping of River Oaks. Will Hogg distributed around ten thousand copies of the book free to the public.46

Zoning in Houston Zoning originated in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century as a means to restrict land use planning by classifying buildings into different functions, separating industrial buildings from residences.47 The first zoning ordinance in the United States was passed in Los Angeles in 1909 to form districts for residential and industrial uses. By 1913, twenty-two cities had adopted some form of land-use controls. In 1913, the Houston Board of Park Commissioners hired Arthur Coleman Comey, a landscape architecture professor at Harvard University, to prepare a city plan. The principal

focus of Comey’s report, published as Houston: Tentative Plans for Its Development, was the inadequate state of public lands for parks and playgrounds. Comey strongly urged the establishment of an improvement commission to direct all public works and to prepare a comprehensive plan of the city. In 1922, Mayor Oscar F. Holcombe formed the Metropolitan Improvement Commission, but the City Council never funded it or created an ordinance to establish it, and it was quickly dissolved.48 A report issued in 1924 by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s Advisory Committee

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on Zoning and the Better Homes in America Movement cited zoning ordinances as a vital element in stabilizing housing values and introducing effective planning.49 Hoover promoted the movement and served as president of the organization, seeing a nationwide need to attract the attention of “civic leaders of all communities, urban or rural, to study their local problems of housing and home-life and devise programs for the promotion of building of new homes to meet the shortage occasioned by the war.”50 In 1924, Mayor Holcombe appointed a second City Planning Commission, authorized and funded by the city council, which approved the hiring of S. Herbert Hare as the professional city planning consultant and Lewis B. Ryon Jr., a Rice engineering professor, as civil engineer.51 Between 1924 and 1926, the City Planning Commission, in collaboration with Hare and Houston’s Board of Park Commissioners, conducted studies on population growth, streets, parks, zoning, and a civic center. In 1925, Will Hogg purchased $260,000 worth of land just west of downtown in the hope that it would become the site for a civic center.52 Planning to sell the land at cost to the city, he was convinced that a civic center would bring together all branches of city and county government in a single location to better respond to the needs of the population. On November 22, 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., ruled that municipal zoning powers were constitutional and that they did not take private property rights. The following year, the Texas Senate passed a zoning enabling bill that allowed Texas cities, through their city planning commissions, to adopt zoning codes, control subdivision platting, establish assessment of property to pay for city parks and street widening and paving, and

control building setbacks. The adoption of these powers by city governments would require a majority vote of the electorate. However, no progress on Houston’s comprehensive plan was made until July 1927, when Will Hogg was appointed by Mayor Holcombe to serve a seven-year term as chair of the third City Planning Commission.53 Undoubtedly, Will Hogg’s planning in River Oaks presaged that of the city, and the mayor felt that Will Hogg would be a driving force in the implementation of the city’s comprehensive plan. Probably due to the progress of the Kessler Plan Association in conjunction with the Ulrickson Commission in Dallas, Will Hogg sent letters to the association inquiring about planning ideas and projects.54 It is evident that he was concerned about Houston’s acceptance of these city powers and wanted opinions that would support his position. Concurrent with the state enabling legislation in 1927, Houston’s third City Planning Commission began to address all of the prior planning issues in a report. The 1929 Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston was paid for by the Forum of Civics. It covered street planning and congestion, parks and parkways, public transit and aviation, stabilization of property values, protection of neighborhoods for unwanted use, a civic center, and a sensible, efficient zoning ordinance.55 Before the report was completed, Houston voters approved a $1.4 million bond issue in 1927 to purchase land for a civic center site.56 This approval held promise for the adoption of a city plan. In the report, Hare wrote what can be considered the epitaph for city planning in Houston, remarking that “the people of Houston and their officials will have to decide whether they are building a great city or merely a great population.”57 Hare’s most important points are set out in

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the section on private property, which includes his proposal for implementing a zoning code in Houston. His comments on zoning indicate that he was aware of the lack of public support. Hare observed that zoning is protection, not regulation—protection of property and individual rights in any district against such uses of developments as would be harmful. .  .  . and prevents the exploitation of any piece of property to the disadvantage of the neighborhood or city. It protects the small home owner as fully as the owner of a mansion. If zoning interferes with the execution of some owner’s cherished scheme which might be detrimental to adjoining properties, it protects that owner in turn against some possible scheme of his neighbors which might be even more obnoxious.58 The report’s zoning component was rejected after Will Hogg resigned the chairmanship in 1929 because he thought political support was inadequate.59 On November 15 of that year, he left for a world tour and never returned to Houston.60 On September 12, 1930, at the age of fifty-five, Will Hogg died unexpectedly from pneumonia, a week after emergency surgery on his gall bladder in Baden-Baden, Germany. After his death, the City Planning Commission report recommendations were implemented in a piecemeal, unsystematic manner. Buffalo Drive (now Allen Parkway) had been laid out by Hare & Hare, linking River Oaks to downtown in 1925–1926. The civic center developed very slowly. The new buildings constructed in the late 1930s—the Sam Houston Coliseum and the Music Hall in 1937; the modernistic Houston City Hall in 1939, designed by the local architect Joseph Finger; and the Fire Alarm Building in 1939—ignored the siting and architectural recommendations of the 1927 master plan.61

Will Hogg’s legacy in city planning would be River Oaks, not the reshaping of Houston. By 1930, zoning ordinances had been adopted in “981 cities, towns, and villages throughout the United States.”62 Zoning was never adopted by the government or the voters of Houston, who rejected it five times between 1929 and 1993. As a consequence, Houston remains the largest unzoned city in the United States.63 The majority of those against zoning were small-scale real estate developers, who felt it would destroy their abilities to buy cheaply and sell for higher profits if they speculated accurately on emerging growth trends. They claimed in the Houston Post that the City Planning Commission was “a dangerous club in the hands of any dictatorial administration.”64 Harsh words continued in the press, as opponents labeled zoning an “un– American, German plan.” A zoning ordinance, according to critics, “is an exercise of the police power of government. . . . Houston was built by men of vision, not by slide-rule experts armed with an omniscient egotism and a pocket full of silly statistics.”65 On the other hand, proponents, including the Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters, thought zoning had the potential to permit long-range planning, prevent eviction of tenants, and most importantly, protect property values. Some of the benefits of zoning were achieved by suburban developers through their use of restrictive covenants. Heavy industry tended to concentrate their developments along the ship channel and other corridors, and the city planning department, through building ordinances, traffic planning, and approval of subdivision plats, exercised a greater degree of consistent oversight over suburban real estate development than had been the case in the nineteenth century. Some advantages were that no extensive city bureaucracy was created, political

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corruption was somewhat abated, and real estate developers were allowed more opportunities to operate without interference from city government. As for negative results, Houston was prevented from participating in federal urban renewal programs, unable to direct city expansion, and allowed mixed land use for businesses

and residences, a fate not shared by Dallas or other major Texas cities, all of which adopted zoning codes in the 1920s and 1930s.66 Whereas Highland Park was politically independent of the city of Dallas, River Oaks became “a part of Houston socially and economically,” and “an integral political part of the City.”67

Texas Garden Suburban Community Planning In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American residential community development by private real estate entrepreneurs was a fairly novel concept, especially in the cities of the Southwest. In the nineteenth century, building lots were platted and sold without constraints on their future improvement. But by the 1890s, the subdivision of land deed-restricted exclusively for residential use was introduced to American urban and suburban planning. Real estate developers first employed this type of planning for middle- to upper-income suburban communities, the possibilities of which were enhanced by sophisticated planning philosophies as well as by financial and technological advancements. By focusing on the neighborhood as a whole, rather than merely on the sale of individual lots, suburban real estate developers formulated a new paradigm in the land development industry that swept the country, creating a higher standard that many suburban developers would seek to emulate.68 The adoption of a broadbased comprehensive planning process enabled developers to control not only the architectural character of their developments, but also the nature of the landscape design and management of their neighborhoods’ property values and social status. This included such elements as street layout and design, open spaces and parks, loca-

tion of nonresidential public and commercial buildings, and a code of restrictive covenants, with the apparatus to administer and enforce them. In the early 1890s, large-scale, Texas midmarket suburban development was attempted at Philadelphia Place and Oak Cliff in Dallas, Houston Heights in Houston, Arlington Heights in Fort Worth, and Alamo Heights in San Antonio, which all were adversely affected by the Panic of 1893. Eventually, most of these suburbs were developed in a less ambitious, piecemeal fashion, proving unprofitable for their initial developers, many of whom experienced bankruptcy. As a result, Texas suburban developers took on smaller-scale projects based on orthogonal urban models, particularly the St. Louis private place, that appealed to an upperincome market, delaying the introduction of the residential garden suburb. The houses built in the private place neighborhoods tended to rely on typologies better suited to an urban environment. Not until 1906, when the developers of Highland Park purchased 1,326 acres of land in Dallas, did a Texan suburban development focus on the garden suburban community model for inspiration and implementation. Its developers introduced new picturesque planning techniques, with houses designed in a variety of period revival styles set in beautifully manicured

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gardens along curving drives, with land reserved for numerous parks for pleasure and recreation, along with such amenities as the Dallas Country Club and, eventually, a community shopping center. In addition, they employed protective restrictions, which resulted in steadily increasing property values that set the standard for successful Texas suburban developments. These measures had a direct influence on Highland Park’s Houston counterpart, River Oaks. What is important to realize is that in order to sell all of the lots in such large parcels of land, the developers of Highland Park and River Oaks developed their property in installments, or sections, because this allowed the developers to generate enough capital incrementally to complete infrastructure improvements one section at a time. They platted the largest, most expensive lots in the center or adjacent to a natural amenity (such as a body of water) and platted smaller-size lots in sections on the fringes to serve as buffers for the most expensive real estate. “We were told that we were foolish to undertake a subdivision development for people of different incomes,” Hugh Potter wrote.69 “But we had to make an appeal to families whose incomes ranged widely in order to sell our 1200 acres of land.”70 In the beginning, the residents of these planned communities ranged from the middle class to the elite, but as property values steeply rose in Highland Park and River Oaks, only the well-to-do would be able to afford them. In 1925, J. C. Nichols wrote that there were “only ten or twelve cities in the United States today that offer superior residential developments,” listing among them Highland Park in Dallas.71 The other significant early twentiethcentury, state-of-the-art communities, according to Nichols, were his own Country Club District in Kansas City (established in 1907), Roland Park in Baltimore (1891), Beverly Hills

in Los Angeles (1906), Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York (1912), Shaker Heights in Cleveland (1916), Coral Gables in Miami (1921), Palos Verdes Estates (1914) and Rancho Santa Fe (1922) in Southern California, and River Oaks in Houston (1924). Between 1917 and 1919, developers of some of these communities, including Hugh E. Prather of Highland Park, attended yearly meetings of the Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property to share ideas about the planned extension of Highland Park, Highland Park West, which would have a major impact on Will Hogg in his development of River Oaks.72 By studying upper-income suburban developments across the country and employing such landscape architects and city planners as Wilbur David Cook Jr. of Los Angeles, Kessler, and Hare & Hare to design and consult on their communities, the Highland Park and River Oaks developers planned their subdivisions based on the most scientific and sophisticated models of their time. At the First Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property in 1917, Prather announced that Dealey had been “one of the strongest advocates [of Highland Park]. . . . We have got a world of publicity, because it is the one example in Texas that could be held up to the people as an example of proper city planning on a small residence city all the way through.”73 In 1928, Prather’s partner and brother-in-law, Edgar L. Flippen, honored Dealey as “the father of Highland Park.”74 Dealey’s commitment to progressive urban planning was reflected by the support, both public and private, that he gave to the Highland Park developers and was cemented by the fact that he and his family moved into the community in 1923. Prather told the members of the 1917 conference that Highland Park “was practically a pioneer proposition,” because, according to

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Nichols’s list of “superior residential developments,” only one development, Roland Park, had opened and was well on its way to comple-

tion, as the Country Club District and Beverly Hills were in their infancy.75

Roland Park, Baltimore In 1891, an English syndicate represented by Samuel M. Jarvis and Roland R. Conklin of Kansas City, Missouri, purchased approximately 495 acres in Baltimore County, Maryland, for a streetcar subdivision.76 The land was located northwest of the city in a beautiful natural setting consisting of gentle slopes and steep hillsides, rising four hundred feet higher than the city. Edward H. Bouton, a title insurance and real estate salesman who had recently moved from Kansas City to Baltimore, was hired as general manager for the Roland Park Company.77 Bouton conceived the ideal suburban development as systematically integrating landscape, architectural, and social design. Although he had no previous experience in the development of subdivisions, Bouton was a shrewd businessman. His first step, before any lots were sold, was to have his initial planning consultant, George Kessler, make a comprehensive plan for the complete improvement of the first section, which contained approximately 120 acres. The plan, called “Plat One,” was finished in 1892. Viewing plans for residential developments as unified landscapes, Kessler lined the streets in Plat One with evenly spaced shade trees and suggested transferring forest trees to the barren sections of the estate “so as to avoid straight lines, making them appear to have what is called natural position, as in the forests,” and when the older forest trees died, the tree-lined streets would provide adequate shade for the lawns and sidewalks.78 He convinced Bouton to plant amid trees “clusters of greenery on the lots

in a naturalistic, random manner,” so as to create a park-like appearance.79 Kessler, however, did not have a precisely delineated role in the planning of Roland Park and did not continue to be involved in its development. As Roland Park grew, Bouton’s comprehensive plan for it would come to include sites for a country club, a shopping center, two schools, and three churches.80 He rapidly grasped what would subsequently be considered the essential elements of residential planning and devoted great attention to infrastructure improvements, supplying electricity to residents and putting in paved streets, sidewalks, gutters, storm drains, artesian water wells, and a sewer system.81 As good transportation from Baltimore was key to the success of Roland Park, Bouton established the Lake Roland Elevated Railroad electric line in 1893 to create a service from the city center within twenty-five minutes to Roland Park, providing a great impetus to the growth of Baltimore northward. Roland Park was also linked to downtown Baltimore via parks, parkways, and other major thoroughfares. Aware that carefully crafted deed restrictions would be necessary to maintain Roland Park’s status as Baltimore’s premier suburb, Bouton and his company formulated restrictions to protect public zones from such visual intrusions as stores, factories, saloons, or any type of business, as well as hospitals and asylums, to maintain Roland Park as a place of residence.82 The deed restrictions were to run in perpetuity, but in 1909 Bouton reduced them to a twenty-five-

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year period and later permitted all residents to renew them by majority vote.83 In 1892, the first lots were offered for sale, and construction of the first houses began. Anticipating the extent to which commercial and social uses, if properly managed, could enhance the community’s desirability, Bouton decided to erect a shopping center and a country club in Plat One but reserved the rest of the community for residential development only.84 Bouton donated one hundred and fifty acres for the country club, and by 1898 six hundred applicants had pre-registered to join the Baltimore Country Club, which was so named to mark it “as a city-wide enterprise” since membership was not limited to residents of Roland Park.85 Bouton was intent on attracting “precisely” the “right people” to move into Roland Park and was successfully aided in his efforts by the presence of the country club.86 In 1913, Bouton advised J. C. Nichols that “practically any person I would sell property to in Roland Park would make a good member in the Country Club,” possibly coded language for a systematic pattern of discrimination.87 Bouton proved that a country club provided an excellent means of stabilizing a suburban development and increased the sale of lots. However, the so-called well-to-do residents that Bouton had anticipated moving into Roland Park did not purchase lots in the development. Instead, by the turn of the twentieth century, it was the “rapidly-growing urban class of

moderately well-off professionals and businessmen that comprised the majority” of its homeowners.88 They were doctors, lawyers, bankers, railway officials, and high-level executives. In 1895, Bouton organized the Roland Park Civic League, the first homeowners association in the United States, through which trustees managed all property owners’ collective maintenance costs for police patrols, road repair, garbage pickups, street lighting, and a water supply. From 1908 to 1916, the League published The Roland Park Review, a newsletter created to instill civic pride and responsibility as well as a sense of community and identity awareness.89 Mandatory restrictions varied from Plat One to Roland Park’s final development of Plat Six in 1910. In the beginning, the restrictions imposed setback lines from thirty to forty feet for each house in order to provide ample front yards. A minimum cost requirement for each house ranged from two thousand to five thousand dollars, with the cost varying from street to street. The Roland Park Company supervised the construction of each house to control architectural consistency and to ensure maintenance of property values. The elevation, site, and floor plans, as well as exterior colors, of every house had to be approved by the company’s architectural design review board, a degree of scrutiny that would not be adopted by developers in most other communities. Yet, the design review board allowed residents to choose their own architects, materi-

University Boulevard in Roland Park, A Book of Pictures in Roland Park, Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore: Norman T. A. Munder & Co., March and June 1911, 93.

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als, and styles as long as the house was integrated with the landscape design, using landscape as a means of siting the house and contributing to the community identity. Stables and other outbuildings were permitted if they were built at the rear of the lot. Many of the original houses were built in versions of the Queen Anne, Shingle, Tudor, and Colonial Revival styles, and some were bought as packages through the plan book designs of R. W. Shoppell and others.90 In 1895, the company claimed that it had erected more than one hundred model houses, worth more than five hundred thousand dollars in total.91 As an incentive, Bouton offered the installment plan for his clients, a standard cash down payment and monthly installments comparable to rental rates. From 1905 to 1911, Edward L. Palmer served as Roland Park’s first resident architect, an arrangement that was considered unusual at the time because “most members of the profession considered such work demeaning.”92 Between 1901 and 1910, Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architectural firm, worked on the planning of the rest of the Roland Park acreage, mostly situated on much steeper terrain than Plat One.93 By making preliminary visits and consultations and drawing a topographical map, Olmsted Brothers invested more time and energy in planning the development than had Kessler. The firm viewed the comprehensive plan as a means of addressing an entire community through a flexible set of goals. Because they

considered planning a complex and ongoing process, they perceived methods of planning for Roland Park as a broad strategy in which precise lines of physical development were resolved over a practical timeline, rather than a fixed, predetermined end date. Bouton exhibited great enthusiasm for the Olmsted Brothers’ planning ideas, often offering his own suggestions to be refined by the professional landscape architects. Bouton and the Olmsteds had an almost perfect developer-client relationship and were in agreement that a flexible, broad, comprehensive plan was the best method for predicting the future needs of a suburban community. In 1908, the Baltimore Sun called Roland Park Baltimore’s “most fashionable and most pretentious suburb.”94 Ten years later, the city annexed Roland Park. The Olmsteds’ work there would be greatly admired by planners and developers across the country. Among those who visited Roland Park were the planner and theorist John Nolan and J. Horace McFarland, the president of the American Civic Association, who stated that Roland Park was a “civic exhibit which cannot be but of increasing value to a whole country.”95 The Olmsteds presented Roland Park as an exemplary model for suburban development to a new generation of landscape architects, architects, planners, and developers. In fact, the influence of Roland Park would extend to all of the major planned suburbs of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Highland Park and River Oaks For Edgar L. Flippen and Hugh E. Prather, beginning the development of Highland Park during the Panic of 1907 must have seemed daunting. As Prather pointed out at the 1917 Conference of Developers of High-Class Resi-

dential Property, “People [in Texas] are not educated up to buying high class resident property.”96 Undoubtedly, Dealey’s accumulation of information on city planning was of great benefit to Flippen and Prather, who essentially built

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their own small residential city based on Dealey’s research, succeeding in what the city of Dallas never fully achieved. Will Hogg followed what Flippen and Prather had accomplished in Dallas in his development of River Oaks, but he and his partners, Mike Hogg and Hugh Potter, had the advantage of viewing and learning from probably all of the “superior developments” cited by Nichols because these had either begun development or had long since been open by 1924, when Hogg and his partners purchased the land for River Oaks. As stated in their River Oaks promotional literature, officers of their organization “visited the pick of the residential developments from Florida to Kansas City and Chicago, and from New England and New York to the coastal cities of California, as well as in European cities. Then they studied the prob-

lems peculiar to Houston and Southwestern cities in general.”97 However, Highland Park and River Oaks did not represent isolated real estate trajectories in Texas cities: Amarillo, Beaumont, Brownsville, Corsicana, El Paso, Fort Worth, Galveston, Port Arthur, San Antonio, and Wichita Falls experienced up-to-date suburban community development during the 1920s and 1930s, although on a smaller scale than in Dallas and Houston. Few Texas cities had the means to support the Dallas and Houston models on such a comprehensive scale and few were significantly complete by the onset of the Great Depression. Prior to 1945, no other Texas suburban developers successfully attempted to fully use the large-scale comprehensive plan, as presented in Dallas and Houston.

Suburban Houses in Dallas and Houston By obtaining professional advice from design consultants for their sites, infrastructure, and buildings and through strict covenants incorporated in deed of sale and in architectural guidelines, the developers could manage the beauty and order of the community as a whole. As progressive suburban planning was established in Texas, more “modern” suburban house types with distinctive architectural styles and interior designs were erected in landscape settings characterized by spacious yards with private gardens. From the 1890s through the 1930s, distinct and recognizable stages of Texas house forms evolved from an urban, street-oriented version with square, boxy proportions to an elongated suburban country house placed low to the ground. These houses featured a oneroom-deep rectilinear plan and multiple exposures organized for climatic responsiveness by

orienting reception rooms to the south facing the backyard (the “country”) to capture prevailing southerly breezes, a great advantage in the years before the introduction of air-conditioning in the 1930s. The outcome of this evolution was a house with a backyard with landscaped gardens that were equal to those on the street side of the house. There was a clear relationship between the interior rooms and the gardens, which became extensions of the house, creating expanded living spaces for outdoor and indoor activities. High-set foundations and front porches were replaced at first by balustraded terraces, a protective hood over the front door, and side loggias, or open porches, topped by sleeping porches that were extensions of the private space of the interior, rather than semipublic spaces, like a front porch, accessible from the street. There was

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also a trend toward diminution of scale, more precise renditions of historic models, and far more consistent development of stylistic identities through the detailing of finish materials, often producing an eclectic effect. This evolution culminated in the suburban country house type with a street front hinting at, but not necessarily disclosing, the interior plan geometry. Thus, the country house type was adjusted to make it suitable for suburban neighborhoods, as the appeal of living in the country and a new desire for privacy, even outdoors, were changing American domestic customs and architecture. By integrating their large community landscaping theme and its improvements with each homeowner’s suburban country house and garden, the developers could reinforce the social status of their property owners, achieving two major objectives: the fulfillment of their quest for profit and the elevation of their standing nationally as models of suburban architecture and community planning. This is demonstrated by the fact that houses in Highland Park and River Oaks were repeatedly illustrated in nationally published journals during the 1920s and 1930s. At the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the middle- to upper-middle-class proponents of Progressivism “believed they could reform through successive approximations of their urban ideal—a clean, beautiful, well-governed city—and they called their movement the ‘civic renaissance,’ the ‘civic awakening,’ and ‘the uplift in American cities’. . . . Their aims included the spreading of middle-class values through the uplift of unfortunates and the establishment of their own cultural hegemony.”98 Progressives often projected a nostalgic view of country living, as immigrants and the working classes crowded into American cities, creating congested center city neighborhoods. Even in Dallas and Hous-

ton, those with means desired the pastoral environment of the garden suburb, as there were few rural summer retreats in Texas for escaping the heat and confusion of the cities. Consequently, a “great wave of renewed love of the out-of-door life and of nature which swept over America in the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth” was reflected in Texas suburban domestic architecture.99 Stylistically, the house designs built in Highland Park and River Oaks in the 1920s exemplified national trends with respect to such types and styles that developers permitted in their subdivisions. This involved a range of sources, from the American Colonial, Dutch Colonial, French Colonial, Beaux-Arts (sometimes labeled Modern French), Tudor, and other genres based on both symmetrical and pastoral European genres. In the early 1920s, Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean were introduced in Highland Park and River Oaks. These regional styles, created by architects in Southern California, became extremely popular in Texas due to its historic and climatic associations and would spread throughout the Southwest and Florida. Although Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style was missing from both Highland Park and River Oaks, houses based on Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman style were erected in the early stages of Highland Park’s development.100 These designs were either provided by architects working for the development corporations or approved by an architectural design review committee. The foremost Texas architects involved in this process were C.  D. Hill, Lang & Witchell, H.  B. Thomson, Anton  F. Korn Jr., and Fooshee & Cheek in Dallas, and John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, Joseph W. Northrop Jr., and Charles W. Oliver in Houston, the latter of whom was the private consulting architect for the River Oaks Corporation from 1926 to 1933. These archi-

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“Attractive Homes and Scenes in Second Installment of Highland Park,” Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park West, ca. 1924, 12.

“Gardens in Highland Park,” Highland Park West, ca. 1924, 28.

Mrs. Charles W. Oliver House, River Oaks Corporation advertising pamphlet. MSS 0012, River Oaks Collection, Scrapbook, Vol. 4. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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River Oaks Corporation advertisement for 2007 River Oaks Boulevard, Houston Gargoyle, back cover, December 8, 1929. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

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tects studied national models of domestic style and adapted them to the climatic conditions of Texas. The developers of Highland Park and River Oaks both had strong advertising campaigns for their suburban communities and house designs, involving published booklets and newspaper ads. In addition, the River Oaks

Corporation placed full-size ads on the covers of popular local journals and published pamphlets with artistic renderings of houses designed by Oliver. In the case of the speculative house at 2007 River Oaks Boulevard, Will Hogg had the house fully furnished by decorators and held an open house for prospective buyers.

Charles A. Platt and Harrie T. Lindeberg Nationally, the two most important architects developing the modern country house type were the New Yorkers Charles A. Platt and Harrie T. Lindeberg, with their most prominent followers including Bertram G. Goodhue, Myron Hunt, Reginald Johnson, Joseph Neel Reid, Mott B. Schmidt, and George Washington Smith, among others. Platt, with his dual interest in the design of the house and the garden, “united architecture and landscape, cut loose from palatial ostentatiousness, and provided a graceful, practical domestic environment for the American of wealth and refinement.”101 He approached his country house projects by designing from the outside in, that is, incorporating the design of the house with that of the landscape and garden. For this, he was labeled “the architect most responsible for the new way of looking at the house in the landscape.”102 Platt

stated in a 1931 interview, “The essential truth in country houses design . . . is that house and gardens together form one single design.”103 Platt drew inspiration from American Colonial and eighteenth-­century English house forms, adapting them to contemporary domestic programs and anchoring them to their sites with his garden designs. Platt had trained as a landscape painter in Paris and New York in the 1880s, but turned to landscape design and architecture after a visit to Italy in 1893. Upon returning to the United States, he made his summer residence in Cornish, New Hampshire, a community of artists and writers. Lindeberg, though trained in the offices of McKim, Mead, and White, was drawn to the work of the contemporary British architects Edwin Lutyens and Charles F. A. Voysey, who were producing architectural designs based on

Anna Parkman Osgood House, “Blendon Hall,” south elevation, Hadlyme, Connecticut, 1901, Charles A. Platt, architect. The Architecture of Charles A. Platt, 129. Courtesy of Acanthus Press, LLC.

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Anna Parkman Osgood House, “Blendon Hall,” first-floor plan, The Architecture of Charles A. Platt, 130. Courtesy of Acanthus Press, LLC.

English regional vernacular manor houses, rather than to the classical prototypes of his mentors.104 Lindeberg transformed the larger-scale country British designs to create an American house type better suited to suburban living. These American house designs were illustrated in his 1912 privately published book, Domestic Architecture. One of the strongest proponents of Platt and Lindeberg’s work was the influential architecture critic and political writer Herbert Croly, editor of Architectural Record from 1900 to 1913, co-author of Stately Homes in America: From Colonial Times to the Present Day (1905), and author of Houses for Town and Country (1907) and a manifesto on Progressive Era beliefs, The Promise of American Life (1909).105 In Houses for Town and Country, Croly defined the typical American country house as “a medium priced building, although it tends toward the upper rather than the lower end of the limit. . . . It is not so large that its inhabitants become insignificant compared to their appur-

tenances; yet it is large and handsome enough to give an effect of ease, good taste, hospitality, and well-favoured abundance.”106 Neighbors in Cornish, Croly had hired Platt in 1897 to design his house in the community, a simple twostory residence with a loggia opening onto the rear garden. In 1904, Croly began publishing and praising the work of Platt in Architectural Record, the preeminent architectural journal in the country, largely due to the extensive written commentaries by Croly and his colleagues that accompanied the photographs of the various architects’ work. Platt’s work was further promoted in the Monograph of the Work of Charles A. Platt, published in 1913 and reprinted in 1919. Platt’s monograph became one of the leading sources for contemporary eclectic designs. Platt “accomplished what all eclectic architects strove for—subtle transformation of historic models as solutions to modern building problems.”107 Although Platt never designed a house in Texas, he was known to architects working there through his published designs. However,

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Frederick L. Lutz, Esq., House, “Laurel Acres,” entrance façade, Oyster Bay, New York, 1917, Harrie T. Lindeberg, architect. Domestic Architecture of H. T. Lindeberg, 167. Courtesy of Acanthus Press, LLC.

Lindeberg, “a specialist in the romantic country house” and “probably the most prolific and widely known domestic specialist of the eclectic era,” was hired in the early 1920s to design four houses in Shadyside, Houston’s elite residential enclave.108 Because of these commissions, Lindeberg’s influence would be felt directly in Houston. Platt and Lindeberg’s designs were

conceptually similar and exerted a profound impact on architects designing suburban houses in Texas, particularly in the way they integrated the plan of the house with the surrounding landscape. Platt’s ca. 1901 American Colonial design for a five-bay, two-story, white-painted shingled house for Anna Parkman Osgood (later Mrs.

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Frederick S. Culver) in Hadlyme, Connecticut, illustrates how he based his design on historic sources and transformed them to accommodate current lifestyles. On the ground floor of the elongated rectilinear plan for the house, known as “Blendon Hall,” the formal rooms faced the gardens. These rooms opened onto a veranda running fully across the rear elevation and flanked by two open porches to provide a transition from the house to the landscape and create the main elevation of the house. If possible, he always faced the entrance front north and the rear south to take full advantage of the site and views. The formal staircase was located at the entrance end of the hall, leaving the rest of the hallway open to flow into the living and dining rooms as well as out to the garden through double doors. Platt placed the kitchen with a service wing also toward the street with the servants’ quarters above it, which traditionally in the nineteenth century would have been oriented toward the rear yard. The horizontal mass of the house rose directly from the ground, physically linking the house and its gardens, and was reinforced by the low pitch of the hipped roof. The porches and veranda, supported by one-story Doric columns, allowed unobstructed

views from the five bedrooms on the second floor, three of which faced the gardens along with Mrs. Culver’s dressing room. Prior to his work in Houston, Lindeberg designed country houses primarily on the East Coast and in the Midwest. One of the most striking examples is the 1917 manorial-style Frederick L. Lutz House in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. Low to the ground, the Lutz House, known also as “Laurel Acres,” formed a complete ensemble of a house and its garden. A steeply pitched roof with an end gable rose high above the entry door in a monumental gesture that signifies the importance of the house. Its smooth stucco walls were austere in character, but the entry door was highly decorated by Romanesque detailing and was further accentuated by a long, horizontal band of casement windows with a brick-relieving arch above them. Spear-like ornamental downspouts flanked the entry. Lindeberg’s style is dissimilar to that of Platt, but the conceptual ideas are alike. Both architects designed houses that rested close to the ground to adapt the house to its site and create a new form of the country house that would be embraced by Texan architects and their clients.

Conclusion The developers of Highland Park and River Oaks adopted the concepts of the American Dream of homeownership: as a place to escape “from the pressure, congestion, and corruption of urban life,” a place to elevate a family’s social status, and for the fulfillment of personal achievement “in the form of self-realization or asserting one’s individuality.”109 In other words, they strongly grasped the middle class’s desire to live in safe, homogeneous surroundings, what

Ethel Longworth Smith aptly described in her 1928 “In Defense of Suburbia,” in which she wrote that she and her husband had “moved to a suburb .  .  . because we believed that our small children would find there a more normal, healthy environment than the city was providing.”110 Additionally, this type of environment appealed to people who did not have children and wanted to obtain the benefits of living in a community of neighbors who also identified

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with these values. By incorporating up-to-date infrastructure improvements, coordinating the landscaping of private and public spaces, implementing such legal devices as restrictive covenants, and providing architectural guidance in terms of style and suitability for new technology, developers so successfully reversed the failure of cities to ameliorate urban living that their developments have retained their appeal to the present day. A comprehensive city plan was implemented incrementally in Dallas, but the concept was never accepted in Houston. Highland Park and River Oaks would stand apart from their host cities by adopting Progressive Movement philosophies to manage issues of beauty, order, stability, and profitability, particularly through the use of restrictive covenants. Therefore, the developers of these Texan suburban communities assumed a civic responsibility to construct models for urban growth in their cities. They drew upon innovative planning concepts and architectural trends, benefiting both themselves and their homeowner clients. Furthermore, by working with some of the most prominent architects in their cities, they educated clients, as well as the broader public, on the merits of architectural design, which also accommodated technological advancements. The developers of Highland Park and River Oaks constructed beautiful, controlled communities, adorned by some of the best architecture from this period in Texas. The key to this achievement was their understanding that the affluent public sought a family-oriented environment, offering a semblance of permanence, social “integrity,” and confirmation of economic prosperity, a neighborhood where like-minded citizens could raise and educate their children far from what they supposed to be the crime-

ridden, working-class, and minority sections of Dallas and Houston. Through their attentiveness to upper-middle-income American values and anxieties at a time of challenging growth and advances in technology, the developers of Highland Park and River Oaks reviewed not only actual but also imagined communities that constructed consensus on spatial settings for domestic leisure, happiness, and social status. It is not surprising today that the names “Highland Park” and “River Oaks” are still associated with distinct lifestyles in Dallas and Houston. As Potter noted in 1937, the creation of small urban neighborhoods, or “a hodge-podge of unrelated subdivisions clumsily hooked on to each other or superimposed on one another,” transitioned to the development of comprehensively planned large-scale communities at Highland Park and River Oaks.111 Through an understanding of the history of American suburban development during this period, it becomes apparent how consistently and creatively these Texas suburban residential communities were planned, marketed, and developed. Highland Park and River Oaks have enjoyed extraordinary longevity thanks to the foresight of their developers, who learned from the experience of early and contemporary nationwide developers, and who, in turn, contributed to the history of suburban planning in the United States by introducing modern concepts of suburban development in Dallas and Houston. Highland Park and River Oaks exceeded the expectations of their developers, who felt that sound neighborhood planning required the presence of families of various income levels. However, as demand for homeownership in their garden suburbs increased in the last quarter of the twentieth century, they would house only the cities’ wealthy, leaving the middle class priced out.

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C h a pt e r t wo

T H E A N D O F

P LANNI NG

D E VE LOP M E NT RE SI DENTI AL

COMMUNITIES AND

HOUSTON,

IN

DA L L A S

1 8 5 0s – 1 9 2 0s

I n the f i r s t q ua rt e r o f t h e t w e n t i e t h ce n t u ry, Dallas and Houston eclipsed all other Texan cities in terms of population growth and wealth production. In the first stages of suburban development, families moved out of the inner core of the expanding cities to small residential enclaves or to outlying “additions” along existing city streets. Undoubtedly, it was a combination of the character of the cities, the increase in commercial development in their cores, and the advent of better transportation infrastructure that led to the rise in suburban development in these two cities. On February 7, 1873, the first two mule-powered streetcars, the “Belle Swink” and the “John Neely Bryan,” began service in Dallas, and lines were soon expanded as the transportation improved and the business became lucrative.1 Dallas’s first affluent residential district, the Cedars, opened in the late 1870s, south of downtown along Ervay and Canton Streets. Some of Dallas’s most prominent citizens built expensive houses there.2 Because of the demand for new construction, much of the housing was poorly built, according to Dallas’s most prominent nineteenth-

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Bird’s Eye View of Dallas, 1872, Herman Brosius, lithographer. Courtesy of Dallas Historical Society. Used by permission.

century architect, James E. Flanders, who arrived in 1876. Flanders recalled in 1925 that he was not impressed by what he saw: “The buildings were of the flimsiest and most temporary kind. . . . Nobody expected to remain here permanently. . . . I was the only exclusive architect in town but the fact that the ones here before me had departed did not augur well for me.”3 Flanders asserted that the “idea was to make all the money they could while the town lasted.”4 By the 1890s, the Cedars began to decline due to the rise of lower-income residential developments surrounding it.5 Beginning in the 1850s, Quality Hill was developed along Franklin and Congress Avenues between Caroline and Chenevert Streets in the Third Ward of Houston, just east of Court-

house Square. Quality Hill was the first enclave suitable for genteel family life. On March 25, 1868, the first streetcar service opened in Houston, but it was bankrupt by July due to lack of patronage.6 Streetcar service would not be revived until May 2, 1874, when the local businessman William Brady and the former mayor Thomas  W. House began operating Houston City Street Railroad Company, mule-drawn car lines.7 Many of Houston’s most expensive houses were located in the grid of streets south of Texas Avenue in the center of town bounded by Main, Texas, Crawford, and Lamar. By the late 1870s, Main had emerged as the most prestigious street, Houston’s Victorian grand avenue. By this time, the area between Courthouse Square and Quality Hill had been affected by

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the railroads, and those with the means to do so left, settling along or to the east of Main Street in the South End.8 As in many American cities, Houston’s rapid expansion and overcrowding made it unappealing to live near downtown, especially as the streets became congested with traffic at some intersections “to a point of paralysis.”9 Due to the polluted condition of Buffalo Bayou, the source of the city’s drinking water; dust and mud on the streets; numerous unsightly overhead telegraph and telephone wires; and noise from traffic and factory whistles, more and more families sought to move.10 Along streets once lined with residences, there appeared offices, apartment buildings, and retail and com-

mercial structures—and by 1894, Houston’s first skyscraper office building. During the nineteenth century, the early housing stock in Dallas and Houston consisted entirely of free-standing structures built on lots of varying sizes, some with large gardens. The densely packed row housing typical of the Northeast, Midwest, and San Francisco did not exist in Dallas or Houston because “land was plentiful and inexpensive enough to avoid the crowding that produced row houses with common walls in other cities.”11 The house built in about 1876 for the Houston banker S.  M. McAshan at 1215 Main Street was a typical regional adaptation of a national city house type,

Bird’s Eye View of Houston, 1877, Herman Brosius, lithographer. Prints and Photographs Collection, di_04508. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

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incorporating the older form of a Greek Revival house—essentially a rectangular box—but with more up-to-date Italianate detailing that included a bracketed cornice, an extremely attenuated projecting entrance portico flanked by a pair of semicircular bay windows, and a hipped roof, which appeared almost flat.12 In 1882, Eugene  T. Heiner of Houston, best known as the architect of county courthouses, jails, and commercial buildings throughout Texas, designed the house at 1806 Main Street, home of the president of the Houston Street and Railroad Company, Charles S. House.13 Heiner employed the Second Empire style for this Victorian towered villa type. The key elements of this type are its asymmetrical massing, Mansard roof, and monumental entrance tower. These two houses reflected nationally popular trends that arrived much later in Texas. The Greek Revival style had reached its zenith in the Northeast by the 1850s; the asymmetrical towered villa decorated with Italianate and Second Empire detail, in the mid-1870s. Though no longer

Samuel Maurice McAshan House, Main Street, Houston, 1876 (demolished). MSS 0248-1048, Domestic Architecture of Harris County 1824–1914/Junior League Collection. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

avant-garde in the Northeast, these styles were the height of fashion in Texas. It would not be until the first decades of the twentieth century that architectural trends would be assimilated in Texas at the same time as in the rest of the country. By the late 1880s, Dallas saw a dramatic increase in the construction of large and elaborately finished houses. The clients for these houses seemed to prefer Queen Anne and picturesque Victorian interpretations of Colonial Revival designs, which were the dominant trends of domestic architecture built in Texas cities in the 1890s. In 1895, the house of the Maple Avenue real estate developer Edwin P. Cowan was built in the Queen Anne style on Maple Avenue, north of downtown Dallas, at a cost of more than twenty thousand dollars.14 Called “The Shingles,” it was monumental in scale with a variety of exterior finishes and complexly massed with towers and ornate brick chimney stacks. The urban character of this house is apparent in the dominance of the entrance façade,

Charles Shearn House House, Main Street, Houston, 1882, Eugene T. Heiner, architect (demolished). MSS 114 808, The Art-Work of Houston, Texas, n.p. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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Edwin P. Cohen House, “The Shingles,” Maple Avenue, Dallas, 1895 (demolished). McDonald, Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion 1870–1925, 187. Courtesy of Dallas Historical Society. Used by permission.

frontality, high-set foundation, front porch, and ceremonial front yard. Compared to trend-­ setting examples of shingle-faced resort houses designed by Boston architects twenty years earlier, The Shingles appears more like a collection of individual elements organized as attachments to the house. However, for Texas residential architecture, The Shingles was a sophisticated work for its day, and it served a crucial market-

Olivia and G. B. Dealey House, Maple Avenue, Dallas, ca. 1901 (demolished). McDonald, Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion 1870–1925, 194. Courtesy of Dallas Historical Society. Used by permission.

ing purpose for the developer. George B. Dealey and his wife Olivia also lived on Maple Avenue, where they built a commodious Colonial Revival house about 1901. At that time, the city’s most expensive houses were built on Maple and Ross Avenues, Dallas’s Victorian grand avenues. The Dealey family resided there until they moved to Highland Park in 1923.

East Dallas Residential development moved out of the Dallas city limits northeast of downtown from Akard Street along Ross and Swiss Avenues to Peak’s Suburban Addition and Munger Place. It also moved southwest of downtown across the Trinity River to Oak Cliff and north of the city in an area concentrated along Cedar Springs Road to the small settlement of Cedar Springs

and the neighborhoods of Oak Lawn and Philadelphia Place (the latter to become Highland Park). East Dallas began to thrive when the first two railroads reached the city. The Houston and Texas Central and the Texas and Pacific Railroads intersected there in 1872, creating a new economic focus—fueled by the activities of real estate developers and streetcar owners—for

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both business and residential expansion away from downtown. Most of the early East Dallas suburban developments were gradually incorporated into a city of that name between 1882 and 1889. These developments were carved from the rural tracts—owned by the early entrepreneurs Jefferson Peak, William H. Gaston, and C. C. Slaughter—into small neighborhoods based on a grid pattern and patterned after the St. Louis private place model. On February 24, 1879, Jefferson Peak and his son Junius filed a plat for Peak’s Suburban Addition, situated northeast of the railroad junction.15 It was laid out northwest between Rose Avenue and Victor Street and southwest between Carroll and Ann Streets. Peak’s sonin-law, Thomas Field, owned a large section of Peak’s Suburban Addition in the 1890s and through his firm, Field and Field Real Estate and Financial Agents, he promoted Swiss and Gaston Avenues as the most prestigious streets in the community, and for a time, some of the city’s wealthiest families resided there. Field never

employed deed restrictions, perhaps thinking clients would not accept them. In 1890, Peak’s Suburban Addition was annexed to the city of Dallas, along with all of East Dallas, a total population of approximately six thousand, because the city leaders of East Dallas saw annexation as a means of improving municipal services.16 But the Panic of 1893, which had an especially severe effect on the Dallas economy, halted construction in Peak’s Suburban Addition and development proceeded in a piecemeal fashion until around 1902, when the neighborhood began to expand east of Carroll Street to Fitzhugh Avenue. Most of the houses in the development were designed in the Queen Anne mode, but popular styles such as the Prairie, Mission Revival, Tudor Revival, Classical Revival, and Craftsman-inspired bungalows also appeared in the neighborhood.17 In the 1920s, the developers of Peak’s Suburban Addition allowed a number of multi-family houses and commercial buildings to be erected in the addition. These replaced the earlier domestic architecture, al-

Sanborn Map Collection, General Index, Dallas, 1921, di_07415. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

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though in the late 1910s and through the 1920s, many fine houses were still being erected in the development.18 With the changing character of the neighborhood in the 1920s, this section of East Dallas “lost the aura of exclusivity it once held, and status-seeking homeowners sought addresses in the newer subdivisions.”19 Yet, the developers of Peak’s Suburban Addition, with

their aggressive promotion of East Dallas, drew attention to that section of the city, resulting in successful suburban development to the northeast, with the developments of Munger Place, Highland Park, and Lakewood offering deed restrictions and other protective measures to maintain property values.

Dallas: Oak Cliff In 1887, John S. Armstrong, the future developer of Highland Park, and his partner in the wholesale grocery business, Thomas L. Marsalis, formed the Dallas Land and Loan Company and began to negotiate the purchase of two thousand acres of farmland between the Trinity River and Cedar Creek for a large-scale suburban new town called “Oak Cliff.”20 Oak Cliff came to represent a generation of streetcar suburban community developments in Texas. Platted in a grid pattern that ignored the rolling terrain of the Trinity River Valley, Oak Cliff was bounded originally on the east by Miller Street (now Denley Street), on the south by the Santa Fe Railroad (now Interstate 35), on the west by Beckley Avenue, and on the north by Colorado Street (now Colorado Boulevard). Realizing that the Trinity River was an “unforgiving boundary” and that investors would not acquire lots that could only be reached by ferry, Armstrong and Marsalis began to raise funds to construct the Oak Cliff Elevated Railway to connect Oak Cliff to downtown Dallas.21 The railway was completed by fall 1887 at a cost of $250,000 and in 1894 became one of the first electrified railways in Texas. During the opening of the Texas State Fair and Dallas Exposition in 1887, the company placed advertisements in the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Daily Herald

announcing the auction of lots in Oak Cliff, beginning on the first of November and lasting for three days. The ads described Oak Cliff as “the Beautiful Suburb of Dallas! On the Bluffs, High, Picturesque, Well Drained, Healthy.” According to the company, “No City in the Country Has as Large Lots, Ample Room for Residence and Garden.” In addition to newspaper advertisements, Marsalis, who was also one of the directors of the State Fair that year, placed flyers all over the county offering “free rides on the elevated railway, free hot coffee, free lemonade, free water from Oak Cliff springs, and free lunch to people taking his train until and during the days of the sale.” The promotional advertising campaign was extremely successful. In addition to local buyers, the company attracted investors from New York, New Jersey, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Louisiana. On the opening day of the auction, Armstrong and Marsalis sold $23,000 worth in lots; on the second, $38,113.22 Fueled by this success, Marsalis suggested that they hold back on the sale of some lots to inflate their prices artificially. Armstrong thought this idea was too risky and requested that Marsalis end their partnership immediately.23 Armstrong kept his wholesale grocery business and agreed

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to hand over the Dallas Land and Loan Company to Marsalis. By the end of the third day of the auction, the sale of lots had risen to $149,980.24 Marsalis continued to spend considerable sums of capital in developing and landscaping his property, and by the late 1880s, he employed deed restrictions—the earliest known use of such restrictions in Texas—that required improvements on each lot within a year of the purchase date.25 Setting aside one hundred and fifty acres for Oak Cliff Park (now Marsalis Park and Zoo), he built the twenty-foot-deep Spring Lake, began the surfacing of streets with river gravel, released the plans for an electrical power plant, and started the construction of a rail station and a two-story frame schoolhouse. Marsalis envisioned Oak Cliff becoming a health resort and “the chief attraction as a place of recreation for the people of Northern Texas.”26 By 1889, he had built a three-story dance pavilion, a summer opera house, and Park Hotel, a $150,000 four-story resort modeled after the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.27 Marsalis also piped artesian water to the hotel so that he could offer “life-restoring mineral baths.”28 Fearing that the city of Dallas would annex the community, he incorporated his development as the town of Oak Cliff in 1890. That same year, he also began to realize the manufacturing component of his project when several businesses chose to locate there, among them Colonel William Lang’s Texas Paper Mills Company, the Oak Cliff Artesian Well Company, and the Oak Cliff Planing Mill.29 By the time of the Panic of 1893, Marsalis had invested more than one million dollars in the development of Oak Cliff. In the aftermath of the Panic, he went bankrupt and was forced to sell his real estate and other business interests.30 The Dallas Land and Loan Company was sold to the Oak Cliff Real Estate Com-

pany. The company, owned by Bartholomew Blankenship, president of the North Texas National Bank of Dallas, divided the large lots into smaller ones intended for more modest houses.31 Between 1893 and 1900, Oak Cliff lost its exclusive status and was developed instead as a lower-­middle- to working-class suburb. By 1903, Oak Cliff was annexed to the city of Dallas, an action that increased the city’s revenues and provided better city services for the residents of Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff was further developed in 1906 when the businessman Charles A. Mangold and a group of partners bought fifty acres of land around Spring Lake and organized an ambitious promotional campaign by renaming it Lake Cliff and redeveloping the park land surrounding it into the Lake Cliff Amusement Park.32 In 1910, Mangold led the effort to build the flood-proof Dallas and Oak Cliff Viaduct (now the Houston Street Viaduct), which was completed in 1912 at a cost of $675,000. Designed by the Kansas City engineering firm of Hedrick and Cochrane, it spanned a distance of 5,840 feet over the Trinity River and was called the “Largest Reinforced Concrete Highway Viaduct in the World.” 33 Despite Mangold’s efforts, the sale of lots was disappointing and the developers were forced to bail out of the project in 1914 when they sold 44 acres of their Oak Cliff property to the city of Dallas for $55,000.34 Another significant development occurred in 1923, when R.  H. Stewart and S.  A Temple bought 275 acres of land and platted four additions, with more than one-third of the land reserved for the Stevens Park Golf Course. It was named “Kessler Park” in memory of George Kessler, although he was never involved in this project.35 While the Kessler Square and the Kessler Highlands Addition were platted into smaller-sized lots, phases one and two of Kessler Park, with their hilly terrain

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and winding streets, were intended for large houses on bigger parcels of land, and these have remained the most affluent and architecturally significant neighborhoods in Oak Cliff. Al-

though many of the original Oak Cliff residences have been significantly altered or destroyed, most of the houses in these later additions have remained intact.

Dallas: Oak Lawn and Philadelphia Place In the 1880s, Oak Lawn was in the early stages of development north of the city limits in an area concentrated along Cedar Springs Road and McKinney, Maple, and Oak Lawn Avenues, which were connected to downtown Dallas by a mule streetcar service.36 With the electrification of the streetcar service in 1890 and the building of Parkland Hospital (now Woodlawn) adjacent to northwest Oak Lawn in 1894, extensive development began in the northern section of Oak Lawn when it became the most affluent suburb in the city.37 Bordering the neighborhood to the south was Hall Street, a growing AfricanAmerican community where many of the servants and laborers who worked in Oak Lawn resided. Southwest of Oak Lawn, the population of El Barrio, or Little Mexico, also began to increase dramatically.38 On May 25, 1908, the Trinity River overflowed its banks and devastated parts of downtown Dallas and Oak Cliff, leaving almost four thousand citizens homeless and $2.5 million in estimated damages.39 This event spurred growth in Oak Lawn. But by the 1910s, many residents who lived in the southern tip of Oak Lawn began to move farther out, either to northwest Oak Lawn or north to the newly developed Highland Park as construction of the scenic Turtle Creek Parkway progressed and the minority working class neighborhoods expanded in south Oak Lawn.40 North of Oak Lawn, Philadelphia Place, later redeveloped under the name Highland Park, was first developed, albeit not successfully, as a

suburban community in 1888 by Colonel Henry Exall, who envisioned the land approximately four-and-a-half miles north of downtown as “an ideal location for residences away from the hustle of growing Dallas.”41 In 1890, Exall, who had become vice president of the North Texas Bank in 1889, accompanied by Colonel J.  T. Trezevant, vice president of the City National Bank, traveled to Philadelphia to raise funds for a real estate venture in Dallas to be called Philadelphia Place.42 Backed by members of the Anthony J. Drexel and J. P. Morgan banking interests, prominent Philadelphia and New York capitalists, Exall and Trezevant purchased the 1,326 acres of land for “an average of $377 an acre for a total price of almost $500,000.”43 In 1930, the Dallas Morning News called it the “biggest single deal in suburban real estate ever made in Texas.”44 Inspired by Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, Trezevant stressed that “Dallas has an opportunity to compete with Philadelphia in the matter of parks.”45 “There is,” he added, “along Turtle Creek from the city waterworks, northwards, greater natural attractiveness than is found in Philadelphia. .  .  . It could be a sylvan delight, the most beautiful drive in all this broad state.”46 Acting as an agent for the Philadelphia Land Association, Exall was given “the privilege of developing it [Philadelphia Place] into a great subdivision for homes and he immediately set about his task with dispatch and enthusiasm.”47 He and his engineer, James S. Thatcher, ar-

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Postcard of Exall Lake, Highland Park, Texas, dated 1907 (author’s collection).

ranged for a topographical map of the acreage to be drawn, began laying out river gravel roads, and built a dam across Turtle Creek, creating Exall Lake in 1890. The topographical map was “undoubtedly the very first survey of this kind of so great a body of land in Texas, involving elevations of 100 feet squares and contours throughout the property.”48 Soon Exall Lake became a popular picnic, boating, and fishing resort, where a boathouse was constructed and, for only a quarter, people could rent a rowboat. The lake was accessible via the Fairland Addition electric streetcar from downtown to the Knox Street station, with a short walk across the cotton fields to the lake. Exall had hoped the success of the lake would act as a magnet

to draw residential development farther north from downtown Dallas, but by 1892, after the Eastern group had spent “about $50,000 in damming Turtle Creek and building gravel roads and planting trees they gave up the enterprise as too costly.”49 Furthermore, the Panic of 1893 cost Exall his fortune, and improvement in Philadelphia Place came to a halt before any houses were built. He relinquished almost the entire tract of land to the Philadelphia and New York syndicate Drexel, Morgan & Company.50 John S. Armstrong purchased this 1,326-acre tract for $208 an acre from Drexel, Morgan & Company in 1906.51 Before beginning any improvements in his new development, Armstrong changed the name to Highland Park.

Houston: Houston Heights Oak Cliff’s Houston counterpart was Houston Heights, which had no deed restrictions. Oscar Martin Carter and a group of investors in the

Omaha & South Texas Land Company purchased Houston’s two competing mule-powered streetcar systems in 1890 and equipped them

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to become one of the first electrically powered street railroads in Texas.52 The Omaha & South Texas Land Company purchased 1,765 acres northwest of Houston for a residential and industrial new town and reserved its northwest quadrant for factories.53 In May 1892, after the completion of a streetcar line from downtown to the company’s property, Carter began to develop Houston Heights on forested land twentytwo feet higher than the city of Houston.54 The Heights was considerably larger in scale than any of the suburban additions made to Houston. The site was two-and-a-half miles in length running north-south and a quarter of a mile in width running east-west. Spending $750,000 in improvements before opening Houston Heights, Carter built an artesian waterworks and a generating plant for electric lights and the electric street railway; the Houston Heights Hotel, a two-story, fifty-room Queen Anne–style building; an opera house;

and the fifty-acre Coombe’s Park, featuring an artificial lake and a large pavilion.55 In addition, Carter’s company reserved sites for schools and churches. Approximately eighty miles of streets and alleys were constructed.56 Houston Heights’s grand central avenue, Heights Boulevard, was macadamized with cast-stone curbs and sidewalks. Boulevard lots were the most expensive, having a frontage of 50 by 150 feet in depth. These became the sites for a few Queen Anne houses. One of the houses that has been beautifully restored is the 1896 frame Victorian towered villa at 1802 Harvard Street, built in 1896 for the real estate agent Henry P. Mansfield. Most lots in the Heights were 33½ to 50 feet in width by 132 feet in depth, ranging in price from $75 up, depending on the location.57 Houston Heights was incorporated as a municipality in 1896, but the company was forced to liquidate that same year, due to losses incurred as a result of the Panic of 1893.58 By 1915, the

Joseph Schleser House, Harvard Street, Houston Heights, Houston, 1912 (author).

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Map of Houston Heights, Texas, with an image of the Mansfield House (labeled as “Residence, corner of 18th Ave. and Harvard St.”), ca. 1892. MSS 118, Houston Subdivision Collection, no. 35. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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population of Houston Heights had reached nine thousand, and three years later, it was annexed to the city of Houston.59 In the early twentieth century, mainly bungalows and other small houses were built. The “Alamo” brick bungalow at 1123 Harvard Street built in 1912 represents typical twentieth-century trends in domestic architecture, such as the simplification of massing into a more compact symmetrical design. The brick contractor Joseph Schleser erected the bungalow for his family perhaps to show off his talent as a craftsman. Stephen Fox described the bungalow as “the most substantial and elaborate of its kind in Houston.”60 According to W. G. Love in his “Suburbs of Houston,” published in the 1908 promotional booklet The Key to the City of Houston, after the Omaha & South Texas Land Company con-

solidated and electrified Houston’s railcar lines in the 1890s, other suburbs appeared in and around Houston.61 These new developments were aimed at working- to middle-class purchasers. Developers generally supplied water, sewerage, electricity, and telephone infrastructure as part of their initial improvements. Most of them offered concrete sidewalks, but their claims of paved roads usually meant shell- or gravel-­ covered streets. Developers’ increasing investment in infrastructure improvements made subdivisions more attractive and competitive. Love noted that the success of these subdivisions was due to the fact that “intelligent people are realizing more and more the moral, as well as the advantages of having suburban homes, away from the noise and disturbing influences of the busy city.”

The Private Place Based on British residential developments, such as John Nash’s Regents Park of 1811 in London and Peter Frederick Robinson’s Nottingham Park Estates of 1825, the American private place evolved, beginning in the 1850s, as a planning solution to maintain property values.62 The private place also stemmed from the almost universal use of the grid, a system of town planning using straight, right-angled streets that simplified laying out a town by using a checkerboard pattern and distributing property within it. For a residential development, the plan usually consisted of a wide avenue, often a boulevard with a center planting space, marked at both ends by gates to restrict access, systematically segregating honorific and service uses.63 Houses often had deep front setbacks and were sited on lots to provide equal-sized yards. Associations of property owners usually enforced restrictive covenants.

Private places for the well-to-do are especially associated with St. Louis because “St. Louis was the only city in the United States where the private street had evolved in such a practical and useful manner.”64 The archetypal St. Louis private street was deed-restricted Vandeventer Place, which had been conceived by the developer Charles H. Peck and a group of investors around 1870. Every lot owner was required to belong to Vandeventer Place’s street association, with an initial payment of $150 followed by annual fees for lighting, improvements, and maintenance of the street and the median park. Only single-family houses costing no less than $10,000 were permitted to be built on lots uniform in size, 50 feet wide by 143 feet deep, with the principal façade of every house facing the street. More and more elaborate gateways signaled increasing competition between St.

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Louis’s private places for high status ranking. Perhaps the most appealing feature of the private place to Texas developers was the ease with

which one could make it an exclusive project, determining exactly who would be allowed to live there.

Houston: Westmoreland Developed speculatively by the South End Land Company in 1902, Westmoreland was the first middle- to upper-income private place in Texas and the first to impose restrictive covenants in Houston.65 Although deed restrictions had been employed in neighborhoods in some U.S. cities before the 1850s, strict enforcement of controls on residential planning and construction to maintain high property values prompted new forms of suburban developments. During the late nineteenth century, when ease of travel and communication rose significantly, new suburban planning practices in Texas began to be disseminated more widely. Published accounts proved critical in broadcasting suburban planning ideas. What is important to grasp, with this abundance of information on planning, is the manner in which these ideas were assimilated in Texas. W.  W. Baldwin, president of the St. Louis, Keokuk & Northwestern and the Chicago, Burlington & Kansas City railways, organized a development company to invest in suburban real estate in Houston, even though he resided in Burlington, Iowa.66 The St. Louis engineer, Julius Pitzman, who planned fifteen of the seventeen private places in the West End of St. Louis between 1868 and 1905, was the planner for Westmoreland. Located one-and-a-half miles southwest of downtown Houston, the development consisted of forty-four acres of land platted in a grid with four east-west streets—Hawthorn, Emerson, Westmoreland, and Marshall Avenues—and three north-south streets—Gar-

rott Street and Flora and Burlington Avenues— creating a twelve-block residential subdivision, with one exit at the northwest corner and several exits south and east. A set of cast-stone gate piers flanked the east end of Westmoreland Avenue at its intersection with Berry Avenue and Louisiana Street, marking the formal entrance to the subdivision. The South End Land Company’s real estate agent was Alfred J. Condit and he, along with the company, improved Westmoreland by installing electric and telephone poles at the rear of the property lines— with the exception of Emerson, where they are still located along the curb line—and concrete sidewalks with some curbing. But they did not pave the streets or install storm sewers or gutters. The subdivision was advertised in The Key to the City of Houston as “a home to homeseekers desiring to be rid of the noise, dust, and heat of the city. . . . Westmoreland boasts that she has no unsightly corner groceries and noisy street cars within her gates. . . . However it is very convenient to have them just outside the gates.”67 Westmoreland’s four restrictive covenants included a front setback line for the uniform placement of houses and permitted the erection of apartment buildings.68 However, they did not address minimum house sizes or costs, construction materials, the placement of utility lines, racial exclusion, or prohibition of livestock. By 1930, Westmoreland had lost its exclusive status with the intrusion of multi-­family complexes, and it was in competition with more highly restricted neighborhoods.

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Dallas: Munger Place In 1908, Robert Sylvester Munger, an inventor and manufacturer of cotton gin machinery, advertised the new development of Munger Place as “a Beautiful Residential Park,” and “in fact,” he claimed, “it is the only really up-to-date Choice Residence spot in Dallas.”69 Importantly, Munger employed restrictions prepared by an attorney and placed them in the deeds to secure the financial success of his community.70 Then a resident of Birmingham, Alabama, Munger had previously lived in Dallas, and in 1905, he purchased a dairy farm near St. Mary’s College in East Dallas, within the city limits northeast of Peak’s Suburban Addition, for the development of a residential community he called Munger Place. “Being interested in Texas and its chief city,” he said, “we were inspired by a motive to do something for the good of the city, as well as for ourselves.”71 In 1910, a writer for the Dallas magazine Beau Monde praised Munger’s work, stating that he “has contributed something to ‘the city beautiful.’”72 She complimented him for his “progressiveness and his generosity,” adding: Mr. Munger really led off in Dallas with one of the most beautiful suburban additions in the South and West. This is not all. He invested his own money and paid for all of the modern accessories of civilization, including the frills. In this Mr. Munger was so different.73 Unquestionably, Munger thought the tract near the Texas State Fair grounds would be valuable for residential real estate investment. As he stated in 1907, “We suggest Main or Elm streets, and Exposition avenue, now connecting the city to the Fair Grounds, be paved to the Fair

Grounds and from the Fair Grounds to connect our Collett Avenue.”74 According to Munger, “this will make a splendid drive connecting the Fair Grounds.”75 Collett Avenue, he added, “would prove a most useful as well as pleasurable drive not only for residents of the city, but a suitable one over which to take sightsee’rs, or visitors to the city.”76 Nevertheless, Munger’s proposal for connecting Collett Avenue to the Texas State Fair grounds was never carried out. Collett Munger, Munger’s eldest son and an attorney, was sent from Birmingham to Dallas in 1906 to become the general manager of Munger Place.77 He worked with a local real estate firm, Aldredge & Knight, through whom his father had purchased the Munger Place property, to oversee sales in the subdivision. On May 18, 1907, the same year John S. Armstrong and his partners opened Highland Park, Munger Place’s first 140-acre plat was filed with Dallas County.78 This consisted of twenty blocks divided into 184 lots and was based on an orthogonal plan. An advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on April 14, 1907, announced that within two days “there will be offered for sale the first forty lots in this handsome addition.” The Dallas Morning News later complimented Munger Place as setting the tone in East Dallas, asserting that it is “one of the most imposing residence districts and has added largely to the value of the property not only within the section, but in adjoining neighborhoods of East Dallas.”79 Constrained by the need to continue the straight-line grid pattern of the existing city street plan, the Mungers used a distinctive planning element to create differentiation between streets within their subdivision that, in general, maintained the existing city street widths.

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Munger Place was platted north-south between Fitzhugh Avenue and Munger Boulevard with Gaston and Swiss Avenues and Junius, Worth, and Crutcher Streets running across them in an east-west direction. All of the streets were seventy feet wide, with the exception of Munger Boulevard and Swiss Avenue, and shade trees of uniform size had been placed in a straight line as borders for all the streets. The one-hundredfoot-wide Munger Boulevard was described as “curbed and laid out for 2,000 feet, with parks between two driveways and only needs to be seen to be admired.”80 Yet, Munger Boulevard was never intended to be lined with houses but was built as a connective artery to downtown Dallas. Although there are houses on this boulevard, they do not face it. Ornamental stone gate piers and hipped tile-roofed lodges with rectangular plaques bearing the name Munger Place were built at Swiss and Gaston Avenues and Junius Street, the most important streets entering the subdivision from Dallas. Swiss Avenue is particularly reminiscent of St. Louis’s grand boulevards, and only its entrance gates survive. The Mungers noted, “Private parks forty feet wide extend the entire length of the four and a half blocks between two driveways,” thus “making the total width of Swiss avenue practically one hundred and thirty feet, which is an exceptionally wide street.” All of the streets were improved by paving them with bitulithic or Jacksboro macadam on a concrete foundation and with cement sidewalks, curbs, and gutters. Lots ranged in size from 60 to 95 feet in width and 141 to almost 300 feet in depth, with the largest lots being platted on Swiss and Gaston Avenues. In an urban environment, such as Munger Place, where the houses fronted the streets, the owners desired to have their houses facing south to capture the prevailing southern breezes, thus making the north side of the street

more desirable than the south. On Junius Street, the north side was priced at $65 per front foot, and the south side at $50 per front foot; on Gaston Avenue, the north side was $80 per front foot, and the south side was $10 lower in price. On Swiss Avenue, the Mungers demanded the highest prices, with lots on the north side priced at $100 per front foot, and on the south side at $90 per front foot. The least expensive lots on Crutcher and Worth Streets were priced at $45 per front foot. The total price for lots in Munger Place ranged from $2,700 to $9,500. Munger Place lot prices were high in comparison to its competitor Highland Park, where the developers asked $10 to $20 per front foot that same year. But the Mungers had spent two years installing their improvements before placing their property on the market, unlike the developers of Highland Park, who were selling lots before improvements had been completed. The Mungers installed city conveniences, including gas mains, water and sewer connections, telephone lines, electric streetlights, and electric street railways. By placing the telephone poles and water and sewer pipes in alleys behind the houses, they ensured that these were not visible from the major streets. According to the Mungers, the advantage of having alleys was that “all coal, vegetables, ice delivery and other necessary though rather noisy, troublesome and unattractive wagons, will have access from the rear, rather than in front of your house.” All of the walks, terraces, and parks were planted in Bermuda grass, as well as “on a number of the lots, whether any of them are sold or not.” The Mungers admitted the prices were “high in comparison with lots in other parts of the city, but cheap as compared to the improvements, location and the various features desirable for comfortable homes.” By 1912, Flippen and Prather never asked more then $32 per front foot in Highland Park, and

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Junius Street stone gates, Munger Place, Dallas, ca. 1915. Courtesy of Dallas Historical Society. Used by permission.

by 1917 resales in Highland Park did not exceed $75 per front foot, making their largerscale development less expensive than Munger Place before the 1920s.81 As an incentive, the Mungers offered “where the purchaser will begin to build within three months from date of deed 33¹⁄3 per cent discount allowed,” and “if within twelve months the discount will be 25 per cent.”82 The terms were “one-half cash, balance on or before one and two years, with five per cent interest,” and a five percent discount for all cash purchases. “A few lots will be set apart specially appropriate and reserved,” they said, “until needed churches or schools and by a vote of the property owners near may be used for those purposes.” These lots “will be sown in Bermuda grass and shade trees planted, so that they may be used as parks until needed for schools or churches.” (However, there were several churches nearby and several schools within walking distance, so these reserved lots were later sold as residential sites.) As a part of Dallas, Munger Place was protected by the Dallas police department and by a city fire station two blocks from the neighborhood, which helped lower fire insurance rates. In 1912, Collett Munger, with the aid of George W. Aldredge, one of his real estate agents and a resident of Munger Place, established what would become the second oldest country club in Dallas, Lakewood Country Club, on Gaston

Avenue near Greenville Road. It was not far from Munger Place in the then-sparsely-settled suburb of Lakewood. C.  D. Hill & Company designed the brick Mission Revival clubhouse, indicating the founders of the country club were aware of current California architectural trends.83 This was the same year that Hill designed the Dallas Country Club in Highland Park. The Mungers were among the first residential real estate developers in Dallas to implement deed restrictions to permit only the erection of single-family residences. These restrictions, the Mungers explained, “may appear somewhat severe and undesirable when applied to yourself.”84 In other respects, however, the deed restrictions were very advanced for Texas because they provided for properly integrated retail development in relation to the restricted residential neighborhood. “No stores or shops will be permitted,” except those “for necessities, such as drugs, groceries, and markets.”85 In addition, “they will be substantially built, doubtless of brick,” and “with appropriate and ornamental fronts . . . located on side streets.”86 The Mungers required that all owners had to front their houses in the same direction on all streets, and the restrictions prohibited those who owned corner lots from fronting their residences toward the side streets. The Mungers never mentioned in their promotional literature the estab-

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lishment of a homeowners association, like those in Roland Park and the Country Club District, but they controlled residential minimum costs, setback lines, orientation, and height. Their objective was to create uniformity and consistency in the design of Munger Place. In 1907, they required a minimum investment of $2,000 for houses on Worth Street and Crutcher Avenue, $3,000 for houses on the south side of Junius Street, and $4,000 for houses on the north side of Junius Street. On Gaston Avenue between Munger Boulevard and Fitzhugh Avenue, they demanded a $5,000 minimum housing investment; on Swiss Avenue, a $10,000 minimum. Some lot purchasers were building houses far exceeding these minimum costs. For example, in 1908, R.  W. Foat built a $15,000 house on Swiss Avenue; H. H. Adams, a $25,000 house; and A. L. Clark, a $30,000 house. On the other hand, that same year, the banker J.  S. McFarland erected six speculative cottages on Worth Street aimed at middle-income purchasers that ranged in price from $2,000 to $2,500. This was at a time in Dallas when the average cost of a house was $2,000 to $3,000.87 Located northeast of the original development, the second and largest section of Munger Place opened in 1914.88 The Munger Place Addition was also planned in the form of a checkerboard pattern, with the exception of Bryan Avenue, which intersected Swiss Avenue at a diagonal from the west. This section was closer to the city reservoir, White Rock Lake, which had been converted into a large park in 1910, consisting of 2,314 acres, 1,350 being the lake.89 The main water pipe from the reservoir passed through Munger Place and furnished its water supply “of sufficient power to throw a large stream of water over any house without the aid of an [a fire] engine.”90 In 1912, George Kessler had suggested that none of the grounds around the

lake should be sold so that “Dallas will have one of the great park properties of the country.”91 Because of Kessler’s insight, White Rock Lake Park remained intact and has survived as the largest outdoor recreational park in Dallas. Compared to Houston’s Memorial Park, it is about one-third larger in size. In 1922, the last installment of Munger Place was completed when Swiss Avenue and Bryan Parkway were expanded to La Vista Drive toward White Rock Lake Park. The residential architecture of Munger Place along its secondary streets, excluding the more costly Swiss and Gaston Avenues, is characterized by a repetitive box-like street façade design in which the frontality of the houses is marked by front porches, high foundations, and foursquare plans. Houses differ architecturally mainly through stylistic ornamentation. In these sections of Munger Place, houses were designed in the American Foursquare, Colonial Revival, Prairie, Craftsman, Tudor, and Mission modes, as can be seen in the advertisement placed in the 1909 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, which is a partial view of a completed row of houses on Gaston Avenue between Munger Boulevard and Collett Avenue. At the corner facing Gaston Avenue, David E. Waggoner, president of the Guaranty State Bank & Trust Company, built a brick Mission-style house with Alamo motif dormer windows, designed by C. D. Hill & Company.92 Thus, the nineteenthcentury Queen Anne– and Shingle-style houses were considered out of fashion and, for the most part, abandoned in Munger Place. These urban house designs were sited on small lots with the main rooms facing the street and service-­ oriented rooms facing the rear, often looking back toward a garage with servants’ quarters above, and were similar to those erected about the same time in Highland Park. In 1909, Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead, vice

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Photograph from Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1909, with a partial view of a completed row of houses on Gaston Avenue between Munger Boulevard and Collett Avenue.

president and general manager of Southwestern Paper Company, erected a two-story frame American Foursquare house at 4921 Junius Avenue.93 The house was clad in shingles and weatherboards with a two-story frame outbuilding behind it. The American Foursquare type is distinguished by its simple, boxy form that was easy to construct and provided the maximum amount of interior space for a house confined to a city lot. These house designs could be mail-ordered from catalogue companies, the largest of which at that time were Sears and Aladdin. Popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s, the American Foursquare often incorporated features from the Craftsman and Prairie styles, both of which rejected the highly ornamental, mass-produced decorative detail associated with Queen Anne houses, replacing it with handcrafted woodwork. The interiors of these styles generally had open floor plans and numerous built-ins. Borrowed from the Prairie style at the Olmstead House are the low-pitched roofs with wide horizontally continuous eaves, the decorative glazing pattern of the windows, and the stout, non-classical character of the brick porch piers. Shown on a 1921 Sanborn map, the outbuilding behind the house was labeled “auto,” or garage, with the address

Bertha and Harry Olmstead House, Junius Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, advertising booklet, Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, ca. 1910, n.p. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

4921½ Junius Avenue, indicating that someone, probably domestic workers, lived above the garage in an apartment, which was entered through the rear alley. Along the alleys of Munger Place and other Texan cities, domestic workers pursued their own lifestyles, creating two societies: one oriented to the main streets, the other to the modest narrow alleys.94 Swiss Avenue, the most restricted street with the greatest number of expensive houses in Munger Place, became the most exclusive address in the neighborhood. All houses along the boulevard had to be two stories in height. On these larger lots, the houses were set back sixty to seventy feet from the front property line so that they might “present the appearance of [the public right-of-way] being two hundred and fifty feet wide, which insures [sic] a most beautiful vista, both from the streets and residences,” visually constructing Swiss Avenue as high class with its expansive swath of green lawn.95 Due to the setback restrictions, the main rooms of the houses did not open to the rear gardens, even as the New York architect Charles A. Platt and his contemporaries were reorganizing the country house type for construction in suburban neighborhoods.

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Mabel and Rufus W. Higginbotham House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, 1913, C. E. Barglebaugh, architect (author).

First-floor plan, Mabel and Rufus W. Higginbotham House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, Texas, 1913, C. E. Barglebaugh, architect. Courtesy of the Craig Rekerdres Collection.

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Rufus W. Higginbotham, chairman of the board of directors of the Southwest National Bank and president of the Higginbotham, Bailey, Logan Wholesale Dry Goods Company, and his wife Mabel built a grand house on Swiss Avenue in 1913.96 C. E. Barglebaugh, a draftsman for the prolific Dallas firm of Lang & Witchell, designed the Prairie-style house, which reflects the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and stands out as the most progressive design on Swiss Avenue.97 Barglebaugh had worked in Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin’s offices in Chicago before moving to Dallas in 1907.98 Turning his back on historical models and decoration, Frank Lloyd Wright developed the Prairie style to conform to the rolling prairie surrounding Chicago. The original landscape design of the Higginbotham House is still intact, with emphasis given to the breadth of the front lawn rather than to extensive tree cover or dense shrubbery. The house was illustrated in the July 1914 issue of The Western Architect in which several Highland Park houses appeared. The Higginbothams’ two-story, dark red brick house has strong horizontal lines and a long, low-hipped roof with overhanging eaves. Other Prairie-style features include the indirect entrance, the separated first- and secondstory roofs, the alignment of white stone copings and planting urns, and the horizontal bands of leaded-glass windows, though double-hung sash windows were installed instead of the Prairie-style casement windows. The asymmetrical cross-axial first floor of the Higginbotham House has two rectangular terraces adjacent to a large, rectangular living room. But in breaking with Wright’s tradition of placing a fireplace at the central core of the house, Barglebaugh situated the fireplace on the front wall of the living room. It features a large Rookwood tile chimney piece, which Wright would perhaps have found

to be oversized for the room. Similar to Wright’s plan for a dining room at the Winslow House (1893) in River Forest, Illinois, and the Dana House (1903) in Springfield, Illinois, Barglebaugh inserted a semicircular conservatory off the dining room, facing east.99 In his 1910 Ausgefürhte Bauten und Etwurfe, or Executed Buildings and Projects, Wright labeled rooms similar in plan to the conservatory at the Higginbotham House as the frühstuck, or breakfast room, on his floor plans for both the Winslow and the Dana Houses.100 Old photographs of the Higginbotham House, taken shortly after its completion, show the conservatory, however, furnished with Italian Renaissance–style stone planter boxes. Obviously, it always served this function and was never intended for dining. Besides, the house has a separate breakfast room next to the kitchen. Many of Dallas’s foremost architects— including H.  B. Thomson, whose high-style domestic work was the most prolific at this time—designed houses on Swiss Avenue.101 Thomson’s work was strongly influenced by the Beaux-Arts trend in American domestic architecture. Beaux-Arts designs relied on classical sources but were new interpretations rather than copies of historical models. Designed by Thomson in 1916 for the president and general manager of the Magnolia Petroleum Company and his family, the Edgar  R. Brown House on Swiss Avenue was a Classical-style stuccoed brick house, which is an asymmetrical composition that is balanced by a tall pedimented entry bay flanked by giant pilasters on one side and a one-story projecting loggia with Palladian archways on the other.102 The giant pilaster theme is repeated at the corner next to the loggia. The swags above the arched first-floor windows, the incised fans above the windows in the roundarched dormers, the dentiled cornice, and the

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Edgar R. Brown House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, 1916, H. B. Thomson, architect (author).

bull’s-eye window in the pediment of the main entrance to the house are other prominent classical details. Though restricted by its urban lot, Thomson’s design of the façade makes a greater effort to open the house to the lawn than any of its predecessors on the street. The front porch has been replaced by a protective hood over the front door and a wide balustraded terrace. The center section of the house opens outward through three sets of glazed French doors. The east side loggia extends the private space of the interior outward to the terrace. Thomson designed one of his most opulent exercises in classicism in 1916 for Judge George C. Greer, general attorney and president of the Magnolia Petroleum Company.103 Symmetrical, unlike the Brown House, the five-part façade of the Swiss Avenue Greer House has an entrance recessed behind a triple arcade and flanked on each side by stone quoins. Below its slate-hipped roof, a modillion cornice accents the eaves of the house. An iron balcony and triplet window on the second floor and a three-part dormer with a large arched center section behind a balustrade

Judge George C. Greer House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, 1916, H. B. Thomson, architect (author).

further emphasize the central portion of the façade. The dark brick walls serve as foils for the abundant, light-colored decorative details, particularly the keystones, lintels, and large shutters flanking the windows, as well as the Palladian and rectangular openings on the loggias at opposite ends of the façade terrace. A wide multi-tiered walkway paralleling a decorative balustrade also adds to the imposing scale of the Greer House. In 1917, Thomson and his assistant Marion Fooshee designed a two-and-a-half-story brick house for the West Texas rancher William J. Lewis and his wife Willie. The eclectic FrenchItalian Renaissance design at 5300 Swiss Avenue was sold in 1921 to George N. Aldredge, a prominent banker, and his wife Rena Munger, and it is often referred to as the Lewis-Aldredge House or simply the Aldredge House by locals.104 French influences include its balustraded terrace, quoined window frames, and wrought-iron railings underneath the second-­ story windows. These are combined with features derived from Italian sources: the pair of

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recessed loggias and the central dormer window resting between the arms of an elaborate broken pediment, as well as the frontispiece beneath it on the slightly projecting entrance bay. The main block has tall brick chimney stacks at each end. The house and its slightly projecting flanking pavilions are topped by hipped roofs. The façade arrangement of this house reflects that of the Greer House but in a more sophisticated academic style. The footprint of the Lewis-Aldredge House differs significantly from that of the Higginbotham House: the Lewis-­Aldredge House is entered through a small double-apsed entrance loggia that opens onto a grand entrance hall, with the main staircase of the house in a separate rear hall. The stair has a French Renaissance–style iron railing decorated with curvilinear forms. Dominated by a large Jacobean stone fireplace, an oversized living room sits east of the entrance hall, with large triple windows looking out over the front and rear yards. Both the living room and dining room on the other side of the foyer feature rich oak paneling of English Renaissance inspiration, particularly impressive in the dining

Lewis-Aldredge House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, 1917, H. B. Thomson, architect (author).

room with its prominent dentiled cornice and pilasters. Behind the dining room is a butler’s pantry, which leads to a well-lighted breakfast area. The kitchen, directly behind the butler’s pantry, retains much of its original character. Curiously, none of the grand houses in Munger Place were designed in the Mediterranean or Spanish Colonial Revival modes, styles that became so popular in Highland Park and in other contemporary suburban developments in Dallas in the 1920s. The Mungers strongly promoted Munger Place as “judiciously restricted, where homes are uniformly beautiful, artistic, exclusive,” and they promised that “the character of its citizenship [will] forever banish all doubt as to its permanency or desirability.”105 “You want a home,” they said, “which has ever increasing value—one that will always be classed as typical of the best to be found in the city.”106 “Everyone who buys a lot and builds a handsome, comfortable home on the MUNGER PLACE,” they predicted, “will contribute to the progress, as well as beautifying the entire city of Dallas.”107 But just a year after Collett Munger’s death

First-floor plan, Lewis-Aldredge House, Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Dallas, 1917, H. B. Thomson, architect. Courtesy of Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation.

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in 1928, changes began to occur in Munger Place, due to provisions in the deed restrictions that allowed changes to be made. The Mungers had instructed that the conditions “may be amended by a vote of three-fourths of the owners on said street, voting according to front foot holdings, each front feet counting as one vote.”108 Perhaps as a direct result of this loophole in the deed restrictions, numerous duplexes, triplexes, and quadraplexes were built in Munger Place—­

especially on Gaston and Live Oak Avenues, parallel to Swiss Avenue and connecting to downtown Dallas—replacing many of the oldest houses in the neighborhood.109 Some single-­ family residences were converted into multifamily units, such as boarding and rooming houses. In the late 1960s, Munger Place experienced its greatest decline; nevertheless, historic preservationists have been attempting to rejuvenate the subdivision since the early 1970s.110

Houston: Courtlandt Place Houston’s exclusive gated private place, Courtlandt Place, was platted in 1907 by the Courtlandt Place Improvement Company and was designed as a small residential enclave.111 Entered through colossal cast-stone gate piers, Courtlandt Place consists of twenty-six lots, all laid out to front onto the 110-foot-wide central boulevard with four evenly spaced medians originally planted with palm trees and flowers.

Gateways at each end of the boulevard limited access to residents, and the restrictions imposed by the newly formed Courtlandt Association in 1912 ensured that “no inferior houses are constructed, no fences mar the beauty of the place, and no stores or shops are found within the limits of Courtlandt Place.”112 More highly restricted than the adjoining Westmoreland, Courtlandt Place’s covenants were established in perpetu-

Plat map of Courtlandt Place, Houston, 1907, Julius Pitzman, civil engineer.

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James E. Dorrance House, Courtlandt Place, Houston, 1914, Sanguinet and Staats, architects (author).

Thomas L. Donoghue House, Courtlandt Place, Houston, 1915, Warren and Wetmore, architects (author).

ity.113 They provided for uniform setback lines, required houses to be two stories in height with a minimum cost of ten thousand dollars, and gave the Courtlandt Association the authority to control the improvement of streets, sidewalks, and parks. In 1912, the association removed the west end brick wall to allow through traffic in exchange for the city’s paving of the boulevard and the installation of streetlights. The houses built in Courtlandt Place set the standard for expensive Houston city houses until the 1920s. In 1914, a two-and-a-half-story Mediterranean-style stucco house with a red-tiled roof was designed by the Fort Worth and Houston firm of Sanguinet and Staats for James E. Dorrance, president of the Shippers Compress Company, a cotton buying and exporting business.114 Well known for their Texas skyscraper designs as well as for grand suburban residences, Sanguinet and Staats had already designed three other houses in Courtlandt Place. The center section of the house, which contains the recessed entrance bay, is flanked by two projecting wings, all with round-arched openings on the first floor

and rectangular ones on the second. The balustraded terrace in front of the main entrance is a trace of the grand front porch, an element that would cease to be employed in the 1920s in Houston’s fashionable houses. Adapting the house to Houston’s hot, humid climate, the architects placed the main exposures of the house to the south and east. The New York architects Warren & Wetmore, who designed the Texas Company (Texaco since 1906) Building in downtown Houston in 1915, designed a house in Courtlandt Place in 1916 for Thomas L. Donoghue, executive vice president of the Texas Company.115 The Federal-style brick residence has neoclassicalinspired moldings decorating the first-floor triplet windows and front door, with its fanlight window, and features an elliptically shaped projecting front porch with extremely elongated columns. Patterned brickwork panels flank the second-story windows, round-arched windows rest within gable-roofed dormers, and, at the top of the gambrel roofline, an ornamental wooden balustrade connects to four brick chimneys.

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Complete symmetry is achieved here, except for the bowed profile of a one-story latticework sunporch on the east side. The living room and dining room have frontage on the rear gardens and face south to capture southerly breezes, features

of the country house type, which this house introduced to Houston. The Donoghue House marked the beginning of nationally known architects’ involvement with Houston’s domestic architecture.

The Residential Park Movement Whereas St. Louis’s private places typically featured straight streets, signaling their urban status and enabling them to be inserted into the ruling grid of city streets, the introduction of the winding road was one of the most significant design features leading to the evolution of the residential park movement. The New York architect A. J. Davis employed the first curvilinear road in an American suburban community at Llewellyn Park near Orange, New Jersey. Developed by the businessman Llewellyn Haskell and built between 1853 and 1869, Llewellyn Park is generally identified as the first picturesque suburb in the United States that is based

on the residential park idea. In 1868, the Illinois developer Emery E. Child established the Riverside Improvement Company and hired Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux of New York as landscape architects for Riverside, a sixteen-hundred-acre Chicago suburban development. Olmsted felt that the grid pattern of straight roads was “too stiff and formal” for suburban developments and that curving roadways “suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.”116 Olmsted and Vaux planned Riverside by featuring curving, treelined roads and reserved areas for parks.

Plat map of Shadyside, Houston, 1916, Herbert A. Kipp, consulting engineer.

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Houston: Forest Hill With the opening of the Houston Country Club along Brays Bayou near Harrisburg in 1909, it appeared that Houston’s well-to-do residential areas might be built east or southeast of downtown and would continue toward Harrisburg. In 1910, the Kansas City landscape architect Sidney J. Hare laid out Forest Hill across the bayou from the country club. Houston’s nod to the residential park movement, Forest Hill was the city’s first country place suburban neigh-

borhood that contained house sites arranged in a curvilinear street plan with an emphasis on coordinated landscaping. Yet, by the 1920s, smaller houses became the norm in Forest Hill. The lack of good roads to the subdivision, the increasing industrial nature of the East End of Houston, and its proximity to a working-class neighborhood, Magnolia Park, meant that Forest Hill never became an elite neighborhood.

Houston: Shadyside Upon the recommendation of the oilman Joseph Stephen Cullinan, founder of the Texas Company, the Board of Park Commissioners hired George Kessler in 1915 to design a park and boulevard system for Houston, with the aid of Herbert A. Kipp as consulting civil engineer.117 In 1916, Kessler presented his plan to enlarge Main Street from two lanes into a 120-footwide boulevard, lined with double rows of live oak trees, that would lead southwest from downtown to the Rice Institute (now Rice University) and Hermann Park. Kessler designed the Main Boulevard traffic circle, serving as the main entrance to the park, and a “sunken garden” in accordance with the principles of the City Beautiful movement.118 Developments of suburban neighborhoods soon began to cluster on the southwestern edge of Houston near the Rice Institute and Hermann Park. In 1916, Cullinan bought almost thirty-seven acres of land along the still-unpaved Main Street between Poor Farm Road and the Rice Institute for a small garden suburb called Shadyside and commissioned Kessler to design

the plan.119 Kessler created The Court, a circular drive with an open area reserved for landscaping, although made suitable for automobile traffic since the enclave was not intended to be linked to a streetcar line. Cullinan retained for himself and his family the largest two lots, U and V, approximately ten acres across from the sunken garden at the intersection of Main Street and Montrose Boulevard.120 Then Cullinan invited his friends and business associates to build their houses on the twenty-two lots, labeled A to T, the largest being the two-acre lot Q, and the smallest being the one-half acre W and X.121 Will Hogg seriously entertained the idea of residing with his brother Mike and sister Ima in Shadyside on lot Q and had preliminary plans for the house drawn up by the St. Louis architect James P. Jamieson, but the house was never constructed.122 After Kessler sent Cullinan a copy of the deed restrictions for Vandeventer Place on August 15, 1916, Cullinan had his attorney, Judge William Wright Moore, fashion an “Agreement Creating Shadyside,” which was revised into a

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Kate Rice and Hugo V. Neuhaus House, Remington Lane, Shadyside, Houston, 1923, Harrie T. Lindeberg, architect. Photograph by Gerald Moorhead, FAIA.

final document covering restrictive covenants and governance in 1919.123 Cullinan, a keen horticulturalist and ornithologist, made landscaping a priority in his restrictions, and because of this, Shadyside deeds were the most restrictive in terms of landscaping in Houston at that time.124 The 1919 Shadyside trust agreement and conveyance between Cullinan and the trustees—Moore, Henry W. Stude, and Kipp— stipulated that each house had to be built within two years, that only one house could be built on each lot, and that upon each of the several residence lots is a central or interior area, separately colored upon the map, which shall be deemed the Building Space, and coincident with the outer lines and around such Building Space, and otherwise colored on said map, is a Planting Space. . . . All buildings and other overhead structure shall in every case be confined to such Building Space, and no such shall be erected on the Planting Space.125 The prominent New York country house architect Harrie T. Lindeberg was commissioned

Alma and Kenneth E. Womack House, Remington Lane, Shadyside, Houston, 1923, Harrie T. Lindeberg, architect. Photograph by Gerald Moorhead, FAIA.

to design four houses in Shadyside in the early 1920s. Architectural historians respectfully wrote: “Of all the chameleon designers . . . Harrie T. Lindeberg was the most popular and versatile. No two designs were alike . . . . Lindeberg was praised for his ‘freedom from formulas.’”126 Lindeberg designed a country house for the investment banker and stockbroker Hugo V. Neuhaus and his wife Kate Rice Neuhaus on lot C on Remington Lane.127 This house is regarded as his most important design in Houston. Lindeberg produced one of his distinctive picturesque English cottage–type houses with plain stuccoed walls on a grand scale, with his characteristic Lindeberg roof that resembles the texture of thatch. The L-shaped plan of the low horizontality is broken by the verticality of a large, centrally placed chimney stack, and even more so by a second chimney stack placed within the projecting eave. His plan opens up the house to the rear and to the gardens, which achieved not only more efficient ventilation but also spatially integrated the grounds and the house. In 1923, Lindeberg introduced the SpanishMediterranean house to Houston on Remington

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Lane on lot R for his clients Alma and Kenneth E. Womack, president of the Houston Harbor Transportation Company and a partner in the cotton exporting firm of Sanders & Company.128 The two-story, asymmetrical, pink stucco house with a red-tiled roof is devoid of sculptural ornament to its plain wall surfaces. Its main entrance is at the back of the house off the rear driveway, with the principal rooms opening onto an arched loggia facing the large front garden. Again, Lindeberg devised a plan that is oriented to capture breezes from the southeast, which

are much needed in Houston’s hot and humid climate. Lindeberg’s architectural themes played a major role in bringing Houston’s domestic architecture up to date in terms of design principles and planning. Shadyside anchored South End development and, within a few years, was encircled by other small subdivisions, such as West Eleventh Place, Waverly Court, Shadowlawn, Jandor Gardens, Cherokee Addition, Southampton, Southgate, and the most imposing of them, Broadacres.

Houston: Broadacres In 1922, a year prior to the development of River Oaks, the young Houston lawyer James A. Baker Jr. and his father Captain James A. Baker, partners in the Houston law firm of Baker, Botts, Parker & Garwood, developed a private place on a little more than thirty-four acres of land close to the Rice Institute.129 Broadacres consisted of three boulevards: North, South, and West. The architect William Ward Watkin and Herbert A. Kipp were hired to devise a plan for twenty-six lots, of which twenty-five were platted, varying in size from four-fifths of an acre to two acres and ranging in price from $5,852 to $13,507.130 Watkin designed four pairs of red brick and limestone entrance gate piers, which bear the name of the development, giving the impression of the entrance to a private place. The deed restrictions—enforced by five of the eighteen lot owners, including Baker Jr. as trustee of the property owners association—stipulated singlefamily residential land use, the orientation of houses, and setback lines, along with a minimum construction requirement of $20,000 for each house. The five-member board of trustees supervised the landscaping of the parks and es-

planades, as well as the planting of rows of live oaks along the boulevards. Now fully grown, these trees create a romantic, picturesque image, making North and South Boulevards two of the most attractive streets in Houston. The banker William S. Cochran and his wife Annie hired John F. Staub in 1925 to design their country house on North Boulevard.131 Staub designed an austere version of the manorial style, with crisp, smooth brick walls that rise up to the top of the steep gabled roof and the projecting gable without any interruptions. From the main block, tall, rectangular chimney stacks rise above the wooden shingle roof and the fenestration of the house is composed primarily of banded windows ornamented by low-relief quoins. The entrance is not on the south side facing the street, but on the house’s west side elevation, behind the living room, and is set beneath a Romanesque archivolted brick entrance portal, an element that stemmed from the English architect Edwin Lutyens. Lindeberg greatly admired Lutyens’s work and had imitated it in 1920 at “Laurel Acres,” the Frederick L. Lutz residence in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Staub’s design mod-

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Annie and William S. Cochran House, North Boulevard, Broadacres, Houston, 1924, John F. Staub, architect (author).

Annie and William S. Cochran House, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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Lucile and Joseph A. Tennant House, North Boulevard, Broadacres, Houston, 1927, John F. Staub, architect (author).

Lucile and Joseph A. Tennant House, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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Bettie G. and Jemison E. Lester House, North Boulevard, Broadacres, Houston, 1927, Birdsall P. Briscoe, architect. Photograph by Gerald Moorhead, FAIA.

el was perhaps Deanery Garden in Berkshire, west of London, England, where Lutyens designed a country house for Edward Hudson, the creator of Country Life magazine. This country house was illustrated in Lawrence Weaver’s 1913 book on Lutyens that Staub had in his architectural library.132 Attached to the entrance hall is a two-story octagonal tower containing the main staircase set directly across from the long rectangular living room. As in the Neuhaus and Womack Houses in Shadyside, the principal rooms on the first and second floors of the Cochran House face south to capture breezes. In 1926, Staub designed a two-story brick neo-Georgian house for the consulting oil engineer Joseph A. Tennant and his wife Lucile on North Boulevard.133 Staub favored eighteenthcentury American domestic models from which he selected elements to produce his eclectic de-

signs. Having no base, the house rests directly on the ground and, as at the Cochran House, ornamental details have been stripped to a minimum. The smooth, blank walls are ornamented by a dentil frieze beneath the roofline and surrounding the front gable, with a bull’seye window in its center above the front door. Contrasting with the red brick walls is the white front door surround crowned by an elliptically shaped arch. A large round-arched window provides light for the main stair that is tucked to the left of the entry and in front of the library. The major room on the first floor is the long rectangular living room, wedged between the entry and a two-story colonnaded porch. Along with the dining room and the library, the living room overlooks a rear garden facing south. The kitchen is located in a separate wing and faces west, situated where it would not block views

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from the main rooms of the house. The emphasis on the southern orientation of the first-floor rooms is repeated on the second floor, with all four bedrooms given this desirable exposure. The Tennant House was designed along the lines of a country house type but integrated into a city neighborhood. In the 1930s, the landscape architect J. Allen Myers Jr. was commissioned to design formal gardens, including a rose garden considered to be one of the “finest to be seen in Houston,” based on the principles of both English and French prototypes and exhibiting Lucile Tennant’s interest in what has been termed the “Southern Garden Renaissance.”134 In 1926, the Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe designed a two-and-a-half story brick house on North Boulevard for Bettie G. and

Jemison E. Lester, president of Gohlman, Lester, & Company cotton factors.135 Considered one of his most important works, the house is Briscoe’s own version of the English manorial style, a design of simple elegance and grace with subdued detailing. Based on an abstract use of geometric forms, the horizontality of the main block of the house is accented by a paired chimney stack, a large two-story gable facing south with a smaller one-story gable that encloses the entrance portal, and a steep slate roof. The fenestration is composed of small-paned glass casement windows, but two are of sash on the first level. All of the windows are trimmed in a dark brown, which stands out in contrast to the deep red brick walls of the house.

Houston: Country Club Estates Company Around 1920, the Houston banker Thomas William House Jr. sold a densely wooded 200acre tract of land, the Four Mile Place, located west of Houston and south of Buffalo Bayou near San Felipe and Westheimer Roads for a residential community.136 In 1923, with the aid of the lumberman Junius W. Reynolds and U.S. Representative Colonel Thomas H. Ball, House organized the Country Club Estates Company, a Texas corporation, with Reynolds serving as president. Additional property north of their subdivision called the Baker tract, which was approximately 160 acres, was purchased for $500 an acre, the same amount House paid for his first parcel. They assembled a group of investors, who chartered the River Oaks Country Club on February 1, 1923. A private golf, tennis, and social club, including a children’s playground and a canoe house, River Oaks Country Club was designed to ap-

peal to the entire family.137 Kenneth E. Womack was the first president of the club, which had an original membership of 300 with a limited membership of 600. Ball sold charter memberships in the club for $350 that also provided one share of stock in the residential development worth $250. Members were given an option period of sixty days to purchase lots in a Pre-development sale.138 After the membership reached 300 by September, members were required to pay the full $350. The River Oaks Country Club then subscribed for 200 additional shares of the land company, making 500 shares owned by the club and its members. The remaining 499 shares were sold on the open market, a total of 999 shares, or a capital stock of $249,750 for the Country Club Estates Company.139 The company retained Kipp to lay out the 178-acre subdivision plan on the south half of the tract, consisting of nineteen blocks between

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Plat map of Country Club Estates, Houston, 1924, Herbert A. Kipp, consulting engineer.

River Oaks Country Club, River Oaks, Houston, 1924, John F. Staub, architect (demolished). Photograph courtesy of River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection.

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Aerial photograph of River Oaks with the River Oaks Country Club in the distance, River Oaks, Houston, 1924. Courtesy of River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection.

Larchmont Road to the west and Bellmeade Road to the east. Kipp employed a network of 60-foot-wide picturesque, curving cross streets in an east-west direction named after famous country clubs—Inwood, Del Monte, and Chevy Chase—with 219 lots stratified in size, from one-fourth an acre (75 by 150 feet) to four acres. Kipp’s plan for the Country Club Estates was the most advanced in Houston. Designed on a large scale, it was laid out in a pattern to accommodate automobile traffic and adjoined a country club with an eighteen-hole golf course. Kipp chose not to use the checkerboard system for the planning of streets, with the exception of lots platted on the edges of the subdivision south of San Felipe, east of Bellmeade, and west —

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of Larchmont Roads. His plan allowed larger lot sizes for the wealthy nearest the golf course; the sites for those of more moderate means were located farthest from it. In addition, the plan arranged to site houses in a north-south direction to minimize sun exposure and maximize exposure to the Gulf breezes from the south. One area in the southwestern section of the plat was reserved for an oval park, Sleepy Hollow Court, which is accessed from the northwest via Mockingbird Lane and ends in a cul-de-sac with five large irregularly shaped lots intended for large houses, although these were not located near the golf course. On March 24, 1924, Reynolds and R.  C. Burrows, secretary-treasurer of the corporation,    —

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signed and filed the “Original Covenants and Restrictions in the Country Club Estates Additions: River Oaks Section Adjoining River Oaks Country Club, Houston, Texas,” which stipulated that the property could only be used for single-family residences until the restrictions expired on January 1, 1955, and “were written for the purpose of creating and carrying out a uniform plan . . . as a high class residential section.”140 Although on Block 15 the restrictions permitted as many as four separate houses on each lot, on Blocks 16, 17, and 18, duplex houses or apartments houses could be erected with the exception of the sites facing Ball Boulevard (now River Oaks Boulevard). Block 19 was reserved for the construction of a school, a church, or some other public building, and business houses that would be “for the benefit and convenience of the inhabitants of the addition.”141 Houses were required to be built at a minimum cost of seven thousand dollars on most streets, with the houses facing Ball Boulevard and Inwood Drive costing a minimum of twenty thousand dollars. The restrictions also controlled the land use and density, building orientation, size, and racial exclusion. The subdivision and country club had a serious disadvantage because they could not be reached directly from downtown Houston. To reach the property from the South End, one would have to drive south on Main Street and then turn northwest on Westheimer Road and drive for several miles before reaching it. The Scottish native Donald Ross, who had designed numerous golf courses in the country, was commissioned to plan the golf course on a 182-acre site. Womack and William Stamps Farish, president of the Humble Oil & Refining Company, recommended that Staub serve as architect for the clubhouse. Staub designed the V-shaped Spanish Colonial clubhouse, a style gaining interest in Texas. The one-and-a-half-

story tan stucco River Oaks clubhouse faced south, to capture the occasional breezes, and was topped by a red-tiled roof with a projecting tripartite round-arched entrance porch flanked by two tall chimney stacks, making the building visible from a distance. The unusual plan of the clubhouse accomplished two important objectives: on the exterior, the wings that radiated from the center of the building made it appear larger than it actually was; on the interior, by creating a central entrance space that was connected to all of the other rooms of the clubhouse, Staub succeeded in simplifying the circulation pattern inside the building. The lounge, one of the principal spaces in the clubhouse, harmonized with the exterior with a beamed ceiling derived from Spanish sources. By the spring of 1924, Kipp’s subdivision plat was filed; utilities had begun to be installed; $90,000 had been spent on the construction of the golf course; $87,000 for the cost of the site; $75,000 for the country club; $25,000 on the clubhouse furnishings and equipment; and $50,000 for other improvements.142 Ball Boulevard, the club’s main entrance, was laid out as an unpaved road that ran from San Felipe Road to the clubhouse. A ca. 1924 aerial photograph of the River Oaks Country Club and the north end of Ball Boulevard shows that no houses had been built or were under construction and illustrates the wooded nature of River Oaks. Because of the expense of laying out Country Club Estates coupled with the building cost of the River Oaks Country Club, the company found itself to be in debt. When the company officers learned of Will and Mike Hogg’s interest in acquiring the property later that spring, they decided to accept the offer and sold all of the property for what would become part of the River Oaks community, then the largest subdivision in Houston.

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Conclusion John S. Armstrong’s involvement with Oak Cliff gave him an opportunity to observe mistakes in suburban planning. He watched Thomas Marsalis go into bankruptcy, a parallel to what happened in Houston Heights, which was aimed at a working-class market from the beginning. Both Oak Cliff and Houston Heights occupied large-acreage tracts on which the developers installed expensive infrastructure, but the original owners were never able to maximize the use of all of their property. Oak Lawn stabilized suburban development north of downtown Dallas. Although Philadelphia Place was too far from the center of the city to succeed, the lake created by its developers as a recreational spot would later prove to be extremely helpful to Armstrong when he purchased the property in 1906. Munger Place was based on the nineteenthcentury St. Louis private place model, with urban-sized lots and residential architectural types that were most appropriate as city houses. This method of planning would become less desirable after the residential park movement was introduced to Texas in the first decade of the twentieth century. H. B. Thomson’s work began to mature in Munger Place, but it would be in Highland Park that he displayed his mastery of the most current house design characteristics. In Houston, Westmoreland and Courtlandt Place were also based on the private place model and

their urban house forms, with the exception of Warren & Wetmore’s Donoghue House, which provided Houston with its first example of a country-style house. By the 1920s, domestic architecture in Texas came into step with other metropolitan centers, as landscape architecture and domestic architecture demonstrated awareness of the best-known country house architects and their works. In Shadyside, Harrie  T. Lindeberg persuasively demonstrated how fresh ideas on house design tailored to the climatic conditions of Houston made the East Coast country house not only more stylish than Foursquare, Craftsman, and Prairie alternatives but also more environmentally suitable, set within a well-manicured yard and opening up to surrounding gardens. At Broadacres, although planned in a grid, Houston architects Staub and Briscoe displayed their talent for designing large houses, which would be of great importance for River Oaks. The Country Club Estates Company laid the foundation for River Oaks and provided the initial infrastructure for the future planning and development of River Oaks. Highland Park and River Oaks, with their large acreages, allowed greater possibilities for architects working in Texas to exhibit their sophistication by designing the most progressive and stylish country houses in Texas.

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C h a p t e r t h re e

H IGHLAND

PA R K

“Just Beyond the City’s Dust and Smoke”

O n M arc h 2 7 , 1 9 5 5 , H u g h E . P r at h e r , i n t h e Dallas Morning News, quoted G. B. Dealey’s editorial: “It is not usual for a newspaper to single out a realty firm of developers and praise it. But the realty company [Flippen-Prather Realty Company] erecting this district [Highland Park] is no ordinary dealer in lands and houses . . . instead of quick returns it has preferred to build its foundation for permanence and its superstructure for beauty.”1 The FlippenPrather Realty Company, he continued, “has built a community that is known for its lovely homes, its cultured people and its enlightened citizenship.”2 The company “has in that sense been a dealer in civic advancement.”3 One of the developers of Highland Park, Hugh E. Prather, told a group of real estate developers in 1917 that Dealey had been very supportive of their work in Highland Park for the last ten years, “exemplifying . . . the very ideas that he has been trying to drive home to the people” of Dallas and has cited “Highland Park, as an example of city planning” numerous times in his newspaper.4 Dealey had begun promoting comprehensive planning in Dallas around the time Highland Park was in its infancy. He exerted great

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influence over its developers, who employed many of Dealey’s city planning ideas in Highland Park, particularly in their reservation of areas for parks and their introduction of City Beautiful planning principles. This occurred almost two decades before River Oaks opened when, on November 21, 1906, the Dallas entrepreneur John S. Armstrong purchased 1,326 acres of land for his suburban development four-and-a-half miles northwest of downtown Dallas. He began platting Highland Park with his sons-in-law, Hugh E. Prather and Edgar L. Flippen. Armstrong, a banker and real estate developer, sold his Armstrong Packing Company in 1906, which provided the capital to buy the land for the suburban community.5 Armstrong organized the Flippen-Prather Realty Company and appointed Flippen, a banker, as president of the company and in charge of finances and Prather as secretary. Already in the real estate business, Prather later became manager of the enterprise. According to a letter Flippen wrote in 1954, “Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Prather and I put up $25,000 each for a total capitalization of $75,000,” and the company was capitalized at $50,000.6 Armstrong retained more than one-fifth of the stock with the remainder owned by Flippen and Prather. The Dallas Morning News stated in an endorsement that Armstrong “saw an opportunity to serve the community by building a planned residential city.”7 These statements confirm the fact that, from Highland Park’s inception, its developers envisioned their subdivision as serving the greater good of Dallas, and, through strict deed restrictions and sophisticated planning techniques, they were able to realize this vision. The publicity generated by the Dallas Morning News served as one of the most important vehicles that secured Highland Park’s success. Armstrong had observed Oak Cliff’s demise

during the Panic of 1893, and, when he again decided to venture into residential suburban development, his goal was to create a subdivision that would rival any in the Southwest for its beauty, exclusivity, and status. For this, he, Flippen, and Prather began research for their community by studying suburban developments in California, as the speculative boom in the southland around Los Angeles was intensifying. The logic of this choice was also rooted in the fact that the cities of Texas and Southern California simultaneously experienced expansive population growth. In both states, a significant percentage of new urban residents was arriving from out of state, drawn by the economic potentials of the young cities with their abundant business opportunities. By 1910, the population of Los Angeles had reached more than three hundred thousand, a six-fold increase from 1890.8 With better transportation available in the Southwest, Dallas was anticipating a significant rise in its population. Dealey, through his campaigns for a city plan, was at the forefront of preparing Dallas for managing this growth responsibly. Texas had become so prosperous in the post–Civil War 1870s that its population had almost doubled between 1870 and the 1880s to a total of almost 1.6 million. This was in part a result of the construction of railroads into Texas. By the 1880s, the Missouri-Pacific; International & Great Northern; Southern Pacific; and Missouri, Kansas & Texas, along with other national railroad corporations, had connected Texas to the national railroad grid.9 The relatively small size of the commercial centers and the vast expanses of land surrounding Texas and Southern California cities meant that new residential construction could be both apart from, yet relatively close to, the business district and, by the 1890s, connected via electric streetcar lines and boulevards. This arrangement would

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provide the business class with places in which to create domestic environments in a community of peers. Thus began the unbridled growth of suburban development. Before beginning any

major improvements, Armstrong, along with Prather, traveled to California in 1906 to study real estate development.10

Southern California in the Early Twentieth Century: The Real Estate and the Architecture Armstrong and Prather likely traveled to Los Angeles on Southern Pacific’s Sunset Line, which ran from New Orleans through San Antonio to Los Angeles. If this was the case, the railroad’s 1902 California Mission-style passenger station would have been where they began their journey west. Through tourism and the barrage of popular literature, Southern California was known nationally as a source of fresh ideas. In architecture, it stood apart from conventional models associated with the East Coast and Midwest.11 The Southern California model seemed especially relevant to Texans because of the collection of eighteenth-century Spanish missions in the San Antonio area, the state’s historical link to Spain, and the emergence of the Southwest as a new hub of regional economic growth. What would be of particular interest to

the Highland Park developers were the activities of the mass transit and real estate developer Henry Edward Huntington, who, along with his primary investor, Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, had amassed a fortune in urban real estate development. Otis has been labeled the city’s “ultimate booster,” and he used his newspaper to publicize his real estate interests.12 Founded in 1901, Huntington’s Pacific Electric Company laid more than eleven hundred miles of track within ten years, linking more than fifty suburban communities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties and creating a suburban metropolis.13 Regional property values skyrocketed.

Beverly Hills, California The Rodeo Land and Water Company, headed by the investor Burton E. Green, began in 1906 to transform thirty-two hundred acres of El Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, “the ranch of the gathering of the waters,” into Beverly Hills, located six miles from the center of Los Angeles.14 Armstrong and Prather met the professional New York landscape architect and city planner Wilbur David Cook Jr., who was then laying out Beverly Hills in association with the Pasadena

architect Myron Hunt.15 Even though curvilinear streets were more costly with their necessary drainage lines and gradients, Cook persuaded the Beverly Hills developers that it was “well worth the added expense . . . instead of the ordinary, checker-board subdivision which up to that time had been the accepted method in subdividing land in and around Los Angeles.”16 Cook, during his one-year contract with the Rodeo Land and Water Company, created a

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Plan of Beverly Hills, California, 1907, Wilbur David Cook Jr., landscape architect and city planner. Courtesy of the Beverly Hills Public Library Historical Collection.

three-tiered plan in which two northernmost tiers were reserved for residential use only with numerous parks. The lower basin then called “Beverly,” lying along Santa Monica Boulevard and south of it, was designated as a mixed-use area and included residential and commercial buildings with no restrictions against the erection of apartment buildings and retail stores. According to one of Cook’s later partners, “A sincere effort was made to locate, define and limit the extent of the business section” at a time when “zoning was in its infancy.”17 For

the middle tier, intended for moderate-income families, Cook designed long, curvilinear parallel streets, which naturally followed the slope of the curving hills north of Santa Monica Boulevard, ranging in width from 60 to 110 feet. The long blocks reduced the number of intersections along the major streets and the high cost of street construction. Because of the relatively shallow depth of these blocks, the lots were laid out wider than deep. House sites grew larger as they approached the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, ranging from 50 feet in width

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and 100 to 150 feet in depth. The northernmost tier above Sunset Boulevard, a major east-west parkway, was reserved for large estates, with streets forming a serpentine pattern in the Santa Monica Mountains. Cook’s plan included generous reservations for 100 acres of parks, land for a civic center, and a 10-acre hotel site.18 Cook had previously worked for the Olmsted Brothers when they were planning the suburban community of Roland Park, outside Baltimore. Cook’s Beverly Hills comprehensive plan was

a complete entity from the beginning and his work brought the Olmsted-inspired comprehensive plan and curving road network introduced at Roland Park to Southern California and gave Beverly Hills its character. Significantly, Beverly Hills would adjoin the Los Angeles Country Club, then under development on grounds along Wilshire Boulevard. Lot sales in Beverly Hills suffered during the Panic of 1907 but, by the late 1920s, Beverly Hills’s status as one of the nation’s most famous subdivisions would be secured.

Highland Park: First Installment “After a most exhaustive study of the best residence sections of the Pacific Slope,” Armstrong and Prather retained Cook to design their First Installment on 100 acres of the 1,326-acre tract of land between Lake Nokomis to the west and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad line to the east.19 Although it is not known what other California cities, besides Los Angeles, the Highland Park developers visited, they seem to have seen Pasadena because the Flippen-Prather Realty Company’s advertising booklet of ca. 1910 was entitled Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South. The association of Highland Park with Pasadena was due to the California city’s reputation for “refinement and informality, civility and luxuriance.”20 The city “brought thousands of upper-middle-class immigrants to southern California in general and Pasadena in particular, transforming the Southland into a special variation of the genteel tradition.”21 Importantly, this was exactly the type of homeowners the Flippen-Prather Realty Company wanted to attract. Wilbur David Cook Jr. made only one visit to Dallas, leaving the developers to employ their local civil engineer Nils Werenskiold to

carry out Cook’s picturesque plan, the earliest known Texas suburban development to be designed by a landscape architect.22 Cook drafted most of Highland Park’s plan in California from an 1890 topographical map, with its contours showing the naturally wooded areas, rolling hills, and water courses. According to Prather, he assured Cook: We had a contour map of the entire property with elevations at 100-foot intervals. He said, “Oh no! I am sure you do not understand!” We then exhibited to him our complete topographical map, which was framed behind glass for protection. He expressed complete amazement and said, “This is a miracle! Way out here on the Texas plains to find such a contour map for such a great body of land! I can go home and speedily complete my plan.”23 Cook’s design for Highland Park harmoniously adapted to the flowing rhythms of Hackberry Creek and the developers’ man-made Lake Nokomis to the west and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad to the east. His plan was similar in design to his curvilinear third-tier

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layout for Beverly Hills.24 St. John Drive picturesquely traced the rhythmic, organic, and irregular contours of the creek channel and joined two triangular-shaped drives, the Park Circles, where Prather and Davis Parks were sited. As stipulated on Flippen-Prather Realty Company’s plat map, the “streets and alleys as shown on said map are hereby dedicated to the public as such, save and except that St. John Drive and all portions of said tract West and Northwest thereof are not dedicated to the public,” and “lot owners in said addition are to have the irrevocable right to use St. John Drive as a private way of ingress and egress to and from their said property.”25 For this reason, St. John’s Drive (formerly St. John Drive) and Alice Circle were narrower in width than the other streets, forty-two feet and thirty-seven feet, respectively.26 The larger, more irregularly shaped lots were plat-

ted along St. John’s Drive and Alice Circle. The largest lot was 145 by 366 feet and overlooked the southern Park Circle. Interestingly, Cook did not employ the characteristic Beverly Hills lot, which is wider than it is deep. Tree-lined streets, most more than 50 feet in width, divided the neighborhood into a pattern of gentle, winding curves, as in Beverly Hills. This was the first appearance in Texan suburban planning of curvilinear streets and generous areas set aside for parks, as Highland Park’s hilly, irregular terrain and natural creeks were especially suitable for the introduction of new methods of residential planning. However, the streets became more grid-like in the eastern portion of the Highland Park plat, which bordered the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad line. In that section, lot sizes were rectangular in shape and averaged about 100 by 250 feet.

Highland Park, First Installment, 1907, filed 1909, Wilbur David Cook Jr., landscape architect and city planner.

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Flippen-Prather Realty Company advertisement, Dallas Morning News, April 21, 1907.

Cook’s design was innovative compared to that of Highland Park’s major competitor, Munger Place in East Dallas, where the developers had platted their neighborhood in the oldfashioned grid pattern. Despite Munger Place’s less picturesque plan, Prather commented at the 1917 subdivision developers’ meeting, “We have competition in Munger Place, which is a development of some 300 acres east of Dallas.”27 Hugh Prather Jr. later echoed his father’s concern in an interview in which he stated, “The big question of the time was whether it [Highland Park] was too far out, because Munger Place was already being developed and there was not much call for people going that far out and buying property.”28 Despite the onset of the Panic of 1907, the first one-hundred-acre section of Highland Park was opened and advertised for sale in the Dallas Morning News. Armstrong’s sudden death in 1908 left the completion of his dream community in the hands of his two sons-in-law. The Flippen-­Prather Realty Company began installing utilities, paving streets with river gravel, and planting quick-growing cottonwoods, hackberries, small-leafed elm trees, and various shrubs for shade and beauty. The developers proclaimed in their ca. 1910 promotional booklet that Highland Park would become “distinctively different from any other property surrounding

Dallas restricted and developed for lovers of the artistic and beautiful in their home environments.”29 Flippen and Prather stated that Dallas had been “conspicuously backward in providing sufficient high-class, property restricted residential districts where her best citizens could build without the fear of being encroached upon by inferior surroundings.” Furthermore, “the varied scenery effectively treated give HIGHLAND PARK character and tone absolutely unequalled heretofore in Dallas or Texas. . . . The natural rustic beauty has been preserved and the development made along broad, scientific lines looking to the symmetry of the whole property—thus in a veritable wilderness of natural scenery every cityhome luxury has been provided.” According to Flippen and Prather, “People of taste and culture seek residence among hills and lakes. . . . The refreshing breezes make home a happiness and life a joy.” Highland Park is a “picturesque—restricted—highly developed .  .  . high-class residential development.” The property is located on higher land—140 feet higher than the intersection of Lamar and Main Streets in downtown Dallas— as they pointed out, “high above the city—where the cool fresh breezes blow . . . we confidently believe make it the most desirable summer location in all Texas.” The company adopted advertising slogans like “Just Beyond the City’s Dust and Smoke” and “It’s Ten Degrees Cooler in High-

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land Park.”30 These slogans were timely because of the nationwide “rapid rise in urban density,” which created “a nostalgia for the healthier and more tranquil world of the countryside.”31 On March 31, 1907, advertisements appeared in the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News for both Highland Park and Munger Place. The developers of each subdivision claimed to offer the healthiest location in Dallas and guaranteed the best improvements and conveniences, with regulations to control their built environments. The aim of the developers was to attract buyers from Dallas, as well as the anticipated number of newcomers or those who, as pointed out by Prather, “had no homes in the beginning. . . . That is a condition that is rather typical [in Highland Park].”32 As stated in the March 1907 advertisement for Munger Place: “People are now coming from all over Texas to Dallas to live; also from every State in the Union, and will continue to do so.” What is particularly striking about the two advertisements is the manner in which they were illustrated. The Munger Place ad featured a photograph of the entry gates on Swiss Avenue, while the Highland Park ad was headed by a line drawing of a balustraded terrace with a body of water in front and landscaped grounds behind. Thus, what the reader saw was the reality of Munger Place versus an artist’s conception of Highland Park. The text of the two advertisements provided readers with the basic promotional facts of each development, with the narrative of the Munger Place ad being much more concrete with respect to what the subdivision offered, particularly in improvements that were in place. By April 21 of that year, the Flippen-­ Prather Realty Company placed another advertisement in the Dallas Morning News announcing that Highland Park would be open “next month.” “You will be able,” promised the

ad, “to buy at from $10.00 to $20.00 per front foot the Best Residence Property in Texas.” It also included the warning, probably in reference to Munger Place: “Do Not Confuse Other Subdivisions with the Future Residence Show Ground of Texas.” The ad was accompanied by a drawing of an idyllic representation of Highland Park fully developed, although little work had actually been accomplished. Dominating the center of the illustration was a large two-anda-half-story American Foursquare-style house, a type that would greatly appeal to a middleincome buyer, with a detached carriage house or garage behind it and a manicured lawn. Surrounding the Highland Park house is a mythical scene reminiscent of the earlier ad in March. It illustrated an expensive automobile filled with people passing in front of the house, as others are engaged in playing badminton, riding bicycles, strolling along sidewalks, reading books by the lake, rowing boats, and even chasing butterflies. Floral decorations fill elaborate urns, and a balustraded lake wall with steps leads down to the water and hooks for chaining rowboats. Swans gracefully swim in the lake, adding to the picturesque image of a lifestyle full of bliss and tranquility. Signed by the commercial artist Champley, it presented an idealized characterization of what Highland Park aimed to become.33 Lots in Highland Park cost considerably less than those in Munger Place, ranging from $45 to $100 per front foot. The higher prices in Munger Place reflected the facts that the subdivision was closer to downtown Dallas and its developers did not offer lots for sale until completion of their improvements, whereas lots in Highland Park were being sold as improvements progressed. Despite the Panic of 1907 that led to the halt in improvements in Beverly Hills, lot sales in Highland Park’s First Installment were promising, as Flippen and Prather noted:

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The almost continuous demand for property in the First Installment of Highland Park until practically every lot was sold, in less than ten months, clearly evidences the desire on the part of the citizenship of Dallas for a large residential area, highly developed and restricted, and combining at once all the advantage of city and country life.34 The Flippen-Prather Realty Company envisioned Highland Park as a “high-class residential district” and to ensure this, they began to enforce deed restrictions on what became “fourteen hundred acres in all.”35 The restrictions, they stated, were to protect “the property against being encroached upon by surroundings which would depreciate its value and detract from its desirability as a home-place.” They further remarked, “The restrictions as to the character of buildings, the cost, etc., insure [sic] not only attractive and high-class homes and the companionship of refined neighbors” but “also add to the permanency of the investment.” In addition, restrictions would appeal to clients who desired to be exclusive and separate from the other neighborhoods in the city, thereby securing higher social status. But in order to secure the financial success of the development as a whole, some of the later installments would provide house sites along the fringes of the property for more moderate homeowners at more affordable prices. Highland Park’s first residents, Agnes and Samuel Wilson Marshall, built a modest oneand-a-half-story frame house in 1908, now demolished, at 3601 Lexington Avenue. Marshall had moved to Dallas from Virginia in 1899 as an attorney fresh from law school and had been residing in the Dallas suburban community of Oak Lawn.36 Although a number of Highland Park’s streets had been paved, the Marshalls

lived in the neighborhood for months without any water or other city conveniences. Marshall recalled, “When Mrs. Marshall and I moved into our home we had no neighbors north of the Katy Railroad, although at least one other house, that of Hugh Prather, was under construction.”37 “Knox street was then an unpaved, unkempt country lane on the outskirts of Dallas,” he said, “and after you crossed the railroad there was not a house in sight except for one or two very distant farmhouses.” Marshall continued: Colonel Armstrong was anxious to get the development of Highland Park under way after he made his plans but the panic of late 1907 was a temporary deterrent. I had already started construction and Colonel Armstrong encouraged me to continue and to move my family out there. Flippen and Prather later boasted that the residents in their first installment witnessed “a wonderful transformation” in their “beautification program,” in which “the creative imagination of the landscape architect was given full sway.”38 As “underbrush and weeds were cleared away, shrubbery and additional forest trees planted, circuitous walks laid out, and picturesque stone bridges constructed,” they said, “the first steps [were] taken in a most elaborate system of parks and parkways.”39 Highland Park was praised by the president of the Civic Beauty Association of Texas as “one of the rarest beauty spots in America.”40 Prather praised their civil engineer, Nils Werenskiold, commenting, “We followed his sound advice at all times and the still splendid miles of streets, water and sewers main, storm sewers and concrete bridges, are due to his advice and planning.”41 The Cleveland, Ohio, landscape architect L. M. Jenney oversaw the planting of trees and shrubs best adapted to the climate along Highland Park’s curving av-

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enues and parkways.42 Flippen and Prather developed their own water supply by sinking deep flowing wells and chartered the privately owned Highland Park Water Company. With regard to the cost of improvements, Prather admitted

that the “first section was purely an advertising proposition on which we had a net loss of approximately $100,000.”43 “Our prices were very low,” he said. “The average price on this property was $15.00 per front foot, 200 feet deep.”44

Booker T. Washington Addition Flippen and Prather had purchased 7.57 acres are building in our district, to building good serof land east of Highland Park on the opposite vants’ quarters.” John M. Demarest of Forest side of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, said, “I do embankment and established an African-­ think that we men ought to give consideration American neighborhood, the Booker T. Wash- to the feelings of these people and try to proington Addition, platted in 1907. After Robert vide better quarters and better conditions, and Jemison Jr., president of the Jemison Real Estate certainly provide better buildings for them.” & Insurance Company in Birmingham, Ala- Edward H. Bouton of Roland Park outside bama, brought up the topic of the “growing dif- Baltimore offered this endorsement: “I think it ficulty of obtaining servants” at the 1919 Third might be well for us to adopt Mr. Prather’s plan Annual Conference of Developers of High- . . . establishing a community which will furnish Class Residential Property meeting, Pra­ ther servants, is something which might be done by replied that one of “the first things we did was all of us.” to take twenty-­five acres and build a servants’ However, the Booker T. Washington Addiaddition . . . we built the houses for these [Af- tion did not provide housing for all of Highland rican-American] people and sold them to them Park’s domestic help. Most houses had servants’ on easy terms.”45 It was on land “adjoining our quarters built above garages. According to the property, and the division line is a high railroad Sanborn Map Company’s map of Highland embankment; it is in between two railroad [sic] Park of 1921, nearly all of the servants’ quarand it never could have been used for any other ters had separate addresses and were entered purpose; our property backs up to it. . . . They all through rear alleys, ranging in width from thirown their own homes and there is not a rented teen to fifteen feet, an arrangement similar to house on the property. . . . We gave them a place that at Munger Place.46 The 1930 United States to build a church and a school. .  .  . And from Census records show that servants who lived in these twenty-five families come the servants in Highland Park were labeled under the heading Highland Park.” J.  C. Nichols of the Kansas of “relationship of this person to the head of the City Country Club District replied, “I think family” as “servant,” and sometimes their spewe should be very careful in our own building cific occupation was listed generally as “maid,” and should call every one else’s attention who “cook,” butler,” or “chauffeur.”47

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Dallas: Southern Methodist University In 1907, before the Flippen-Prather Realty Company had begun improvements to Highland Park’s First Installment, Armstrong, in a philanthropic gesture, donated one hundred acres of his land in what would become Highland Park West as a site for the proposed Texas Presbyterian University, but the institution never became a reality.48 However, “Armstrong was imbued with the idea of a local university,” and he said he “would bequest land now on a second tract just northeast of Highland Park to any religious denomination that would build a campus within a specified time.”49 In 1910, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South announced its intention to build a new university in North Texas. Offering strong support in the Dallas Morning News, G.  B. Dealey convinced the church to select Armstrong’s site.50 After Armstrong’s death, his widow Alice responded by donating the one-hundred-acre tract, with additional land donated by William W. Caruth, for the campus

of what would be known as Southern Methodist University.51 The Armstrongs’ gift was commemorated by the naming of Armstrong Field at the university. In 1912, the cornerstone was laid for the first building, Dallas Hall, erected by a local contractor for a cost exceeding $212,000.52 Designed by the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, Dallas Hall was modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s rotunda at the University of Virginia.53 In 1917, at the First Annual Conference of High-Class Residential Property, Nichols asked Prather, “Don’t you feel that the location of a large university is about the finest advertising you can get for your sub-division?”54 Obviously, Prather agreed. Suburban real estate developers often located near or reserved land for “suburban universities” because of their prestige value. Such suburbs included University City in St. Louis, Westminster in Denver, and Bel Air and Westwood in Los Angeles.55

The Dallas Country Club When Flippen and Prather persuaded the Dallas Golf and Country Club, the oldest country club in Texas, founded in 1900, to move from Oak Lawn to Highland Park in 1911, it sealed the future success of Highland Park as the preeminent suburban community in Dallas.56 In 1909, The Blue Book of Dallas: A Social and Club Directory heralded the relocation by stating that Highland Park “is destined in a very short time to become perhaps the peer of any residence section of Dallas,” as the present club was “inadequate to the purposes of the growing membership.”57 The Oak Lawn Dallas Golf and

Country Club occupied fifty-five acres, which barely accommodated an eighteen-hole golf course. Its members, mostly a group of golf enthusiasts, could not resist relocating to the larger parcel of land, approximately 115 acres, in the center of the subdivision that spread north from Beverly Drive across Mockingbird Lane, following the path of Turtle Creek and its creek bed. Flippen and Prather sold the land for a total cost of thirty thousand dollars, and the Golf Realty Company was formed to raise revenues to build a new clubhouse and golf course.58 Admitting that residential real estate com-

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Dallas Country Club, Highland Park, 1912, C. D. Hill & Company, architects (demolished). “Dallas: A City of Art and Commerce,” 84. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

petition motivated the proposition, Prather stressed, “It was absolutely necessary to possess some unusual advantage over other developments to attract the better class of people we desired as buyers and builders.”59 He insisted, “The American businessman wants his golf.”60 By that, he meant the country club would be a magnet to their development, as he and Flippen were aware that the location of the club was a crucial selling point for their subdivision, similar in concept to the country clubs built in Roland Park, the Country Club District, and in Los Angeles near Beverly Hills. Learning of the relocation, a member of the club and a reporter for the Dallas Morning News said, “It is not to be a club of the rich or of the poor, but a club of the respectable and the worthy.”61 Despite his claim, it was also a ploy to appeal to the wellto-do. The club changed its name to the Dallas Country Club and decided to limit membership to five hundred. Before the new club opened, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company had sold more than two hundred lots in Highland Park,

and Prather later admitted, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the Dallas Country Club has been by far the greatest influence in bringing . . . the very best element of Dallas and North Texas. . . . [And, it has] been responsible for securing so many desirable residents.”62 After spending two hundred thousand dollars in improvements and construction costs, the company hosted the grand opening on February 22, 1912, for both the seventy-five-thousanddollar, Tudor-inspired clubhouse at the corner of Preston Road, facing Beverly Drive, designed by C. D. Hill & Company, and an eighteen-hole golf course, the work of nationally known golf course architect Thomas Bendelow.63 Sharing the same designers, the Dallas Country Club and Lakewood Country Club in East Dallas were illustrated in the July 1914 issue of Western Architect. An unsigned article in the Southern Architectural Review described the Dallas Country Club as having been designed in the “English Gothic and Domestic type, eminently fitted to fill its post prandial functions; having

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a hospitable breadth of front, with broad and well-shaded porches, suggestive of out-of-doors living.”64 The Dallas Country Club membership at that time consisted of 413 members from Highland Park and 25 residing elsewhere.65 In addition to the golf course, the club had other outdoor amenities, such as tennis courts and a

swimming hole, fondly called “The Pig Pen,” which was formed by damming Turtle Creek. The site of Easter egg hunts, Fourth of July picnics, dances, and weddings, the club became the social center for the community. Flippen served as third president of the club in 1913; Prather, as seventh president in 1917.66

Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen’s Mount Vernon House The officers of the Flippen-Prather Realty Company became aware of and adopted new trends in domestic architecture that would become synonymous with the type of community they wished to create. Designed by C. D. Hill & Company, Minnie May and Edgar  L. Flippen’s stately Mount Vernon–inspired house, now demolished, was erected in 1910 in Highland Park on Preston Road. It was located on 7.7 acres of land overlooking Highland Park Lake in close proximity to the Dallas Country Club and situated in the northern two-thirds of the 55.91acre Turtle Creek Acres tract. This parcel of land was reserved for three estate-sized lots,

where the Highland Park developers intended to erect their country houses.67 According to The Blue Book of Dallas of 1909, the Flippen House, with its location on the upper part of Highland Park Lake, would furnish “the effect of the Potomac River in front of Washington’s home.”68 The role of a defining feature of the suburban country house, orientation, could be seen at the house, which presented a relatively plain elevation on its arrival front with the more elaborate elevation visible from the rear garden facing Lakeside Drive, resulting in two separately designed facades, as at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen House, Preston Road, Highland Park, 1910, C. D. Hill & Company, architects (demolished).

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Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen House, main stair hall. “Our Illustrations of the Work of C. D. Hill & Company,” 257. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen House, dining room. “Our Illustrations of the Work of C. D. Hill & Company,” 258. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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James L. Breese House, “The Orchard,” Southampton, Long Island, 1904, Stanford White, architect. Ferree, American Estates and Gardens, 174.

Sanger Brothers advertisement with a photograph of a dining room in Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Views, ca. 1923, 32.

The Flippen House captured the city’s attention, both for its beauty and its imposing scale, and established a precedent for building some of Highland Park’s grandest country houses. Prominently featured on the cover of the Flippen-­Prather Realty Company’s ca. 1910 Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, the Mount Vernon replica was the only grand house illustrated in that promotional booklet. The choice of this historic model reflected the nation’s “renewed interest in the colonial past.”69 Flippen and Prather wanted to create a recognizable symbolic icon to attract attention, yet Hill reshaped the original model to function as a contemporary family house. Precisely for this reason, non-literal copies of prominent U.S. buildings were erected all over the country. Stanford White’s 1904 version of Mount Vernon, the James L. Breese House, “The Orchard,” in Southampton, Long Island, was among the first close adaptations erected in the United States as a country house. Though not a literal copy, it reflected Mount Vernon with its two-story portico. However, White altered his model by replacing Mount Vernon’s hipped roof with a gable roof and a deck in place of the

cupola that overlooked the Potomac. He also standardized the fenestration, placed French windows on the ground floor, and used columns instead of slender piers. Hill’s version of Mount Vernon reflected Washington’s country estate even more closely. Yet, Hill also altered the design by placing a balustrade over the two-story front portico, making the fenestration on the main facade symmetrical, replacing the hipped roof with a gable roof, and expanding the depth of the house to create more interior space. Hill also inserted a Palladian window in the face of the gable. Thus, both contemporary country houses were designed to serve as appropriate and comfortable houses for twentieth-century families. The Flippen House demonstrated a shift in thinking on the part of architects, and their clients, on the appropriate typological organization of an American suburban house. Although no architectural drawings survive for the house, it is possible to reconstruct its internal arrangement from contemporary photographs. On the north side of the house, a one-story projecting wing contained the kitchen and associated service areas. This left the main block of the house

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free to contain the three formal rooms on the first floor—a sitting room, a dining room on the north, and a double-sized living room extending from the front to the rear of the house on the south. A wide stair hall divided the house into north and south halves and stretched from the entrance of the house to the rear view of the lake and the gardens, which were designed in 1916 by George Kessler. In 1910, the same year that the Flippens built their country house, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition that was pronounced “the first nationally recognized exhibition to present American furnishings.”70 The Colonial Revival movement came to Dallas not only as an architectural style but also as a mode of modern interior decoration endorsed by one of the foremost U.S. cultural institutions. Interior photographs of the Flippen House show that the main stair hall was finished in a light, delicate Colonial Revival style with a wide staircase gently rising to a landing before turning to reach the second floor. The colonial simplicity of the hall contrasted with the more richly decorated dining room, with its monumental dark-stained projecting wooden mantel and elaborately patterned wallpaper. The rather dark character of this room reflects a residential Victorian and, therefore, provincial aesthetic. Further reflecting residential Victorian influence was the formal block plan of the house, which included

a parlor, a room associated with nineteenthcentury social behavior. Such plans had been usurped by more open designs accommodating greater informality and leisure, where various family activities could take place in more fashionable houses.71 The Colonial Revival began to be “something that was carried inside . . . . As interiors from the past . . . were in turn viewed as embodiments of old-fashioned qualities and internal characteristics that connected them to historic time. . . . Architectural order, the pride of the colonial interior, implied moral order.”72 For a decade, the Flippen replica of George Washington’s house expressed an association with the president’s moral character and served as an architectural model for residential construction in Highland Park. As the community grew, other Colonial Revival–style houses would follow the Flippens’ example, and the popularity of the style was duplicated in the interiors, as evidenced in an advertisement, ca. 1923, placed for Sanger Brothers, one of the leading department stores in Dallas. The ad features a photograph of a Colonial Revival dining room, most likely in Highland Park, and provides a contemporary example of high-style Dallas interior decoration of that period. It is a rare view of a contemporary interior of that period in Highland Park and serves as a local example of a trend toward recreating interiors from the past.

Johnetta and Hugh E. Prather’s First House in Highland Park The Flippen-Prather Realty Company platted small- and medium-sized lots suitable for the erection of less expensive cottages, bungalows, and two-and-a-half-story houses. Their goal was to establish a community where homeownership could flourish. The appetite of the

American middle class for privately owned suburban houses increased dramatically in the first decades of the twentieth century, as many families deserted city neighborhoods, a pattern that Dallasites embraced. The expansion of industry and the working-class, and frequently

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immigrant, segment of the urban population “appeared as a danger, both to the family and the polity . . . . [A]n overt anxiety about the erosion of the pastoral landscape and undergirded with subtextual fears of urban feminists, radicals, and immigrants, was at the heart of the new suburban advocacy.”73 Within such middle- to upper-income suburban communities as Highland Park, homeowners could erect houses on suburban lots—which served as symbols of their taste, self-image, and individuality—in a highly stable and desirable environment. The architectural critic Herbert Croly believed that “the house was the key building block and root manifestation of American individualism,” a thought shared by many at the time.74 He felt that a model suburban house of a professional businessman is situated in a neighborhood accessible from the man’s place of business, and is occupied both summer and winter. It has enough land around it to permit the enjoyment of some of the pleasures of the country, and to afford an opportunity for a certain amount of landscape treatment; but not so much as to be any more than the front and back yard of the house. As an architectural type it is intermediate between the town and country house.75 Among the illustrations in the FlippenPrather Realty Company promotional booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, were photographs of ten other houses built in Highland Park, including Hugh E. and Johnetta Prather’s modest two-and-a-half-story brick Craftsman-style house built about 1908 at the southeast corner of Lexington and Bryan Avenues, with a twostory detached garage at the rear.76 The Prather House featured shallow porches and a roof with

exposed roof rafters and decorative braces beneath the gables, keeping with the expectations of middle-class homebuyers in the 1900s. Gustav Stickley, the creator of the Craftsman style, used simple, rectilinear forms and standardized, inexpensive materials for model house designs appearing in his magazine, The Craftsman, from 1901 to 1916 and in his 1909 book Craftsman Homes. As an American promoter of the English Arts and Crafts movement, Stickley advocated an alternative to the excesses of Victorian house designs, both their large scale and overly detailed finishes. The Craftsman style was appropriate for suburban houses, which Stickley claimed were associated with democratic ideals, making good on this claim by providing comfortable housing for families of moderate incomes. Stickley opened up the interiors by using only a few partitions to secure “plenty of space and freedom,” and he designed many of the interior features—including window seats, fireside nooks, and chimneypieces—to reduce the need for furniture.77 As one way of selling out an entire subdivision, developers erected smaller, well-designed houses to attract professionals who could afford a mortgage and would fit into a community’s social milieu. Although the character of the exterior of the Prather House was progressive and non-historical, the square plan of the house was arranged like an urban house with the rear yard occupied by a garage and a servants’ quarters above, accompanied by a secondary entrance to the house for the use of the servants. This arrangement compromised the relationship of the rear of the house with its yard, orienting the public rooms toward the front and the street. The majority of the houses featured in the booklet were two-and-a-half-story American Foursquare types (page 83, upper left and upper right) set on high foundations with wrap-

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around front porches, similar to Harry A. Olmstead’s house in Munger Place and the drawing of a house shown in the Flippen-­Prather Realty Company’s advertisement of 1907 in the Dallas Morning News. Few of the illustrations, however, included garages. The choice of this square, urban form with its four-room plan seems to suggest that this was the average median-priced suburban house in Dallas that most lot purchasers aspired to build. In plan, these houses differed little from those of the Victorian era of the 1890s. Several extremely modest, small-scale, one-story bungalows clad in wood shingles were also illustrated in the booklet, some with a hooded stoop instead of a front porch. Obviously, Flippen and Prather felt that the bungalow was appropriate for climatic conditions in Tex-

as, and it suited the needs of those who could not afford more expensive houses, demonstrating that this middle segment of the market was welcome in Highland Park. The floor plans of bungalows were more innovative than those of the Foursquare, as the entrance hall and parlor were typically replaced by an entrance directly into the living room, which in turn opened directly to the dining room.78 A precursor of the ranch house, the bungalow was adaptable to climatic conditions that diverged widely from those of Southern California, where this house type originated. The bungalow (facing page, middle left) appears to have been larger, with the entrance marked by a flight of steps covered by a bracketed gabled front porch and another expansive porch to one side. The chimney stack

Johnetta and Hugh E. Prather House, corner of Lexington and Byron Avenues, Highland Park (demolished). Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, ca. 1910, 8. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

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Highland Park houses. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, ca. 1910, 15. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

barely breaks the edge of the roof and was not an ornamental feature, as in the other bungalow (above, right, bottom). On the other hand, the most modest house shown in the booklet, the Highland Park bungalow had the characteristic

Highland Park houses. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, ca. 1910, 4. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

low silhouette of the bungalow house type, with an entry covered by a flat hood under the pitch of the roof. It was flanked on one side by a large external chimney stack that rose through the one-story roof.

George Kessler and J. C. Nichols’s Influence on the Design of Highland Park Between 1910 and 1917, Flippen and Prather developed three new installments of Highland Park south of Mockingbird Lane, all designed by George Kessler. Now rather than garnering

ideas from Beverly Hills, which had been taken off the market because of sluggish sales, Flippen and Prather began to look for their inspiration in the contemporary work that J.  C. Nichols

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was undertaking in Kansas City. Kessler, whose early work at Roland Park made him one of the most significant figures in suburban planning, had worked for Nichols in 1909 on the development of the Kansas City suburb of Sunset Hills, making it the most exclusive neighborhood in that city. According to Flippen, “The FlippenPrather Realty Company, at the recommendation of Mr. Geo. Dealey of The Dallas News, engaged the services of Mr. George E. Kessler for which we agreed to pay him $6,000 per year,” as a consultant for their landscape and topographical planning of Highland Park.79 Kessler’s advice on the planning of Highland Park would profoundly change its character, shifting away from Wilbur David Cook Jr.’s Beverly Hills–based model toward Kessler’s prior planning of a system of parks and parkways in the Country Club District in Kansas City. Kessler convinced Flippen and Prather to set aside 20 percent of their property for parks. His designs and layout and the quality of his program led to Highland Park becoming “a model residential district,” with his plans for the city of Dallas never fully implemented.80 Kessler, Flippen, and Prather envisioned the Turtle Creek Parkway as a grand avenue connected to Lakeside Drive to the east along Turtle Creek, where they laid

out sites for grand country houses. Another system of parks run north between the parkways of Drexel and St. John’s Drives on the banks of Hackberry Creek through the entire development. The parkway created a picturesque planning technique, which unifies this entire section of Highland Park. Most homeowners were within walking distance of the parks, as Kessler intended to be the case for the system of parks and parkways he planned for Dallas. By adopting Kessler’s innovative planning philosophies and beautification program, Flippen and Prather readjusted the model for Highland Park, aligning it with Nichols’s work. It is also apparent that the employment of Kessler strengthened Flippen and Prather’s ties to Nichols, whose work they would emulate in such features as deed restrictions, the laying out of lots and streets, the construction of artificial lakes, the installation of playgrounds, and the creation of a public school district to provide the best education in the city. As future sections of Highland Park were planned, Nichols’s influence became more and more visible, except with the issue of incorporation. Nichols strongly believed in the annexation of his subdivision to the city. Kessler worked on the project until 1923, when Hare & Hare assumed his position.

Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas: Country Club District J.  C. Nichols, the self-made entrepreneur, amassed a fortune in suburban real estate development at his Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri, and across the state line in Kansas. His developments were based on the principles of a comprehensive plan for a community that within thirty years would expand to more than four thousand acres. Nichols developed thirty-three subdivisions—twenty-six on the

Missouri side of Kansas City and seven across the Kansas state line—with eighteen homeowners associations run by ninety directors.81 Although the property appeared to have little future value to other real estate investors, Nichols foresaw that in time residential development close to the exclusive Kansas City Country Club would be very desirable, as had been proven in Roland Park. In 1905, having no capital

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of his own, Nichols organized a syndicate and bought a ten-acre tract of low-lying land south of the city limits below Forty-ninth Street. Though Nichols’s land lacked public utilities or transportation connections, he erected moderately priced houses on some of the lots to attract potential home buyers. By continuing to purchase inexpensive, unimproved land near his initial investment in order to create new subdivisions, Nichols was able to offer generously sized lots in a park-like setting. In April 1908, Nichols advertised in the Kansas City Star that he had acquired “1,000 restricted acres” for suburban development along the state line in Missouri and Kansas for his “Country Club District.”82 In the first section of his community, Nichols employed restrictions that were to run for a period of twenty years with no extensions. Only single-family houses with forty-foot setbacks were permitted to be built, at a minimum cost of five thousand dollars.83 For some lots, there were specifications on which direction the houses should face. All utilities lines, electricity and telephone, had to be installed at the back of each lot. Determined not to follow a simple gridiron, which characterized most new residential additions in Kansas City, he retained Kessler to design neighborhoods for his newly formed J.  C. Nichols Company.84 Probably on Kessler’s advice, Nichols initiated an ongoing program of planting thousands of trees in his subdivisions long before they were platted and sold, and he established his own nurseries to landscape his property. He held that “every neighborhood should be garden-like” and that this would encourage “the effort of every owner to produce desirable landscape effects and create a home fitting to the surroundings.”85 One of Nichols’s most important contributions to suburban planning was that he anticipated the significant role that Kessler’s Ward

Parkway would play for automobile traffic.86 As he noted in 1912, “The automobile has revolutionized the location of residential centers, demanding new features in subdividing.”87 Later he wrote, “We realize the importance of developing main traffic ways, boulevards or parkways spaced a half mile or mile apart to carry the general flow of traffic in and out of the district.”88 Furthermore, Nichols advocated “the use of long blocks, reducing the number of side streets, thereby saving money in the cost of street improvements.” This would help neighborhoods “maintain their quiet residential character and eliminate as much through traffic as possible.”89 Nichols was aware that good roads to accommodate the increasing automobile traffic and the landscaping of his property were important selling factors. Nichols had envisioned large houses along Ward Parkway that would attract upper-income purchasers to the intersecting streets. As a reporter for the Kansas City Star wrote: “Ward Parkway means money, power, and permanence. . . . It’s a road like no other in Kansas City. Living there is synonymous with prestige.”90 When Kessler moved to St. Louis in 1910, Nichols hired Hare & Hare to design his most exclusive neighborhood, Mission Hills, on the Kansas side of his property. There, in 1913, Nichols opened the Mission Hills Country Club for his residents who could not join the old Kansas City Country Club, which no longer had room for new memberships. That same year, Nichols visited Edward H. Bouton in Roland Park and they established a close friendship, exchanging ideas on land development and house building.91 Both men made numerous trips to England and Europe to study garden suburbs, as well as medieval towns and villages, for ideas for their suburban planning.92 In his advertisements, Nichols often re-

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ferred to his “protected” residential properties, by which he meant “the shielding of property values in certain residential areas from depreciation through gradual encroachment by lesser property values in surrounding neighborhoods.”93 He achieved this through filing strict deed restrictions with each subdivision plat in advance of sales. These restrictions were to run for a period of ten years in 1906 and were expanded to twenty years in 1908 without a provision to extend them beyond this period.94 They stipulated how the land could be used, to whom it could be sold, what type of building could be constructed on it, and minimum price restrictions for houses.95 Because Nichols believed so strongly that deed restrictions stabilized property values, he modified them in 1909 to run for a period of twenty-five years and allowed them to be renewed by a majority vote of the landowners. Nichols used restrictions to regulate the location of garages and outbuildings and required a minimum building cost of ten thousand dollars for some lots.96 In 1914, he made his restrictions self-perpetuating, becoming the first subdivider to do so in the country. This meant that restrictions would remain in place unless the owners of the majority of front feet of the section voted to modify or revoke them.97 Nichols was also convinced that deed restrictions served no purpose unless they were the dual responsibility of his real estate company and the property owners. Therefore, in 1909, he organized homeowners associations and required mandatory membership for all property owners, similar to the Roland Park Civic League, established by Bouton in 1895.98 These associations elected a board of directors from among property owners. Board members were charged with enforcing deed restrictions on their fellow property owners and collecting dues based on the amount of street frontage to

maintain parks, streets, and unsold lots.99 The associations also established police patrols, fire protection, garbage collection, snow removal, and taxes on public areas, and they arranged for water, gas, and electricity. Like Bouton, Nichols established a four-page community newsletter in 1919, the Country Club Bulletin, distributed monthly to all residents to promote community identity and to announce improvements and events in the district.100 Nichols formulated a comprehensive planning policy, which included not only selling lots but also designing and constructing houses, offering financial services, and installing sewer systems. The sewer installation was facilitated after Nichols gained approval from the city to have his development annexed in 1911.101 After annexation, he could sell lots for a small down payment of 10 percent with a 1 percent monthly payment plus 6 percent interest, making his lots affordable for families of moderate means.102 This was significant because banks usually granted five-year mortgages. When mortgages came due, banks usually renewed them at the same rate. Nichols also worked persistently for the establishment of a Kansas City planning and zoning ordinance, enacted on June 4, 1923.103 He embarked on a mode of subdivision design that would distinguish his land development from most others, and “by the 1920s, Nichols was recognized as being among the most innovative and successful residential real estate developers in the United States.”104 His aesthetic regulations attracted planners from England, Australia, South America, and all parts of the United States to the Country Club District. The planners marveled particularly at the “harmonious architecture; its subtle controls over form, color, and roof lines; and its land-use regulations.”105 In 1915, J. C. Taylor, vice president of J. C.

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Nichols Company, organized the Country Club Building Service, but purchasers were not obligated to use this service as long as their architectural plans won company approval. This was a more detailed service than that offered by Bouton at Roland Park. Although Nichols built some inexpensive speculative houses based on mail-order and plan book designs, he hired a staff architect, Edward W. Tanner, in 1919 to design houses within the district that ranged from modest to some of the grandest dwellings in the city.106 In 1922, Nichols began to build what he labeled “model homes,” which came to refer to speculative houses built with the most modern technology and household appliances.107 With the rise of middle-management business positions in Kansas City, more house buyers had incomes to meet the financial requirements of professionally designed houses, and Nichols soon assembled a fully staffed architecture department.108 Most of the early domestic architecture in the Country Club District followed the classical principles of the 1920s period revivals: adaptations of French chateaux, Norman farmhouses, Georgian manors, Old English cottages, and Early American modes were built.109

Nichols’s belief in the City Beautiful Movement was demonstrated by his installation of more than five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of European fountains and outdoor sculpture to create an “outdoor museum of art” for the parks, triangles, circles, and boulevards of the Country Club District.110 Moreover, Nichols is credited with making Kansas City the “City of Fountains” because of the more than two hundred fountains in the Country Club District. Areas for a country club, five high-rise apartment buildings, eleven churches, fifteen schools, numerous playgrounds, four golf clubs, and eight shopping centers were also an integral part of Nichols’s comprehensive plan.111 Houses in the Country Club District and their landscaping elicited admiration from within the United States and abroad, including the admiration of the developers of Highland Park and River Oaks, who personally visited the community. By 1939, the J. C. Nichols Company had grown to include twenty-four departments, including construction, brokerage, conveyance, engineering, financing, landscape and nursery, loans, sales, and water.112

Highland Park: The Second to Fourth Installments The Second Installment opened in 1910 and is bordered by Lake Neoma and Highland Park Lake (formerly Exall Lake) and the wooded Lakeside Park on the west, Hackberry Creek on the east, Armstrong Avenue on the south, and Beverly Drive along the grounds of the Dallas Country Club forming its northern limits.113 “Everything is being done to make HIGHLAND PARK not only the most desirable residential district of Dallas,” the Flippen-Prather Realty Company boasted, “but the finest and most

favorably known in all the South.”114 They claimed “the well kept grounds and the carefully chosen membership of the [Dallas Country] club, create most desirable and pleasant surroundings for the beautiful homes to be erected throughout HIGHLAND PARK.” Every lot in Highland Park now included artesian water, sewer and gas, and telephone and electric light poles placed in alleys. The streets were “[a]ll splendidly paved,” and “throughout the entire property .  .  . wide cement side-walks, heavy

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Map of Highland Park, First Four Installments, n.d. Courtesy of Dallas Historical Society. Used by permission.

curbs and gutters [were installed].” Alongside areas for parks, the parkways of Lakeside and Drexel drives were planned for less traffic, fortyfive feet in width, with other streets sixty feet in width. Access to the city by automobile was via Oak Lawn and McKinney Avenues, as construction of Turtle Creek Parkway continued. “Residents of the second installment, as well as the first,” Flippen and Prather stated, “are also fortunate in their proximity to Prather and Davis Parks, whose inviting shade trees and varied

attractions lure thousands of grown-ups, as well as children, to seek out-of-door diversions.”115 Always intended for recreational usage, Prather Park was equipped with a playground and tennis and croquet courts. A large swimming pool was installed in 1924 in Davis Park. Forming “a picturesque southern boundary,” two bridges were built to span Lake Neoma and Hackberry Creek on Armstrong Avenue. “Glimpses of lakes and playgrounds,” along with the bridges of the installments east of Preston Road, were fea-

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tured in the Flippen-Prather Realty Company’s ca. 1924 promotional booklet, Highland Park West, which included numerous photographs of the original five installments in Highland Park east of Preston Road. The twenty-six largest lots in the Second Installment were platted on Lakeside Drive facing Lakeside Park, “with its chain of lovely lakes which reflect the glory of and luxuriant forest trees, abounding along the shores,” becoming “a favorite place for the holding of community gatherings, spring pageants and Christmas exercises.” Picturesque gardens were planted in the parks and served as examples for landscaping possibilities for homeowners, who were encouraged not only to build fine residences but also to beautify their grounds. Examples of both public and private gardens were illustrated in the promotional booklet. Houses on Lakeside Drive were described as “palatial residences [that] rise on wooded eminences and mirror their stately lines in the placid water of the lakes which lie just to the east.” Lots ranged in size on average from 70 by 225 feet to 162 by 236 feet and in price from $18 to $25 a front foot with “a few highly developed lots a trifle more.” The prices were based on cash purchases, “but where desired, [the company] will make terms of as little as one-fourth cash and the balance in easy annual payments.” Purchasers of the lots were under no obligation to build, but the deed restrictions permitted only residential construction and accessory buildings with a minimum cost set for each house at three thousand dollars. On Lakeside Drive, the minimum was five thousand dollars. From Highland Park’s inception, the developers did not allow “the intrusion of stores, factories, and even multiple-type residences” by restrictions in the deeds of sale.116 In 1909, John S. Armstrong’s widow Alice sold her 5.06-acre estate property at the corner of Beverly Drive and

Preston Road to H. J. Pettengill, president of the Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company. Stipulated in the deed of sale was that the restrictions were “to run with the property for a period of ten years from date here of,” and that any house erected on the property could cost no less than five thousand dollars.117 Interestingly, the cost requirement for a house was less than what Pettengill paid for the lot, ninety-five hundred dollars, yet he never erected a house. Flippen and Prather never required blanket minimum cost restrictions on houses except in individual deeds to their purchasers, allowing more flexibility in negotiating each sale.118 “The further development of an elaborate system of parks and parkways marked the opening of the Third Installment of Highland Park,” according to Flippen and Prather.119 The boundary of this 79.9-acre section extended north from Beverly Drive to Mockingbird Lane, east of the Dallas Country Club, and west of Hackberry Creek on Drexel Drive.120 Block 15, consisting of only four lots, was the only area in this installment that was platted south of Beverly Drive with Oxford Drive to its west end and Drexel Drive to its east and south. Streets were sixty feet in width on average, but the parkway Drexel Drive was only forty-five feet in width to discourage through traffic and was intended to be laid out following the contours of Hackberry Creek and facing the parkway. Announced as the “Country Club Section of Highland Park” in the Dallas Morning News on May 12, 1912, the Third Installment had “a magnificent country club on the one side and a great university on the other—insuring [sic] an atmosphere of culture and refinement.” Lots in this installment varied in size from 50 to 75 feet in width and 203 feet to 266 feet in depth, ranging in price from $28 to $32 per front foot. Flippen and Prather commented that “development of this

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installment was rapid, handsome homes of various types . . . soon sprang up, because by now the fame of Highland Park as a residence city of surpassing beauty had spread far and wide.”121 Again, the houses presented in their promotional booklet, Highland Park West, were fully landscaped and grander than those illustrated in the First Installment. That same year, the Fourth Installment, the largest section platted east of Preston Road, was located on 238.45 acres south of the campus of Southern Methodist University, north of Gillon Avenue, east of St. John’s Drive, extending west to Airline Road and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad line.122 In this section, Prather named some of the streets after Ivy League schools: Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Harvard Avenues. Lots ranged in size from 50 feet in width to 150 feet in depth, with the exception of Beverly Drive where lots were 195 to 200 feet deep. They were priced on average

from $32 to $40 per front foot. This ensured, said Flippen and Prather, that “[t]hose who desired to erect structures of the bungalows and cottage type, and still enjoy the advantages of a highly restricted residence section, might not lack the opportunity.”123 Only Beverly Drive, running east to west, and Abbott Drive, running east and turning north to the entrance to Southern Methodist University, w 70 feet in width— the widest in this installment. Along Hackberry Creek, between Drexel and St. John’s Drives, a system of picturesque parks was planned that would be connected to the areas for parks that Kessler had designed for the Second Installment. Lots in Highland Park now ranged in size from estates facing the waterways and Beverly Drive to smaller sites on the northern and eastern boundaries, with medium-sized lots in between. By providing this range of properties, the developers sought to appeal to a broad market of potential clients, from the wealthy to the middle

Map of “Areas in the Town of Highland Park, Dallas County, Texas,” ca. 1950.

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class. In 1914, the Highland Park Independent School District was formed when the John S. Armstrong School opened its doors at 3600 Cornell Drive on a block of land donated by Alice Armstrong to commemorate her husband.124 Not featured in Highland Park West were the 109.71 acres, purchased on May 9, 1922, called Mount Vernon. North of Mockingbird Lane, this area runs out to Shenandoah Street between Turtle Creek to its west and Key Street to its east and is shown on the maps, “Areas in the Town of Highland Park, Dallas County, Texas”

and “Dates and Areas Annexed to the Town of Highland Park, Dallas Country, Texas,” both ca. 1950. Another 7.83 acres of land, referred to as Walkers, was bought on September 3, 1923, and forms another area north of Mockingbird Lane. Adjacent to Walkers to the east is an additional 5.13 acres that were purchased on November 8, 1923, and donated to the Highland Park United Methodist Church, which was designed in 1926 by Dallas architects Roscoe De Witt and Mark Lemmon.125

Highland Park Incorporates In order to receive city services, Flippen and Prather petitioned the Dallas city government for annexation of Highland Park in 1913 in their Proposed Charter for the Town of Highland Park, Texas.126 When the city refused, the citizens of Highland Park voted in November of that year to incorporate their fourteen hundred acres as a separate township, which became official on December 22nd.127 According to historian Bill Crook, “Dallas had no interest in it [Highland Park], because they could see nothing but expense in the cost of paving and sewers and water.”128 Highland Park adopted a “councilmanager” form of government, as stated in the

charter: “All powers of the Town shall be vested in an elective council, hereinafter referred to as Council.”129 W. A. Frazer was elected Highland Park’s first mayor on April 7, 1914.130 Since 1913, Highland Park has remained independent of the city of Dallas and has continued with the council-manager government. The incorporation of Highland Park protected homeowners’ real estate investments and brought lower taxes and tighter control over town government and city services.131 It also helped to retain Highland Park’s small-town atmosphere and proved “a method by which suburbs could protect their reputation, status, and independence.”132

Conferences of Developers of High-Class Residential Properties A group of developers organized the 1917 First Annual Conference of Developers of HighClass Residential Property because they saw a slowdown in the sale of lots after the United States entered World War I, and they wanted a forum for a wide-ranging discussion of their projects. The participants were Hugh E. Prath-

er; Edward  H. Bouton of Roland Park; E.  W. Chaille of Indianapolis; William Demarest of Forest Hills Gardens; J.  E. George of Omaha, Nebraska; Paul  A. Harsch of Toledo, Ohio; Lee J. Ninde of Fort Wayne, Indiana; Elmer I. Rowell of Berkeley, California; King G. Thompson of Columbus, Ohio; Frederick Law Olm­

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sted Jr., the landscape architect for Roland Park; and J.  C. Nichols, who was appointed chairman. “Perhaps,” Nichols told the group, “the sales problem is an educational problem of getting people in our respective cities to continue to appreciate the advantage of the permanency of our community. . . . Or, it may be that some of us are trying to hold too large a proportion of our property to the high class character.”133 Bouton explained that when he began development of Roland Park in the early 1890s, “there was no suburban growth at all. . . . The whole habit of the people to go into the suburbs had to be created.”134 “In order to stimulate sales,” he continued, he “would have to convince more people that property values had been decreasing, to find a method to increase their desire to leave the city for a suburban way of life.”135 The developers agreed that practically all the sales in their subdivisions had been to newcomers to their respective cities. Each developer was asked by Chairman Nichols to give a description of his residential development. Prather outlined how he and Flippen had developed the first four installments of Highland Park: Total sales in Highland Park amount to $1,155,000.00 vacant property alone. Last year’s vacant property sales [were] $272,000.00. We find that restriction of any given street to brick, hollow tile or stucco [for house construction] has been a great help in making that said street a high class development, and has stimulated sales. We have practically eliminated wooden houses. Our restrictions provide for houses to cost not less than $3,500 up to $10,000.136 Of the group of developers, Bouton and Nichols had been the strongest advocates of long-term deed restrictions. Nichols, like Flippen and Prather, had instituted deed restrictions in 1906

for a period of ten years. The restrictions addressed the cost of the houses, mandated singlefamily residential land use, and outlined setbacks from the streets. But, as Nichols later wrote, “a ten-year restriction period provided practically no permanent protection. . . . After the restrictions had run three or four years, buyers became concerned about what would happen at the end of the original ten-year period and hesitated to buy or build a home.”137 In 1914, Nichols required the restrictions to be self-perpetuating for twenty-five-year intervals, and Bouton soon followed this practice.138 They must have influenced Flippen and Prather because by 1921 their deed restrictions had been extended to run for a twenty-five-year period. On January 3, 1921, Flippen sold his Mount Vernon replica on Preston Road to Fay and Le Roy Munger for one hundred thousand dollars.139 Incorporated in the deed was the stipulation that “[e]ach and every condition and covenant herein contained shall terminate and be of no further effect after twenty-five (25) years from the date of this deed.”140 The deed also required that “the dwelling house, exclusive of outhouse and other improvements shall cost not less than TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND ($25,000) AND NO/100 DOLLARS.”141 This requirement represented a fivefold increase in the minimum building cost stipulated in the 1909 sale of Alice Armstrong’s lot on Preston Road to H. J. Pettengill.142 Bouton recommended that developers maintain their own architecture departments.143 He said he paid an architect a yearly salary in addition to a commission, making the total salary around $4,000 to $5,000, and he did not require the architect to supervise building, hire labor, or assume any duties associated with a contractor.144 Although Prather did not have an architecture department, he informed the group that he gave a 5 percent discount to builders but

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never to individual buyers.145 He said his company had a small building operation that had opened twelve months before and since then it had built about one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of houses.146 In terms of financing, his company’s terms were to accept a down payment of 20 percent of the cost of the house, or no less than 10 percent, and to place a 50 percent first lien on the remaining 80 percent, which was sold at 6 percent. The second lien was divided into monthly payments with the interest included in monthly payments, not only on the first lien but also on the second one. That way, the interest was paid from month to month on both liens. The company guaranteed the first liens and interest on the houses when they sold them. Nichols suggested that the developers “should do everything we can to keep our credit as clean as we can and our obligations as small as we can.” Prather’s immediate response was that through guaranteeing the first lien at 6 percent, they could undercut the prevailing interest rate in Dallas of 7 to 8 percent, which proved helpful in selling their houses. He pointed out that “the second liens all come due within the period of five years . . . in other words we get all our money back before the first lien becomes due.” Nichols required a 10 percent down payment for a house designed by his architecture department. A first mortgage was set up for five years at an interest rate of 6 or 7 percent, depending on the current rate, and two points, or 2 percent of the mortgage amount, was charged for arranging the financing. The principal amount ballooned in five years, when a second mortgage came due that required interest on the principal until the balance was paid in full. In regard to temporarily furnishing speculative houses until they sold, Prather exclaimed, “It has been done very successfully in Dallas.”147 Developers J. E. George of Omaha and Paul A.

Harsch of Toledo reported they had been successful in motivating buyers by furnishing their speculative houses. Harsch said he sold most of the furnishings as well. Prather told the group that he had intentionally built several houses for himself and his family in Highland Park to boost sales. Additionally, his salesmen had bought houses in Highland Park and had furnished them to present a finished product to the public. Other developers commented that they had taken a similar course of action. When the conversation came to garages, Prather remarked that “some people won’t have it [an attached garage],” because of a fire risk, although Nichols had allowed attached garages since 1908.148 He discouraged detached garages because they “create a solid mass of buildings up and down the block to the rear of the houses.”149 A majority of the developers voted in favor of making it a policy not to permit the erection of detached garages; however, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company permitted both types to be erected in Highland Park. Prather’s attendance at this meeting, his receipt of the account of the 1918 meeting, and his attendance at their final meeting in 1919 made him aware of the activities of his peers and aided the company’s planning decisions for Highland Park West, west of Preston Road, which opened for sale in 1923. At the 1919 meeting, Prather said his company could not build a house for as little as ten thousand dollars and asked the other developers if he should raise the minimum cost in his deeds to fifteen thousand dollars.150 Nichols advised him to set the minimum at ten thousand dollars and raise or lower it according to current conditions. After a brief debate, the men requested that the written record be halted. Thus, the conclusion on this topic is unknown. In a January 1920 memo that Prather sent to members who had attended the Third Annual

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Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, he reported that the FlippenPrather Realty Company had sold slightly more

than $98,000 in speculative housing, $434,400 in vacant lots, and almost $900,000 in re-sales of improved and unimproved property.

Highland Park: Fifth Installment In 1917, the Fifth Installment of Highland Park was being developed east of Preston Road, under Kessler’s supervision. Known as the Highland Park Acreage Addition, it consisted of forty-four acres of land south of Armstrong Avenue on both sides of Turtle Creek Parkway, the drive that connected Highland Park to the city of Dallas and served as the grand south entry to Highland Park.151 Seventeen large lots were platted between Turtle Creek Parkway and Preston Road, ranging in size from 79 to 151.5 feet in width by 164 to 325 in depth, with two triangular green spaces located at the interception of the parkway at Armstrong and Wycliffe Avenues. Forming an oval shape east of the parkway, Highland and Overhill Drives were picturesquely planned but were not divided into lots on the 1917 plat map. In 1923, another plat map was filed with the city for the development of Overhill Drive, leaving Highland Drive, now renamed St. John’s Drive, to serve as

a buffer between Turtle Creek Parkway and the large house sites on Overhill Drive. Curiously, the seventeen lots on the two plat maps seem to have been drawn by the same hand, but the lettering is different on each map. Perhaps Kessler was working on this design before his death in 1923, and this is the reason the plat was left unfinished. In a letter written by Nichols to Prather on March 27, 1923, Nichols recommended that they contact “Herbert Hare of the firm of Hare & Hare” to complete the design of Highland Park and Highland Park West, noting that he was “entirely competent for all our subdivision properties and is also quite familiar with most of the best subdivision work throughout the country.”152 Taking his advice, the developers hired Hare & Hare to complete the Highland Park Acreage Addition, filed on May 28, 1923, and the future development of Highland Park West.153

Highland Park Houses Published in Western Architect In July 1914, the journal Western Architect devoted an entire illustrated issue to the architecture of Dallas.154 “Dallas: City of Art and Commerce” included photographs of three houses in Highland Park, accompanied by first- and second-story floor plans: one Tudor in style, one Craftsman, and one Colonial Revival. Also pictured, although without the floor plans, was the Prairie-style Rufus W. Higginbotham House in

Munger Place. Although nothing was written about the houses, the issue praised the city: Dallas was selected for this exposition of Southwestern architecture because while there are other cities in Texas that possess buildings of as great merit and architects of equal skill, it is representative of that merit and skill and the art and commercial importance of the Lone Star

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Caro and Harry L. Edwards House, east/lakeside elevation and floor plans, Preston Road, Highland Park, 1912, C. D. Hill & Company, architects. “Dallas: A City of Art and Commerce,” 83. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

State. .  .  . Dallas has made such continual and phenomenal growth, that there is every reason for the faith of her people that she will continue to be the great commercial and financial center of the Southwest. The editors continued, “As a city Dallas . . . will use its growth in wealth and influence as a powerful factor in building up a people that will be noted for their culture and progressive energy,” and “mark this Texas city as one that is an important factor in our National progress.” Impor-

tantly, Dallas was now becoming regionally well known for its architecture. The garden side of Caro and Harry  L. Edwards’s two-and-a-half-story brick Tudor country house in Highland Park, designed by C. D. Hill & Company in 1912, was illustrated on the last page of the issue.155 Born in Wales, Edwards founded one of the oldest and largest cotton exporting firms in Texas, H. L. Edwards & Company.156 He was an avid golfer and the founder and first president of the Texas Golf Association. Located on Preston Road at the southern end

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of the Turtle Creek Acres tract, the Edwards House was the second grand country house in Highland Park. The house was built on an estate-­sized lot south of the three lots reserved for the Highland Park developers on Preston Road, past Highland Park Lake, Exall Dam, and the water pumping station. The garden elevation was the main elevation of the house and, like the Flippen House, it was oriented toward the water, in this case Lake Neoma, rather than Preston Road and placed atop a multi-tiered garden. The garden façade was ornamented by two large symmetrically placed gables with half-­timbering on the upper floors topped by a slate roof. Casement windows on the second floor added to the English-inspired spirit of the design. The open formal block plan reflected an informal style of leisurely living, an influence stemming from the work of Charles  A. Platt and his contemporaries. This is evident in the interior in the relatively open spatial relationship between the major reception rooms and, on the exterior, in the large porch facing east, an extension of the living space in keeping with the desire to open the house to its surrounding grounds. From the central porte cochère, the entrance opened into a long stair hall that divided the house into halves and ended in a vestibule facing the garden. To the south, a living room and a den were adjacent to an extremely long porch. To the north were the reception and dining rooms, beyond which was a semicircular breakfast room, then the kitchen, servants’ porch, and servants’ stairs. Upstairs were five bedrooms with multiple upstairs bathrooms carefully integrated; a long screened porch, possibly for sleeping; and two maids’ rooms, the latter above the downstairs servants’ wing. The service areas on the first and second floors were gathered together and pushed to one end of the house, segregating them from the own-

ers’ spaces. Also on the property were two onestory frame outbuildings, probably also servants’ quarters; a frame gatehouse; and a one-story brick greenhouse, all appurtenances of a country house.157 The Edwards House was designed by a Dallas architect at a time when the employment of an architect was encouraged by developers and critics alike. For, as Herbert Croly had recommended, “Without the architect the result may be individual and charming: but it can only rarely possess that highest quality of style.”158 The other two significant Highland Park houses illustrated in Western Architect were those built for Dorothy and Frank Austin, president of Austin Brothers Company, a structural steel factory, and for Nadine and Frank Callier, president of Trinity Cotton Oil Company.159 Frank Austin’s two-story Craftsman-style house on Beverly Drive was designed in 1913 by H.  B. Thomson. Compared to Prather’s house, the scale of the Austin House was large for the Craftsman idiom, combining English Classical, Dutch Colonial, and Pennsylvania Colonial inspirations. Such details as a pair of Tuscan columns placed at the back of a small brick terrace in front of French doors, the window boxes, the use of roughcast plaster, the pent roof, and the gated arbor from the sidewalk lent other themes to the mix. The Austin House indicated Thomson’s developing suburban design sophistication, as seen in the simplicity of the street front and the minimal ornamentation. With its rectilinear lines, low placement to the ground, and integration of gardens in the overall scheme, the Austin House was a more advanced suburban type than such Munger Place houses as that of Harry A. Olmstead. Thomson created an impression of symmetry at the Austin House, with the two gable-roofed end bays of the façade, but this symmetry was not rigorously observed

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Dorothy and Frank Austin House, front elevation and floor plan, Beverly Drive, Highland Park, 1913, H. B. Thomson, architect (demolished). “Dallas: A City of Art and Commerce,” 74. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

as evidenced by the fenestration of the first floor of the house. Unlike in the Edwards House, the stair of the Austin House was compartmentalized on the first floor and was not part of the reception spaces of the house. It also was isolated from the kitchen and service rooms of the house. Placed along the outer wall of the kitchen was a smaller stair, providing access to the basement, and a screened porch, which led to a two-story plaster outbuilding that served as both a dwelling on the second level and a garage on the first. The enclosure and placement of the main stair made it usable by both the family and the servants, eliminating the need for a secondary stair

to the second floor. On the second floor, the two largest bedrooms, as well as the two sleeping porches, were given the desirable southern exposure. The entire eastern end of this floor was set aside as an owners’ suite with the dressing room and bathroom placed on the less desirable north side of the house. The powder room was inserted beneath the upper run of the main stair as had been the case at the Edwards House. At the Austin House, Thomson oriented the breakfast room, the dining room, and the living room with its adjacent glazed porch, to the south, opening them to the best natural lighting and breezes, thereby turning them away from the

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Nadine and Frank Callier House, front elevation and floor plans, Gillon Avenue, Highland Park, 1913, H. B. Thomson, architect. “Dallas: A City of Art and Commerce,” 75. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

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street. The dining room and glazed porch provided access to the rear garden via French doors, and the living room featured a wide window bay looking out to the same outdoor space. The living room and the glazed porch were designed en suite, with the fireplace in the glazed porch making that space usable year round. Thomson employed elements of country house planning in this small suburban house. According to Croly, “the plan of a small house is frequently even more difficult to work out than that of a much larger one, and as like as not, it is equally difficult to fit a good-looking design to the plan.”160 That same year, Thomson designed the Callier House on Gillon Avenue, a two-story frame house in a simpler Classical Revival style, featuring a low-hipped roof with jerkinhead ends and a deep overhang. The house had a recessed front porch, framed by paired classical piers, and tripartite windows on either side of the entrance bay. To the right of the house was an open porch with a sleeping porch above it, ornamented by four two-story giant piers. Because the house was on the north side of the street, the dining room and the living room opened to the street. The living room also opened onto the colonnaded side porch that faced south into

the prevailing south and southeasterly breezes. The house had an unusually wide entrance hall, probably to provide for more ventilation. The kitchen and its screened service were located behind the dining room and the butler’s pantry. Upstairs, the house had two bedrooms and a sitting area with no private bathroom, requiring that all members of the Callier family use the one bathroom located within the master suite. Above the living room was the master suite with its sleeping porch, dressing room, and shared bath. Thomson’s work in Highland Park from this period reveals that he explored climatically responsive plans with multiple exposures, which evolved into more complex asymmetrical plans. This resulted in the formation of a house type that is truly suburban in character in contrast to the comparatively more urban forms in Munger Place. Thomson was not constricted by the developers of Highland Park. Their restrictions did not force him to set back the houses as far as those of Munger Place and that allowed him to open up his Highland Park houses to their backyards, a more progressive solution to suburban house planning.

Early 1920s Improvements in Highland Park On November 20, 1921, a Dallas Morning News article, “Highland Park Has Extensive Program,” announced that there were “thirtysix homes costing nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, that have either been completed or [are] under construction” in Highland Park and that the suburb was planning to build a town hall where city officials could better manage the administration and maintenance of the community. Now it was apparent that Highland Park

had become one of the foremost suburban developments in Dallas. These accomplishments were “said to constitute a record unequaled by any other town in Texas or by any subdivision of a city as Highland Park is generally considered.”161 Ten miles of paving had been laid, seven parks had been established, and the Highland Park Nursery had been formed as part of the beautification program, planting more than three thousand trees. The nursery also offered

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Aerial photograph of Highland Park and Highland Park West, 1923. From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

full landscaping services for residents and created beautiful gardens for both individual and company grounds. The fire department headquarters had been doubled in size and equipped with a new pumping apparatus costing thirteen thousand dollars; an ornamental street lighting system was being completed; and a footbridge on Stratford Avenue was under construction at a cost of three thousand dollars. On November 21, 1921, according to a Flippen-Prather Realty Company newspaper advertisement, property for the independent Highland Park Water Company had been reserved in the Second

Installment. The company could “adequately supply a city of 10,000 inhabitants with pure artesian water.”162 Around 1920, Exall Dam across Highland Park Lake had been extended to provide flood control. This also required lengthening the footbridge over the dam. By 1923, Highland Park’s population had grown to more than eight thousand. An aerial photograph from 1923 shows how filled-in the subdivision had become. In 1925, it was reported that 60 percent of the highest-income families in Dallas resided in Highland Park and Highland Park West.163

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Highland Park Town Hall Designed by Lang & Witchell, the two-story Spanish Colonial Baroque-style Highland Park Town Hall at 4700 Drexel Drive was completed in 1924 for a cost of sixty-five thousand dollars.164 The building housed city offices and an auditorium. This was the first monumental use of Spanish Revival architecture in Texas, a style that had its genesis in the work of the New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue at the 1915 San Diego Exposition.165 The decision to employ the Spanish Revival mode for a prominent structure was perhaps intended to encourage use of that style in newer sections of Highland Park west of Preston Road in Highland Park West. The stuccoed hollow tile building has an elaborately carved limestone entrance flanked by ornamental Solomonic columns, a motif that is repeated in an elaborate window frame above the entrance. An ornamental tower rises in three stages above the building’s red clay–tiled roof and is topped by a low dome. The tower emphasizes the importance of the town hall in the manner of a Baroque Spanish Colonial church. Prior to the completion of the building, Highland Park’s mayor, Frank

M. Smith, commented that the function of the town hall as a community center was “to awaken our people to a fuller, truer appreciation of art, music and all things cultural that make for a finer citizenship.”166 On the evening of October 30, 1924, G.  B. Dealey presided over the formal opening and was appointed chairman of the Highland Park Society of Fine Arts, which was organized to hold exhibitions, lectures, and concerts.167 The Spanish Revival Highland Park Art Gallery and Library, again the work of Lang & Witchell, was built in 1930 as a three-story annex to the town hall, with its entrance facing St. John’s Drive.168 The first floor contained a library of eighteen thousand books, with separate reading rooms for children and adults. On the second floor, there were two 30- by 40-foot art galleries to house rotating art exhibitions, with an art studio on the third floor. Once completed, the art galleries were furnished in the Federal style, not reflecting the character of the exterior of the building. Although the art galleries have been converted into office space, the library currently occupies five thousand square feet of the building.

Highland Park Town Hall, Drexel Drive, 1924, Lang & Witchell, architects. The Art-Work of Dallas, Texas, n.p.

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Highland Park Views In 1924, Flippen and Prather boasted that they had intended “to build [in Highland Park] a City of Homes, which would rank second to none in the entire South.”169 “Pride of the developers,” they stated, “found ready response in the home site owners who reared structures of varying types of architecture, all dignified and glorified with the adornment of shrubs and flowers.”170 Around 1923, the same year the First Installment of Highland Park West was opened to the public for sale, the Flippen-­Prather Realty Company produced a promotional booklet, Highland Park Views, which featured photographs of the Dallas Country Club, one of their “beautiful winding drives,” Highland Park Lake, and twenty-two residences.171 The cover photograph captured a glimpse through an ornamental gated wooden arbor, draped with vines and other plantings, to a substantial masonry house, giving the impression of a bird’s-eye view. The houses illustrated in the booklet presented architectural styles that Flippen and Prather felt would conform to a consensus on Highland Park’s identity as a community of stately houses. Highland Park Views is significant because it presents photographic documentation of the houses in their original condition (several have been demolished, others altered). As stated in the promotional booklet, “Many of the firms represented in the advertising section were prominently identified in the construction and finishing of the residences shown in the preceding pages,” and they are “to be credited in a large measure for the wonderful strides made in building in Dallas.”172 H. B. Thomson, Herbert M. Greene, and Anton F. Korn Jr. were among the Dallas architects whose designs for Highland Park houses were featured. Some of the houses were built by

the talented general contractor Walter Whitley, who noted in his advertisement in Highland Park Views that he was “Specializing in Better Class Residences.”173 Whitley was the most prolific general contractor in Highland Park. Rose Youree, the daughter of a wealthy banker-­plantation owner in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Alfred T. Lloyd, the owner of Lloyd Advertising Company, built their estate on Beverly Drive. Labeled “an exact replica of a famous Italian villa” in Highland Park Views, the house was the first of its genre built in Texas.174 Designed by Greene in 1912, the house was also featured in the 1925 edition of The Art-Work of Dallas, and it stands across from the Dallas Country Club at the corner of Preston Road on the 5.06-acre estate lot once owned by Alice and John S. Armstrong.175 Rising high above its gardens on Highland Park Lake, the east elevation of the three-story white stone house is dominated by a giant Palladian arched loggia. Its verticality makes it visible across the lake from Lakeside Drive. The entrance, waterfront view, formal garden, and the site plan of Carrère & Hastings’s 1891 E.  C. Benedict House in Greenwich, Connecticut, were illustrated in the January 1910 Architectural Record in a survey of their work. The entrance of the E. C. Benedict House likely served as the inspiration for the Lloyd House because of the similarity in the use of the oversized Palladian opening that frames the second and the third floors, although the Lloyd House was built on a much smaller scale. Carrère & Hastings’s renown as designers of Beaux-Arts country estates made their work a logical choice for Greene to study for his design of a Renaissance Italian villa. For its time, it was the most lavish residence in the subdivision.

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Rose Youree and Alfred T. Lloyd House, Highland Park Lake elevation, Beverly Drive, Highland Park, 1912, Herbert Greene, architect. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Views, ca. 1923, 6.

Postcard of the Rose Youree and Alfred T. Lloyd House (author’s collection).

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E. C. Benedict House, entrance façade, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1891, Carrère & Hastings, architects. Courtesy of the Greenwich Historical Society.

Leonna and Orville Thorpe, state manager for the Kansas City Life Insurance Company, hired Thomson to design their ornate neoGeorgian residence on Lakeside Drive.176 It was described as “a perfect type” in Highland Park Views.177 Built in 1915, this house reflects Thomson’s contemporary work in Munger Place: the Edgar R. Brown House, the Judge George C. Greer House, and the Lewis-Aldredge House. Built across the street from Highland Park Lake, the Thorpe House, along with the other grand houses on Lakeside Drive, commands a view of the lake and its surrounding park. Thomson produced an eclectic variety of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century motifs, aggrandized to an early twentieth-century scale, including the dentiled cornice, a balustraded roofline topped by ornamental urns, segmental pediments above the first-floor windows, swags beneath —

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the second-story windows, Corinthian pilasters at each corner, and Corinthian columns on the front and side porches. The most distinctive element of the exterior is the semicircular front porch, which is reminiscent of the south façade of the White House, completed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1812, though the porch at the Thorpe House is much more attenuated. “Gwinn,” the Cleveland, Ohio, residence of William G. Mather, designed in 1907 by Platt, is a contemporary house comparable to the Thorpe House design. Platt modeled Gwinn’s waterfront elevation after the south front of the White House, because, as architectural historian Keith Morgan has suggested, it was “an American building Platt greatly admired.”178 Numerous illustrations of Gwinn were published in 1909 in Architectural Record and in Platt’s monograph of 1913.179

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The most complete example of the country house type to be built in Highland Park was the two-story brick neo-Georgian house designed by Anton F. Korn Jr. for Johnetta and Hugh E. Prather on their estate-sized lot on Preston Road, although they never resided there.180 Begun in 1917, it was not finished until 1919, the same year that Prather sold the house, called “Shadowlawn,” for two hundred thousand dollars to Electra Waggoner and Albert Wharton.181 Mrs. Wharton was the daughter of one of the wealthiest cattle ranchers in Texas, Tom Waggoner, which gave her the means to purchase so large a residence. Shadowlawn, described as “palatial,” was pictured in Highland Park Views and identified as the house of Mr. and Mrs. Weldon Bailey, Electra Waggoner’s second husband.182 The design of the private garden elevation was recorded in September 1927 by Southwestern Architect with a vignette of the details of the entry Corinthian temple portico to the house facing Preston Road, although obscured from public view. However, by this time, the Baileys had sold the house to Michael M. Thomas, chairman of the branch of the Southwest National

Bank.183 Like the Flippen and Lloyd Houses, the house was oriented toward Highland Park Lake. The garden façade was symmetrical with two stone-faced Palladian projecting brick loggias at either end of the main block. It appears to reflect the influence of Platt, who used similar projecting wooden loggias on the garden façade of the 1901 house he designed for the Anna Parkman Osgood House, Blendon Hall, and included in his monograph, The Works of Charles A. Platt. Platt embraced a less formal approach than Carrère & Hastings, whose ornate French classicism was the signature of their designs. The exterior of the Prather-Bailey-Thomas House reflects the interest of both architect and client in formally integrated eclectic architecture that appropriated historical models with accurate and subdued decoration. It was built lower to the ground, becoming rectangular in plan, with its long axis parallel to the street. The house divided the lot into a front lawn and private rear garden, reflecting the suburban country house type. What is striking about the house is its great length, the main block being seven bays wide,

Leonna and Orville Thorpe House, Lakeside Drive, Highland Park, 1915, H. B. Thomson, architect. FlippenPrather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Views, ca. 1923, 11.

William G. Mather House, “Gwinn,” waterfront elevation, Cleveland, Ohio, 1907, Charles A. Platt, architect. Architectural Record 26, no. 11 (November 1909): 316.

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with the lower wings extending out of the north and south ends of the main block. The southern wing appears to contain a loggia, on the ground floor with a porch above that may have been attached to the master bedroom. The north wing, likely the location of the kitchen, did not feature any openings out to the grounds. The layout of the property, as illustrated in the 1921 Sanborn Map of Highland Park, shows what amounted to a processional route from Preston Road through the gatehouse, past the Palladian footprint of the combined servants’ quarters and garage, and toward the main entry portico of the house.184 The idea of the gated entrance was a motif borrowed from English country houses, as was the idea of a long drive leading to the great house. Obviously, Prather admired Korn’s work because he prominently featured his sixth house in Highland Park in Highland Park Views.185 The house, a two-anda-half brick Tudor style, was built about 1920 at the corner of Beverly and Drexel Drives. The half-timbered second story is composed of extremely dark quatrefoil and vertical wood framing members, which contrast starkly with the white stuccoed walls. The ornamentation may have been adapted from sixteenth-century half-timbered British urban models from the southeastern counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.186 It is interesting that Prather chose a British urban form for a suburban house rather than opting for a Tudor style more representative of English country houses: Jacobean, Elizabethan, Old English, Queen Anne, or a half-timbered English country cottage. This is also about the time that Flippen sold his Mt. Vernon replica to Fay and Le Roy Munger, president of Munger Automobile Company, distributors of Cadillac automobiles, who remodeled it into “a pure English type,” or “a Jacobean derivation.”187

It is important to note that both Flippen and Prather built new houses in Highland Park that reflected other historical sources adapted from southern Europe that, along with the Highland Park Town Hall, would be influential in the design of houses built in their new section, Highland Park West. “Commanding a magnificent outlook of the golf links,” the Flippens’ second Highland Park house was designed in 1920 by Thomson.188 The two-and-a-halfstory stucco house on Beverly Drive, across the street from the Dallas Country Club, featured curbside street plantings, sidewalks, and manicured lawns, representing improvements made in Highland Park by the Flippen-Prather Realty Company. Photographs of the house and its floor plans were published in the May 1922 issue of House and Garden. The house was designed in a restrained Italian Renaissance style with a low-pitched tile hipped roof and a brick veneer Palladian arched solarium facing northeast. The first-floor plan of the house has dual entrances into the large reception hall, one via the entrance loggia on the Beverly side of the house, the other through a vestibule opening to the driveway on the Lakeside Drive side. The reception hall and living room are placed end to end and were meant to function as a single long space, an en suite arrangement, ending with the projecting solarium on the east side of the house. The dining room, kitchen, and service stair are placed to the rear of the reception hall and living room, separating the service areas of the house as much as possible. The second floor of the house contains four bedrooms and three bathrooms, with the owner’s bedroom located above the living room, the best orientation for the southerly breezes. The arrangement of the Flippens’ second Highland Park house marked a major departure from the formality of

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Prather-Bailey-Thomas House, Preston Road, Highland Park, 1919, Anton F. Korn Jr., architect. “Rear of M. H. Thomas Home,” Southwestern Architect 1, no. 3: 13, plate 6.

Johnetta and Hugh E. Prather House, Beverly Drive, Highland Park, ca. 1920, Anton F. Korn Jr., architect. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Views, ca. 1923, 27.

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Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen House, Beverly Drive, Highland Park, 1920, H. B. Thomson, architect. “A Group of Medium Houses,” 79.

Minnie May and Edgar L. Flippen House, floor plans. “A Group of Medium Houses,” 79.

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Johnetta and Hugh E. Prather House, Overhill Drive, Highland Park, 1923, J. Allen Boyle, architect (author).

their earlier Mount Vernon–inspired residence. Thomson produced a plan without a single restricted formal room, such as a parlor. His plan was more open, with interior partitions being removed, reflecting the trend toward greater informality and leisurely living in his extensive use of large windows and French doors to link the interior of the house to the outside. The compartmentalized Victorian plan seen in their first house began to evolve into a freer plan based on changes in the patterns of daily life. In 1923, Prather and his family moved a seventh time, to a Spanish Colonial Revival–style house on Overhill Drive in the Acreage Addition. Although it was not illustrated in Highland Park Views, the front elevation of the house was

on the cover of the April 1924 issue of the newsletter Highland Park and is probably the best example of this domestic style in the eastern sections of Highland Park.189 The style arrived in Dallas at the same time that the Kenneth E. Womack House in Shadyside in Houston was being designed by the New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. The houses differ in that the front arcade of the Womack House faces south and is patterned after a Spanish farmhouse, whereas the Prather House faces northwest, has no covered living space, and has numerous ornamental details. The Prather House was designed by J. Allen Boyle, a Dallas architect who in 1925 designed a Renaissance Italian-style villa (now The Mansion on Turtle Creek) for

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the cotton magnate Sheppard King. The Prather House features smooth stuccoed walls ornamented by an elaborate carved stone entrance surround, tile roof, and leaded-glass windows as well as wrought-iron screens, balcony railings, and lighting fixtures. Flanked by decorative Sol-

omonic columns, a large two-story leaded-glass arched window faces Overhill Drive, and above it is an ornamental quatrefoil opening. Three of the second-floor windows are grouped in an arcade of pilasters.

Conclusion The appeal of living in the country, rather than living in a city neighborhood, was enhanced by Highland Park’s plentiful outdoor spaces, which no other subdivision in Dallas can match, and beautiful bodies of water—Highland Park Lake, Lake Neema, and Hackberry Creek. The parks are meticulously maintained with lush greenery, trees, and flower beds. Nowhere is the picturesque theme left unattended. Residents as well as non-residents engage in daily recreational activities, from joggers to walkers to tennis players, from children playing in playgrounds to families strolling or walking or simply resting on the generous number of benches. Flippen and Prather’s desire to create a haven for affluent family life in a peaceful and beautiful environment still attracts purchasers. This extends to the maintenance of individual yards along tree-lined streets; there are no derelict houses or unkempt lawns to be seen. Ideally suited to the country life atmosphere, planned and promoted by the Highland Park

developers, the suburban country house type in its smaller form was introduced to Dallas in Highland Park. Open house planning, along with the introduction of new styles, would lead to the creation of a more current domestic idiom. Prather’s attendance at the Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property meetings in 1917 and 1919 kept him abreast of the latest development trends. With the advice of Kessler, the Highland Park developers became more sophisticated in their efforts to complete their plats east of Preston Road. These combined sources would be realized more fully in the 1920s in Highland Park West. A keen awareness of other suburban developers’ work was reflected in Flippen and Prather’s decisions regarding not only domestic design but also commercial planning and architecture. As a result, Highland Park became the model of planning and architecture in Dallas for the modern suburban city.

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C h a pt e r four

H IGHLAND

WE ST

PA R K

“The Crowning Achievement of Highland Park” and the Highland Park Shopping Village

A l arge p ec an tr e e si t uat e d at t h e n o rt h e r n e n d of Turtle Creek Parkway, at the junction of Armstrong Parkway (formerly Armstrong Avenue) and Preston Road, serves as a natural entrance marker for Highland Park West.1 Its site was once part of a 512-acre tract bound on the east by Preston Road; on the west by the Cotton Belt Railroad (now the North Dallas Tollway), Elsmere Addition, and Lemon Avenue Heights; on the north by Mockingbird Lane; and on the south by the University Place Addition, North Oak Lawn, and Lemon Avenue Place, with additional acreage later added.2 George Kessler and Hare & Hare probably viewed the 170-footwide grand Armstrong Parkway as a continuation of Kessler’s Turtle Creek Parkway into this planned residential neighborhood. Named in memory of John S. Armstrong, the parkway extends in a northwesterly direction and then gradually curves to the north toward Mockingbird Lane, running for more than a mile through the heart of Highland Park West. The parkway was intended to carry the heaviest volume of traffic in the neighborhood. In its center is a landscaped median sixty feet wide with two thirty-foot-wide parallel driveways

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on each side. The Dallas nursery owner H. A. Veale supervised the planting of almost one thousand large forest trees in double rows along the parkway, with the “Park Bridle Path and Sidewalk” running between the rows, and mature trees planted on every spacious home site.3 In addition, the Cleveland landscape architect Lee M. Jenney, who had landscaped Highland Park, completed the work for the entire length of the parkway, adding flowers, perennials, and shrubs.4 Nils Werenskiold, the Dallas civil engineer who supervised the development of the eastern segments of Highland Park, served in this capacity in the development of Highland Park West. The Flippen-Prather Realty Company spent more than a half-million dollars in developing and beautifying this section, which they “confidently believed . . . would be improved by the erection of a splendid character of homes.”5 After opening the First Installment of Highland Park West in 1923, Flippen and Prather described it as being where “the romance of a vision nearing fulfillment . . . a vision of a sparsely inhabited highland transformed into a community of beautiful dwellings . . . primeval woodlands transformed into parks and playgrounds where children romp and play, growing strong, healthy and rosy-cheeked.”6 Prather compared it to the earlier sections of Highland Park: “The same atmosphere, the same prestige, the same

community spirit will be enjoyed by those who build their homes on this new highly restricted homeland, as in the older section.”7 Highland Park West, however, differed from the earlier sections in layout. Kessler, along with Hare & Hare, took a more modern approach, integrating street planning and landscape features that were entirely man-made. The streets in Highland Park West were designed to control the flow of traffic to avoid having automobiles become nuisances in residential zones. In the eastern sections, a discontinuous street pattern hindered the movement of traffic, but accommodated the existing natural landscape conditions. Between 1909 and 1921, automobile ownership rose dramatically in Dallas County from 860 to 27,248 vehicles.8 In 1917, the American City Planning Institute (now the American Institute of Planners) was founded. Among the charter members were G. B. Dealey, Frederick Law Olm­sted Jr., and Kessler.9 The organization found that there was an alarming increase in automobile registration in the United States from more than five million in 1917 to an unprecedented nine million in 1920, with more than twenty million estimated by 1925. This study prompted the discussion at the 1917 Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property about methods of laying out streets that would best accommodate vehicular traffic.

Forest Hills Gardens Olmsted had been the first landscape architect to confront the problem of planning a major suburban development that addressed the needs of motorists as well as safety concerns. His prototype of a transit-oriented suburban plan had

been adopted in 1912 at Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York.10 The street plan, sophisticated for its time, featured the 125-foot-wide Queens Boulevard and two 80-foot-wide streets, Ascan and Continental, as the main thorough-

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Map of Forest Hills Gardens, 1912, Olmsted Brothers, landscape architects. Photograph courtesy of the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation.

fares. Two gently curving 70-foot-wide avenues, Greenway North and South, were planned to radiate from Station Square through the middle of the property to the entrance of Forest Park. Numerous 60-foot-wide “cozy, domestic” streets were designed for local traffic and not as “endless, straight, wind-swept” thoroughfares, thus permitting planting spaces and front gardens, which were among the developments’ charac-

teristic features.11 Most important, Forest Hills Gardens was the first American suburban community in which a street plan was integrated with the landscape design to control local traffic and the flow of traffic through the development. This type of plan would highly influence other suburban planners and developers of high-­status communities.

First Annual Conference of the Developers of High-Class Residential Property At the 1917 meeting, Hugh  E. Prather stated that he and Kessler were planning to create a twenty-five-foot roadway at the center of a fiftyfoot right-of-way in Highland Park West. The roadway would allow a twelve-foot strip for each vehicle to pass one another, with twelve-and-

a-half feet on either side of the street reserved for five-foot-wide sidewalks next to a planting strip between the sidewalk and curb. Olmsted approved of this arrangement to accommodate larger and faster new automobiles, saying that people “can turn around in a 24 or 25

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foot roadway without much inconvenience.”12 Prather told the other developers that for his minor streets he and Kessler planned to make the blocks about five hundred feet long. Olmsted responded, “The question of the length of the block becomes important because if you have a block which is 500 feet in length or more, it is inconvenient to go to the end of the block to turn .  .  . people will want to turn their cars around in the block.” Nevertheless, in the First Installment of Highland Park West, the blocks ranged from six hundred to twelve hundred feet in length. J. C. Nichols inquired if Olmsted was increasing the size of the radii at street corners, to which Olmsted replied, “I do not believe at ordinary street intersections you should increase the radius with any idea of allowing au-

tomobiles to go around at speed, only it ought to be big enough so that the automobile can go around without swinging out around the other road. . . . If the radius is too small, they will have to swing out into the middle of the street they are going into.” Responding to Olmsted, Prather said, “We have had the same experience, and have torn out I don’t know how many, but probably fifty intersections and made the radii very much larger.” In the First Installment of Highland Park proper, the intersections were awkwardly designed with curvilinear and straight roads coming together and creating tight spaces that were not ideal for automobile traffic. This problem was mostly corrected, as Prather remarked, but it was still difficult to drive through some intersections in the old sections.

Highland Park West: First Installment The “very best” improvements were under way in the 90.67-acres plat of Highland Park West’s First Installment, filed on May 10, 1923, with many of the lots laid out in extremely irregular shapes, ranging from 79.1 to 368.3 feet in width and from 167.5 to 228 feet in depth.13 To retain property values, the largest, most irregular lots were platted on Armstrong Parkway and Preston Road at the corners of Belclaire, Lorraine, Marseilles (now Arcady), and Bordeaux Avenues. Some of the houses were designed to face side streets, a planning device that had previously been used in the development of the Third and Fourth Installments in Highland Park. The average price of the lots was eighty-five hundred dollars, with larger lots offered at proportionately higher prices.14 Between Preston Road and Armstrong Parkway, the lots were platted in this flat, barren section facing the fifty-foot-wide

curvilinear Belclaire, Lorraine, and Marseilles Avenues with Bordeaux Avenue having a slightly wider width of sixty feet. Running parallel to Armstrong, Douglas Avenue was seventy feet wide and was also intended to carry the heaviest traffic, whereas the minor, narrower, shorter avenues were designated for slower residential automobile movement, minimizing the amount of hazardous traffic and reducing the cost of street improvements. All of the streets were paved with bituminous pavement, with concrete sidewalks and curbs laid out along the gracefully winding streets. A new feature in Highland Park West was the introduction of ten-foot-wide reservation strips to replace alleys, which had become undesirable. Nichols advised that alleys were considered to be “the source of disorder and uncleanliness.”15 “When you have an alley,” he wrote,

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“it is difficult to keep people from putting trash in it.”16 Described as “rather unique for Texas,” single poles wired for both telephone and electric lines, as well as underground pipes, were placed in the reservation strips, a method that Nichols had employed in his development.17 In April 1923, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company purchased the Lomo Alto Addition, a small, piecemeal, 18.2-acre section that was north of Mockingbird Lane, west of Preston Road, and east of Loma Linda. On March 24, 1924, the addition was annexed to the Town of Highland Park and renamed Preston Place.18 From January 1, 1924, new blanket protective restrictions were enforced in Highland Park West to run for a thirty-three-year period. These

differed from earlier restrictions placed on individual deeds for a twenty-five-year period.19 After these expired, property owners were allowed to renew them by a majority vote. The restrictions required all houses and garages to be constructed of brick, hollow tile, or stucco on metal lath with roofs of tile or slate. To ensure the character of the construction, architectural plans had to be approved by a board of architects.20 The owner of each lot was charged an annual fee for a maintenance fund that was used for the upkeep of streets, parks, and sidewalks; the care and replanting of trees, shrubs, and lawns; police protection; and other services deemed necessary.21 It was the first Dallas subdivision to impose this type of fee.

Third Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property At the 1919 Third Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, John M. Demarest of Forest Hills Gardens reported that his free bimonthly, four-page newsletter, established in 1913, had succeeded in stimulating a strong sense of community identity among his residents.22 He also held Saturday night dances, Sunday evening concerts, and social gatherings for holidays.23 Nichols began his own newsletter about two months after the conference, with Flippen and Prather following suit by publishing Highland Park from January 1922 to December 1930.24 It contained community news and provided a means of promoting Highland Park West while continuing to report on the development of the rest of Highland Park. A group of Highland Park citizens created the Highland Park Celebrations Association in 1923, an organization that sponsored public

gatherings on major holidays and special occasions. The association stated as its objective: “to create and promote a community spirit and neighborly feeling among all of the citizenship of the community.”25 In 1923, the association’s first two events took place in Highland Park West: a May festival and an “old-fashioned” Fourth of July celebration.26 It was also announced in that same year that the old pecan tree would be decorated every Christmas season as a “Tree of Light,” a tradition that has been maintained to the present. Even though the Highland Park Celebrations Association was formed by a group of citizens, Flippen and Prather probably presented the idea to promote their new development, to encourage “a rare spirit of neighborliness and friendliness,” and to spark interest in their newly opened section.27

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Highland Park Sales Office Overlooking Highland Park West, FlippenPrather’s Colonial Revival general sales offices at 4800 Preston Road stood on less than one-half acre between the earlier Edwards and Prather-Bailey-Thomas estates.28 In 1924, Flippen and Prather moved their sales offices from a downtown bank building to Preston Road, “so that the firm might better serve the hundreds who have expressed their interest in building sites in Highland Park West.”29 The sales building looked like a house rather than an office building, probably to present an example of domestic architecture suitable for construction

in Highland Park West. It was elaborately landscaped to demonstrate how “the rawness of the vacant territory” could be improved.30 Potential clients entered a large reception hall, where informational materials on the developments were available for their inspection. Prather said he had been advised by an unidentified man in California to “display everything conceivable about your property in the way of plats, maps, pictures and things of that kind in his office. . . . It struck me as being probably a very good thing for people, who had just come in your town that didn’t know anything about you.”31

Highland Park West: The Second to Ninth Installments On May 21, 1924, the second section of Highland Park West, called the Country Club Section was opened to the public for sale on a 56.10-acre tract of land.32 A Pre-development sale was advertised four days prior to the formal opening in the Dallas Times Herald. Flippen and Prather claimed in the advertisement that this new section was aimed at those “who wished to keep their investment at a moderate figure” and was described as “a continuation of the First Installment; equally desirable in location, alike in improvements with bitulithic paved streets, curb, sidewalks, forest trees.” In the June 1924 issue of the Highland Park newsletter, they announced that a majority of the lots with no improvements had been reserved two days before the sale, which produced more than four hundred thousand dollars in revenue with only a few lots remaining on the market.33 Lots ranged in width from 50 to 110 feet and in depth from 110 to 188.9 feet and were sold at prices

averaging from $43 to $60 per front foot, being more uniform in size than those platted in the First Installment. Flippen and Prather claimed all improvements—including water and sewage, gas, light, and telephone—would be installed within ninety days. A ten-acre portion of this section at the corner of Mockingbird Lane and Preston Road was labeled “reservation,” which later became the grounds for the Highland Park Shopping Village.34 The Highland Park School District purchased Block 150, measuring 800 by 253 feet, for a second elementary school, the John S. Bradfield School, named after the president of the school district.35 The building permit for the school, at 4300 Southern Boulevard, was filed in 1930 for the $68,200 Spanish Colonial Revival–style structure, designed by Fooshee & Cheek.36 The plat map for the Third Installment for Highland Park West was filed on April 8, 1925. This addition comprised forty-two house sites

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along Beverly, Versailles, and Belclaire Avenues between Armstrong Parkway and Preston Road on a 27.69-acre tract of land.37 An advertisement in the May 3, 1925, Dallas Morning News stated that the developers required a 10 percent down payment for each lot with a balance “at one per cent monthly, including interest,” with some smaller lots less than $2,400 in price. Smaller lots, ranging in size from 70 to 106.45 feet in width by 142.5 to 169.25 in depth, were platted in this section. The type of street layout used in the first two sections of Highland Park West was also used here, with the exception of a seventy-foot-wide cross street, Beverly Drive, which was probably widened because it led to the entrance of the Dallas Country Club. West of the fifty-foot-wide Preston Road was the Park Bridle Path and Sidewalk of the same width that now has been converted into a park space. “Horseback riding is fast becoming one of the most popular forms of outdoor sport in Highland Park,” noted the November 1922 Highland Park newsletter, calling it an “exhilarating and healthful exercise.”38 Although Prather was not in attendance at the 1918 Second Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, he would have received a stenographic report of the meeting, in which the majority of the developers endorsed the idea of establishing riding academies on their properties.39 Flippen and Prather built the Dallas Saddle and Bridle Club on Beverly Drive one block west of the Dallas Country Club. Horseback riding became so popular among Highland Park schoolchildren that a bus was regularly scheduled to shuttle between schools and the club.40 Beginning on March 1, 1925, only a club stockholder or an immediate member of the family of a stockholder was permitted to use the club. Maintenance of yards was seen as another means to encourage pride in homeownership.

Nichols, at the 1919 Third Annual Conference, told the other developers that he awarded three cash prizes every year for the best-kept lawns.41 Following Nichols’s example, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company started their “Grounds Beautiful Awards” in 1925, but they awarded five cash prizes, ranging from ten to one hundred dollars.42 The purpose of these awards was to produce examples of well-maintained, beautifully landscaped yards to inspire all homeowners to improve their properties, so that “even if you fail to win one of the five cash prizes, the work you do will make your place more attractive, more enjoyable, more valuable.”43 The contest was particularly aimed at the owners of smaller houses to encourage them to conform socially to the practice of owners of larger, more expensive house sites. The first three prizes were awarded to homeowners of lots fewer than sixty feet in width, the fourth was presented to a homeowner with a lot sixtyfive feet in width, and the fifth to a homeowner with a lot only fifty feet in width.44 “You may be impressed with the splendor of the large grounds, but you are entranced by the beauty of the small grounds,” Prather noted before the second contest, going on to say that “every small home, with its grounds, can be a picture.”45 The Grounds Beautiful Awards were held for four years. The plat for the Fourth Installment of Highland Park West was filed in 1926, running from Beverly Drive to Mockingbird Lane and flanked by Armstrong Parkway on the east and Cotton Belt Railroad on the west.46 Like the First Installment, all of the residential streets had fifty-foot right-of-ways. An area directly facing Lomo Alto Drive was reserved on the plat map for “schools, churches, public buildings, retail shops, apartments, filling stations, garages, etc.” but was never developed for any of these pur-

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poses. Instead, in an amendment to the plat of October 21, 1926, a part of the 57.89-acre area was divided into lots.47 The other part was set aside for a play park, later named Fairfax Park, and Fairfax Avenue was then terminated in a round cul-de-sac. Lots in this installment ranged in size on average from 65 to 79 feet in width and from 127.1 to 138.1 in depth. On June 8, 1928, the plat map for the Fifth Installment, lying west of Armstrong Parkway and adjacent to the Cotton Belt Railroad, was filed as an extension of the fourth section.48 The size of this large 75.01-acre tract necessitated that the developers pave nearly 7 miles of streets, plant 1,051 imported forest trees, and construct 5,488 linear feet of storm sewers, as well as 23,720 linear feet of sanitary sewers.49 On average, house sites in this section were between 60 to 92.5 feet in width and 134.2 to 166.3 in depth. Flippen and Prather advertised this section in a Pre-development sale as being “$10 to $20 per front foot. . . . Lower in price than other sections less favorably located, $42 to $52 a front foot, a few at $60 to $75 a front foot, [with] all 1928 taxes paid.”50 Perhaps the decrease in lot prices reflected a slowdown in the sale of houses, and the Flippen-Prather Realty Company decided at this point to reduce lot sizes in order to reduce prices and sell inventory. Versailles Avenue was split into two streets north and south with a triangular area

reserved for a park, later named Flippen Park. Since 1914, Nichols had frequently employed the use of small, triangular parks in the Country Club District, pointing out, “We feel these give refinement of character to street entrances; they overcome the effect of ugly barren wide stretches of pavement in front of homes, and also help to check through traffic.”51 In 1929, the company erected a reflecting pool with a fountain in the center and an octagonal Spanish Colonial Revival–style gazebo in the park, the latter designed by Fooshee & Cheek.52 Five additional sections were annexed to Highland Park West before 1940. The section, known as Westpark, opened in 1928, a 47.35acre section at the Lemmon Avenue entrance, “in which duplex apartments of certain types may be erected [and] . . . it is expected to make this section the most exclusive of its kind in the city, with all the protective features applied to Highland Park and Highland Park West.”53 In 1931, the Seventh and Eighth Installments were platted on a 70.33-acre site between Westpark and the Fifth Installment. The Sixth Installment, a small 6.25-acre area, was platted in 1934 on Preston Road between Fairway and Hawthorn. Between 1936 and 1940, the last addition to Highland Park West, the 99.14-acre Ninth Installment, was platted west of the Cotton Belt Railroad and east of Westside Drive between Mockingbird Lane and Lemmon Avenue.

Zoning in Highland Park and Highland Park West The issues addressed in the comprehensive zoning ordinances for Highland Park and Palos Verdes Estates, California, were so similar in content that it is likely that the authors of the Highland Park ordinance based it on the 1927 Palos Verdes ordinance.54 In May 1928, the Na-

tional Conference of City Planners was held in Dallas. During the May 8 session, the Palos Verdes city planner Charles H. Cheney gave a lecture: “What Esthetic Items Should a Master Plan Include?”55 He listed five objectives: “to plan for beauty, to plan for color,” to plan gen-

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erously for open space and parks, to maintain a town picture by protecting early buildings, and, significantly, to architecturally control all buildings, signs, and physical appearances.56 Attending the conference were two residents of Highland Park, Dr. Edward H. Cary, president of the Kessler Plan Association, the organization founded to promote the completion of George Kessler’s comprehensive city plan for Dallas, and G.  B. Dealey, chairman of the local committee for the conference, who was also elected to its board of directors at the close of the meeting.57 Cheney’s comments were taken seriously because of the favorable response to Palos Verdes Estates. It is likely that Cary and Dealey, by virtue of their interest and involvement in the conference, created the movement that produced Highland Park’s zoning ordinance. In November 1928, a committee was appointed to formulate a comprehensive zoning ordinance, even though, in the original section, restrictions would expire in four to ten years and would not be initially included in the ordinance.58 The Highland Park City Council thought it advisable to proceed with re-restriction of separate areas for business and public buildings and for residential sections. The zoning ordinance was approved on July 17, 1929, and became law immediately.59 The zoning committee—Flippen, W.  H. Frasier, J.  T. Wells, R.  R. Gilbert, and D. A. Frank—said that they had approved

the ordinance both “in response to the desire of the residents” and “to preserve the residential Character of the Town.”60 All provisions and restrictions of the new ordinance would affect all future building in Highland Park, both residential and business. Properties under the old restrictions would be governed under their current individual deeds until they reached their natural termination date. The ordinance served two important functions, the first of which identified land uses.61 It established areas within Highland Park and Highland Park West for single-family dwellings, with smaller portions of the town reserved for duplexes and apartment buildings. Already existing was a country club, a library, and municipal buildings. Such infrastructures as parks, playgrounds, water pumping facilities, and a railway station were exempted. The only other use category allowed was for retail business construction. Second, the zoning ordinance also restricted the placement and height of all buildings. For single-family dwellings, the height could not exceed thirty-five feet with a minimum front yard of twenty feet, rear yard of twenty feet, and side yard of five feet. These regulations were repeated for two-family structures, apartment buildings, and commercial buildings, but the latter two could be greater than thirty-five feet in height under certain circumstances.

Highland Park Building Permit Book Records The March 1924 Highland Park newsletter featured an article titled, “Extensive Building Program In Highland Park West To Be Carried Out This Spring and Summer.” The article stated: “Handsome homes are Under Construction on Armstrong Parkway, Bordeaux Avenue

and Lorraine Avenue. . . . Plans are being drawn for a number of additional dwellings which will be erected within the next few months.”62 In the first ten months of 1924, building permits for houses had reached $1,219,075, which surpassed totals for the entire previous year.63 In

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F. C. Bacon House, 4237 W. Potomac Avenue, Highland Park West, 1926, James C. Teague, architect (demolished). Courtesy of Jackie and Christopher Converse.

1925, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company announced that, in the last twelve months, fifty-­ seven houses had been erected in Highland Park West and that many others were under construction. The new construction ranged, the company claimed, from “attractive small cottages to the imposing mansions.”64 Thus, an aggressive building campaign had

been successfully launched in Highland Park West. According to the Highland Park Building Permit Book records, houses in Highland Park West ranged in price from $3,000 to $45,500 in 1925, while no permits for more than $20,000 were issued for the older Highland Park sections.65 In 1925, the Flippen-Prather Realty Company built seven speculative houses in

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Highland Park West, ranging in price from $4,750 to $20,000, in all sizes and styles, including duplexes, and continued with this practice until 1930. The number of permits issued in 1925 was 177; in 1926, 130; in 1927, 138; and in 1928, 187. Records indicate that from 1929 to 1932, most of the building permits were for additions and repairs. But it is apparent from Dallas city directories that the occupants of these houses were entrepreneurs and professionals. By that time, Highland Park seems to have almost filled up, with Highland Park West providing ample room for those with the means to enter the neighborhood. A small number of architectural drawings from this period has survived. These drawings are stored in the Highland Park Town Hall. The builder Frank K. Williford purchased four lots in 1925 and was issued building permits worth fifty-five hundred dollars for each house, all four of which have been demolished.66 A drawing

of only one of the houses has survived, which is a front elevation of the one-and-a-half-story Tudor house built on W. Potomac Avenue, designed by the architect James C. Teague. It had three gables across the façade, a large one on the left of the centrally placed front door and two smaller gables to its right. All of the gables were detailed with half-timbering filled with pebble dash. Above the windows and the front door were brick segmental arches broken by a keystone in their centers. The fenestration was a mixture of sash and casement, the latter filled with diamond-shaped panes. Dominating the façade, a monumental chimney stack rose above the height of the gable roof. The house was purchased in 1927 by F. C. Bacon, distributing superintendent for the F. W. Woolworth Company.67 Significantly, there remain many Tudor houses in Dallas that are similar in size to the Bacon House from that period.

The Olmstead House The architectural firm of H.  B. Thomson and Frank  T. Swaine began to design plans for L-, H-, and Y-shaped houses that were more complex and up to date, including the sophisticated Y-shaped plan for the Olmstead House.68 By the mid-1920s, the manner in which the ornamentation of houses was handled reflected a more scholarly approach to historical appropriation. One of the most expensive permits in the Highland Park Buildings Permit Book, number 49, was issued in 1925 to Harry A. Olmstead, president of Southwestern Paper Company. He and his wife Bertha had lived in the simple frame American Foursquare house in Munger Place on Junius Street since 1909. In Highland Park West, they built a grand $45,500 Tudor-style

country house on Armstrong Parkway, sited on a one-acre lot and opened in the back to its gardens. Thomson & Swaine described the original house in one of their series of articles in the Highland Park newsletter as “clearly English; wherein colorful walls of mingled shades of red, brown and russet brick and Oklahoma field stone set off with not too white stone trim, attain Old World charm.”69 Ornamented by off-white stone surrounds, the asymmetrical fenestration was filled with various sizes and shapes of window panes. Rising from each end of the house, tall chimneys with fieldstone bases and brick stacks had ornamental raised brick horizontal bands. The architects noted that “the roof,

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Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead House, reception hall. Courtesy of Amy W. Davis.

blending with the interesting changing skies of Texas, is of purple, and seems to make the heavens a part of the picture.” Hipped-end dormers pierced the slate roof of the house. The entry gable rested on stone kneelers with its apex dominated by a brick and stone pattern set off by a course of white headers. Beneath the three-part window in the projecting entrance, the building material changed from brick to stone, and a brick segmental arch marked the opening of the front porch. Canted at an angle to the main block, the oversized reception hall, spiral staircase, and projecting rear library formed an elongated oval space dividing the first-floor plan into two sections, creating a Y-shaped plan. The photograph featured in the article showed Jacobean furnishings in the reception hall. East of the vestibule, the great living room stood alone, sharing a wall with the loggia. The western half of the first floor contained a dining room, a breakfast room,

a kitchen with a utility porch, and two service pantries. This unusual asymmetrical plan repeated on the second floor, which had “five bedrooms, four tiled baths, and large storage closets, dressing rooms, etc.,” with “quarters and bath for two white maids” in the attic. The house had such modern home conveniences as “electrical refrigeration, automatic vapor heat, and many electrical devices for operating a home of this character.” The three-car garage was built “integral to the house as a wing and of the same material as the house proper,” and it contained rooms for two servants along with the laundry and boiler rooms. The triangular lot was “freely landscaped with rich shrubbery and large trees” and included a swimming pool at the rear. According to Thomson & Swaine, “nothing is quite so intriguing as the house planned and adapted to irregular grounds,” where a sense of balance was created through “an appreciation of line,

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Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead House, Armstrong Parkway, Highland Park West, 1926, Thomson & Swaine, architects (author).

Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead House, south elevation. Courtesy of Amy W. Davis.

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Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead House, first-floor plan. Courtesy of Ann and Lee Hobson.

Bertha and Harry A. Olmstead House, second-floor plan. Courtesy of Ann and Lee Hobson.

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form and color.” They continued, “Today’s house must attain charm through an intimacy of relation between house and surroundings as well as of its own part.” What Thomson & Swaine accomplished in the plan of the Olmstead house was to give the major reception rooms on the first floor and the bedrooms above three exposures, orienting them to the backyard, rather than the street,

for privacy and access to the prevailing breeze, with the exception of one bedroom facing north. The Armstrong Parkway front of the Olmstead House hints at, but does not disclose, the diagonal plan geometry of the house, which is more clearly expressed in the rear, where the formal block plan has been replaced by a freer plan for more leisurely living and informality.

Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture The Spanish Colonial Revival style—displayed first in Highland Park at the Spanish Baroque– style town hall and Prather’s house on Overhill Drive, both erected in 1923—began to gain popularity in Texas as the opening of Highland Park West commenced. It is noteworthy that the Main Exhibit Building at the State Fair of Texas in 1924 was built to resemble a Spanish village and had a great impact, not only on the city but also on visitors. The English-born and -trained New York architect Sir Alfred C. Bossom, in a paper read before the 1924 convention of the Texas Association of Real Estate Boards, “stressed the desirability of Spanish architecture for Texas homes.”70 In his opinion, “Spanish types were the most adaptable as well as the most sensible.”71 In Texas, as well as in California, Florida, New Mexico, and Arizona, architects began to study Spanish vernacular buildings for domestic designs in order to adapt houses to the land and climate. The choice of the California Mission style represented the first phase of the Spanish Colonial Revival, which began in California in the 1880s.72 However, the genre did not gain strong momentum until the San Francisco architect Arthur Page Brown won first place at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition with his Mis-

sion Revival–style California State Building.73 The first phase proved to be more suitable for public buildings—most conspicuously, train stations and hotels—rather than for single-family houses. Because of the similarities in climate between Spain and California and because of their association with Spanish architecture, California architects were greatly interested in the Spanish Colonial Revival. The style “came to be increasingly associated with its functional and environmental features, eventually being touted as a rather ‘modern’ model of the efficient dwelling in warm climates.”74 The introduction of the second phase of the Spanish Colonial Revival gained a strong presence and popularity in Southern California. As with the California Mission phase of the revival, the Spanish Colonial style could be found as early as the 1890s in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco in large buildings, but its popularity did not spread quickly. The profound effect of Bertram Goodhue’s work at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego led the way for the Spanish style, which was embraced by the Southern California architectural culture as well as those of the Southwest and Florida. Yet, it was the domestic architecture of the picturesque winter resorts, Santa Barbara

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and Montecito, notably by George Washington Smith, coupled with the work of Pasadena architects Wallace Neff, Myron Hunt, and Reginald Johnson, that would pave the way for the popularity of the “California school” in the 1920s and 1930s. Southern Californian architects planned their houses with an emphasis on integrating terraces, courtyards, garden patios, balconies, and pergolas with interior living spac-

es in ways that were appropriate for the region’s temperate climate. Their inspiration came from the architecture of Spain and Mexico, as well as from Mediterranean sources, including Italy and the Islamic buildings of North Africa. Texas architects would draw most of their inspiration from the Southern California architects, whose works were frequently published in the 1920s.75

George Washington Smith and Wallace Neff Smith, around 1916, set up an architectural practice in Montecito, California, that specialized in designing small-scale houses mainly in the Spanish style, including his studio-house in Montecito, Casa Dracaena, later known as the Craig Heberton House.76 In 1921, Carrie Howard Steedman and her husband, the St. Louis industrialist and businessman George Fox Steedman, visited Santa Barbara and were impressed by the Spanish-inspired domestic architecture. In 1922, they hired Smith to design their own country estate on an eight-acre, later expanded to eleven-acre, plat in Montecito, which was suitable for multiple gardens. They named their estate “Casa del Herrero,” or House of the Blacksmith. The Steedmans frequently traveled to Europe, especially to Spain, to study architecture and decorative arts, and their favorite architectural type was the simple Andalusian farmhouse. The main, north elevation of their white two-story stucco Montecito house, with Smith’s signature low-pitched, red-tiled roof, is not elaborately ornamented. Decorative wrought-iron grills cover the irregular fenestration, with the dark brown wooden front door inserted into a stone surround ornamented by Baroque motifs. Casa del Herrero was laid out in an H plan, with

the entrance hall joining the arms of the H. To the east is the living room, which has a hooded fireplace topped by a gilded coat of arms. From the living room, the floor plan continues out to a small walled patio space that can be considered an outdoor room, enclosed but not covered, with its patterned tile floor and octagonal central basin facing the east gardens. The patio ends in a decorative multi-colored Moorish tile wall fountain set before a rose garden. On the south façade, Smith designed a recessed loggia leading to an open patio behind a low wall that allowed for views to the long major southern garden axis. The scale of the house is somewhat deceiving as there are only three main rooms on the first floor: the dining room, entry hall, and living room, with a rather small octagonal library tucked behind the living room. The library was a 1930 addition by Smith’s associate and successor, Lutah Maria Riggs.77 In 1923, the Steedmans traveled to Spain, Portugal, and Majorca, accompanied by Arthur and Mildred Stapley Byne. The Bynes, authors of numerous books on Spanish decorative arts, acted as consultants for the furnishings of the house.78 The interiors are filled with elaborate finishing touches, mostly of Spanish ornamental tile and wrought iron that were removed from

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Entrance of the Frances Marion and Fred Carrie Howard and George Fox Steedman House, “Casa del Herrero,” Thomson residence, Beverly Hills, ca. 1923, south elevation, Montecito, California, George Washington Smith, Wallace Neff, architect. This item is reproduced architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson. by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, photCL 211 (144a).

Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque buildings and re-assembled in their new house.79 The plan of the estate was published in the November 1926 issue of Architectural Record and would have been well known by architects across the United States.80 Wallace Neff departed from Smith’s rectilinear designs and restrained detailing because Neff “liked the potential for geometric complexity in massing and in plan.”81 He tended “to experiment with circular turrets and semicircular plans and to mold the stucco forms of his houses expressionistically. . . . Far more playful than his fellow California eclectics, his work seemed to suit perfectly his theatrical clients.”82 Neff received his first major Beverly Hills commission from Frances Marion, a screenwriter, and her husband, the cowboy star Fred Thomson, for a Spanish Colonial house built ca. 1923. The Marion-Thomson House, on Angelo Drive, is considered the finest residence Neff

designed in Beverly Hills.83 The house had white stucco walls, red-tiled gabled roofs, and an L-shaped plan. An entrance patio of flagstone featured a multi-colored, tiled, octagonal fountain placed at its center. The Marion-Thomson House design was innovative because of such whimsical features as the elliptical arched openings of the entrance courtyard and front door, a pattern repeated on the second-floor balcony. Flanking the entrance were two engaged round columns, which were topped by modernistic finials. Above the dramatic voussoired entrance portal were canvas exterior draperies that hung from a shed roof. A second-story wooden door opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. Two stucco coats of arms rested on each side of the balcony, making the overall effect winsomely theatrical. Neff’s designs became so popular that, in 1926, Urmy Seares, the editor of California Southland, observed, “In so short a time his original work has been the inspiration of count-

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less copyists.” 84 Designs like Neff’s and those of his California counterparts would become popular in Texas in the 1920s, but in houses that were generally smaller in scale than those built for Neff’s clients. The Spanish Colonial would be used for both custom and speculative

house designs by the architects H. B. Thomson and Fooshee & Cheek in Highland Park West and by John F. Staub, Cram & Ferguson, and the staff architect for the River Oaks Corporation, Charles W. Oliver.

The San Antonio firm of Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres Influence also came from within Texas. The suburban architectural designs of the San Antonio architect Atlee B. Ayres, who had traveled and worked in Mexico, and his son and partner Robert M. Ayres were also published frequently.85 At the turn of the twentieth century, Atlee Ayres began to explore possibilities for employing elements from the eighteenth-century colonial missions and old Spanish houses. The domestic architecture he produced in the 1920s did not merely copy Mexican buildings. A passionate photographer and collector of photography, Ayres was fascinated with Mexican Colonial architecture. His interest culminated in the publication of a short article, “The Earliest Mission Buildings of San Antonio,” in American Architect in August 1924, and, subsequently, his book, Mexican Architecture: Domestic, Civic and Ecclesiastical, published in 1926. This architectural reference book consists mainly of

photographs of churches in and around Mexico City, with a few examples of urban domestic architecture. It was probably the lure of the romantic, exotic, and picturesque images of these buildings that inspired his work and also likely influenced his clients. In 1922, Atlee and his son established the firm of Atlee  B. and Robert M. Ayres. The first of the Spanish Colonial Revival suburban houses Atlee Ayres designed was for Marie and Thomas E. Hogg. Work on the Hogg House, located on Bushnell Avenue in Monte Vista, began in 1924, two years before Tom Hogg’s sister Ima and his brothers Will and Mike started the planning of Bayou Bend in Houston. The Hogg House in San Antonio set a pattern that would be repeated in other houses designed by the Ayres firm over the next nine years. Ayres’s design for the Hogg House drew national attention when it was published in the

Marie and Thomas E. Hogg House, Bushnell Avenue, Monte Vista, San Antonio, 1924, Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres, architects. Architectural Record 134, no. 8 (August 1928): 237.

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August 1928 issue of American Architect. Situated on a large rectangular lot that slopes away from the street to the south, the Hogg House presents a carefully composed asymmetrical block to the public. The main entrance is set within a projecting mass two stories in height and capped with a hipped roof clad in red barrel tiles. The entrance bay is flanked by a chimney stack to its left and a monumental cylindrical stair tower to its right. The stair tower is the most picturesque element of the composition, and it also serves as the hinge on which the plan and mass of the house pivot with the din-

ing room wing being skewed at an angle to the main body of the house. It was this feature that was to become the leitmotiv of Ayres’s Spanish Colonial Revival houses. The living room of the house was connected on its east side to a covered porch, with both the living and dining rooms having multiple exposures to the uncovered southern terraces, allowing southern breezes to flow into these rooms. The principal difference between this house and those built in Highland Park West is that the Hogg House is larger in scale and sited on a much larger lot.

Highland Park West: Spanish Colonial Revival Domestic Architecture Thomson & Swaine wrote in 1926 that “Highland Park West in its short history has become famous, not alone as one of the most beautiful residence sections in America, but as a source book of suitable and correct architectural types especially in the medium or so-called smaller house.”86 It is significant that the Spanish Colonial Revival house type was gaining greater popularity among architects and homeowners in Highland Park West during the period that the construction of housing began in earnest. For example, Thomson & Swaine designed a Spanish Colonial Revival house on Armstrong Parkway for Mabel and Harry Harlan, the president of a loan company called Harlan-ElzeyRandall, that was illustrated on the cover of the December 1924 Highland Park newsletter.87 The three renderings of the house in the newsletter were accompanied by text noting that the Spanish types “have been declared by leading architects to be the most adaptable as well as the most sensible for Texas.”88 On the Harlan House street elevation facing north, Thomson & Swaine blended simple ornamentation taken

from Spanish sources, such as the smooth stucco walls, the iron grilles covering most of the firstfloor windows, the Spanish Renaissance front door enframement with a railed balcony above it, and a red-tiled roof pierced by a very smallscale belfry. The architects devoted even greater attention to picturesque Spanish Colonial details in the rear elevation. The house was open to the rear yard by loggias, decks, balconies, and a walled garden laid out around an octagonal fountain. At the southeast corner of the house, the covered loggia was faced with a roundarched arcade set on Romanesque columns, with an entrance provided by a gated Moorish arch topped by a railed open deck. The house was entered through a wide hall, containing the main stair, through which the fountain was visible. To the left of the hall stood the long, rectangular living room, which opened onto a terrace to the east and a grass lawn to the south. On the other side of the hall were the dining room and a row of service rooms behind it. The Harlan House had three bedrooms with two sleeping porches attached to two of the bedrooms while

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Mabel and Harry Harlan House, Armstrong Parkway, Highland Park West, 1924, Thomson & Swaine, architects (author).

Mabel and Harry Harlan House, rear elevation. Thomson & Swaine Architects, “The Small House in the Spanish Style,” 47.

the other bedroom looked out over the deck. The Harlan House was featured in the December 1927 article, “The Small House in Spanish Style,” published in Southern Architect and Building News, further emphasizing the popularity of the style.89 H.  B. Thomson and his wife Geils Adoue hired the builder Walter Whitley to construct their own house in 1926 on Bordeaux Avenue for a cost of fifteen thousand dollars, resulting in an elegant two-story stucco house with a redpantiled roof.90 This house, one of Thomson’s best designs, was included in the same journal article in Southern Architect and Building News that featured the Harlan House. The Thomson House was described as being “Spanish in feeling though Italian details are introduced here and there effectively . . . and so well adapted to modern living conditions.”91 The house has been demolished, but it was illustrated in the journal article and is preserved in contemporary drawings at the Highland Park Town Hall. The elevation drawings submitted for the building permit show a shed roof over the multi-paneled wooden front door in the projecting entrance bay and tall exterior chimney

stacks, which were the most decorative features of the main façade. The façade of the house, as built, was a much more polished piece of design with an elegant classical doorframe, probably of Italian Renaissance derivation, taking the place of the shed roof over the front door shown on the drawing. It was flanked by elaborate wrought-iron grills placed in front of the firstfloor windows. One stack rose on the east end of the house and the other was placed on the north façade between the two living room windows. The house’s L-shaped, one-room-deep plan gave Thomson an opportunity to orient the two major formal rooms of the first floor, and all but one of the upstairs bedrooms, toward the south and southeast. To the right of the vestibule on the first floor, Thomson placed his home office/library across from the main stair in the hall. Beyond the hall was the large, rectangular living room that opened onto the L-shaped south terrace. The rear wing of the house contained a dining room with the service rooms placed behind it, an arrangement Thomson employed at the Harlan House. Both the living room and dining rooms were given access to the rear terrace of the house through French doors. Although less dramatic

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Mabel and Harry Harlan House, floor plans. Thomson & Swaine Architects, “The Small House in the Spanish Style,” 48.

than the plan for the Harlan House, Thomson’s house completed the transition from town house to country house by virtue of its elongated rectilinear plan oriented toward the rear garden. In 1927, the architects Fooshee & Cheek

designed a Spanish-style speculative house on Beverly Drive for the Flippen-Prather Realty Company. Purchased by Dr. H.  Leslie Moore and his wife Lydia, the house was featured in the Highland Park newsletter.92 Facing east to-

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Geils Adoue and H. B. Thomson House, Bordeaux Avenue, Highland Park West, 1926, Thomson & Swaine, architects (demolished). Thomson & Swaine Architects, “The Small House in the Spanish Style,” 43.

Geils Adoue and H. B. Thomson House, floor plans. Thomson & Swaine Architects, “The Small House in the Spanish Style,” 45.

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Lydia and Dr. H. Leslie Moore House, Beverly Drive, Highland Park West, 1927, Fooshee & Cheek, architects (author).

ward the Dallas Country Club, the two-story white stucco house with a red-tiled, hipped roof has a slightly offset circular entrance silo topped by a shed roof, with three round-arched windows following the interior curve of the staircase. On the first floor of the tower is a smaller round-arched window and a round-arched front door placed on center, ornamented by a sandstone veneer surround. To the left of the tower is a wide, round-arched window, which opens onto the living room, and above it is a small, corbeled wood balcony containing double windows with shutters that open into the master bedroom, which faces south. The second-floor, round-arched windows have a wooden balcony supported by three console brackets with stone

bosses between them. The most distinctive feature of the design is its asymmetrical, H-shaped, one-room-deep plan, with the two sections of the house connected only on the second floor, where there are three bedrooms and a library placed above the porte cochère. On the first floor, in addition to the rectangular living room, there is a stair hall connected to a spiral stair located in the semicircular tower. Opposite the stair hall stands a dining room with service rooms north of it. Behind the stair hall and dining room, an entry passage leads to a rear porte cochère that connects the private entrance of the house to a three-car garage. Both the garage and the covered porte cochère are approached from the south, requiring drivers to back out and turn

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Lydia and Dr. H. Leslie Moore House, first-floor plan. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Doc Swalwell.

Lydia and Dr. H. Leslie Moore House, second-floor plan. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Doc Swalwell.

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to exit the property. Because the rear elevation of the house faces west, the major rooms were placed south and east and do not open to the rear yard. By creating a more irregular, picturesque character, Fooshee & Cheek’s approach

to the Spanish Colonial Revival style on their entrance facades differed from that of Thomson & Swaine. This approach would be further developed in their design of the Highland Park Shopping Village.

Duplexes in Highland Park West Designed in 1930 by Fooshee & Cheek, the Spanish Colonial Revival two-story stucco duplex with a red-pantiled roof on Westway Avenue was built on a block filled by expensive duplexes, mostly in the Tudor style, that were intended to look like single-family houses. Fooshee & Cheek used their skill in picturesquely massing irregular details to design a more modest project for the Spanish-style duplex. Flanked by a round-arched window on the left and the first floor entrance to its right, a parabolic arch features leaded, multi-colored glass, possibly a nod to designs by Wallace Neff. Above the front door on the right side of the house is a quatrefoilshaped ornamental window. The dominant fea-

ture of the façade is the wooden balcony above the arch. A shed roof tops the balcony, which is supported by console brackets. The Dallas contractor Dee N. Bunn was issued a building permit and hired Fred F. and Charles E. Peterman Architects & Construction Engineers to build the duplex for fifteen thousand dollars.93 It was sold to Goldie and Charles Brewington of the Robertson-Brewington Lumber Company, who resided in the first floor unit.94 Brewington rented the upper unit to Marie and Thomas A. Manning, an insurance agent for the T. A. Manning & Sons Insurance Company. The units have now been combined into a single-family residence.

Spanish Colonial Revival duplex, Westway Avenue, Highland Park West, 1930, Fooshee & Cheek, architects (author).

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The Park Cities: University Park The sister city of Highland Park, University Park was established in 1915 by the leadership of Southern Methodist University on grounds donated to the school west of the campus and north of Highland Park.95 University Park initially consisted of only one street, University Boulevard, which stretched from the campus to Preston Road. In 1920, the university acquired several more parcels of land, mostly in the form of gifts from the Caruth family, and the neighborhood added two streets, Hayen (now Haynie) and Roberts (now McFarlin) Avenues.96 Since University Park was not being marketed by professional developers, like those for Highland Park, it did not financially undercut the sale of lots in Highland Park. Lots in University Park ranged from 60 to 70 feet in width by 150 to 185 feet in depth. Most of the houses initially erected in University Park were smaller than those built in Highland Park. From its beginning, Southern Methodist University had difficulties collecting pledges from companies and individuals for the university. In order to raise ten thousand dollars in 1921, the university platted fifty lots in a section two blocks north of the campus to develop University Park Estates, which was intended for upper- to middle-class professionals.97 As stated in deeds of sale, University Park Estates houses were required to be at least two stories high and built of brick veneer or hollow tile.98 On April 17, 1924, the citizens of University Park decided to incorporate their community with a city government composed of a mayor and five aldermen. In 1926, they voted to change the city government to a home rule city with a city manager, mayor, and two councilmen.99 University Park formed its own police and fire departments and agreed to share a

school system with Highland Park, which led to their nickname, “The Park Cities.” In 1922, the first Highland Park High School was built on Normandy Avenue in the Jacobean style and was shared by both communities. In 1928, the University Park Grade School, designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style by Lang & Witchell, was built on Amherst Avenue for the children of University Park.100 Highland Park High School was moved to Emerson Street in 1937, and the original structure on Normandy Avenue became McCul­loch Intermediate Highland Park Middle School. By 1925, University Park’s boundaries were moved north to Northwest Highway and expanded east to the Cotton Belt Railroad. The boundaries have remained unchanged since then, enclosing 3.7 square miles.101 The principal difference between Highland Park and University Park is that the former has fewer permissible uses, allowing only a small area for duplexes, two elementary schools, one church, and one shopping complex. Modeled on that of Highland Park, the zoning ordinance enacted by the city of University Park on December 17, 1929, permitted the erection of numerous multi-unit housing complexes, eleven churches, schools, and many commercial buildings.102 The zoning ordinance divided the city into three districts: A for single-family dwellings, B for apartments, and C for retail businesses. Presently, the maximum height for houses is thirty-five feet, the same as in Highland Park. The area set aside for districts B and C is larger than that for Highland Park, encompassing the area between Mockingbird and Lovers Lanes with the same east-west boundaries for the rest of University Park. In 1927, C.  W. Snider of

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Elbert Williams House, McFarlin Boulevard, University Park, 1931, David R. Williams, architect (author).

Wichita Falls, Texas, with his partner, J.  Fred Smith, mayor of University Park, purchased a 30-acre tract of land for $82,500 to build Snider Plaza, a shopping center.103 By the onset of the Depression, only two buildings had been erected, both of which have been demolished. Snider Plaza was not fully developed until after World War II. University Park had more variety in terms of architectural styles, resulting in some of the most innovative houses designed in the Dallas area. Beginning in the late 1920s, the Dallas architect David  R. Williams designed houses that were rooted in Texas vernacular architecture.104 In 1931, he designed a two-and-a-halfstory, light-colored, painted brick house with a

standing seam sheet copper roof that faces north on McFarlin Boulevard. Sited on a low bluff overlooking Williams Park, with Turtle Creek running behind it, the house, which has become the most famous in University Park, was built for Mayor Elbert Williams (no relation to the architect), who was also a partner in an oil operation known as Glenn & Williams, and his wife Lola.105 The house attracted national attention when photographs of it were published in the January 1935 issue of American Home in an article titled “A Rambling Texas Home” and again in the June 1937 issue of Better Homes and Gardens in an article written by Wayne Gard, “The Ranch-House Goes to Town.”106 In the WPA Dallas Guide and History, pub-

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lished in 1942, the Williams House was described as a “fine example of indigenous Texas architecture and material,” noting that “here several types, mostly found in Central and Southern Texas, have been blended and adapted to the modern mode of living, environment, and the climate.”107 Williams’s use of Texas iconography appears in the metal trellis to the left of the front door with a row of punched stars recalling the single star of the state’s flag, a motif carried throughout the interior of the house. The cantilevered second-story porch of the main block was borrowed from the Joseph Carle House and Store in Castroville, Texas, of about 1850, which Williams knew firsthand from his trips to the town to sketch and photograph historic buildings, often accompanied by the young architect O’Neil Ford.108 Of course, the Williams House is far larger than its prototype, and the architect maintained the emphasis on the Carle House model by setting the two-story section to its east back from the main block and making it lower in height, almost as if were an addition to the original structure. The L-shaped plan of the house provided for the placement of the living room with the master bedroom di-

rectly above it, both facing east and south onto porches, decks, and terraces. On axis with the living room, the dining room faces west with service rooms placed behind it. Designing his last house, Williams left private practice and joined public service in 1933. Another Dallas architect, Charles Stevens Dilbeck, also admired vernacular structures.109 Dilbeck specialized in reproducing eclectic mixtures derived from Texas, Irish, and European vernacular forms. However, in 1936 he designed a speculative house reflecting Norman French farmhouse sources, including an asymmetrically placed tower.110 Dilbeck sold the house on Shenandoah Street to the oil operator J. E. Parker and his wife Ruth.111 Dressed in rubble limestone with a cedar shingle roof, the house, with its differing textures and surfaces, displays the playfulness that was the signature of Dilbeck’s whimsical designs. The main elevation of the house faces west onto Preston Road, with a low, stone-walled terrace providing some privacy, although the interior plan compensates for this arrangement. On the first floor, a long, narrow entry connects to a spiral staircase placed in the turret, with the library to the

Ruth and J. E. Parker House, Shenandoah Street, University Park, 1936, Charles Stevens Dilbeck, architect (author).

Ruth and J. E. Parker House, first-floor plan. Courtesy of Douglas Newby, Architecturally Significant Homes.

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right of the entry. Behind the entry are the main rooms on the first floor: a formal living room, a dining room, and an informal living room in the rear that was probably a screened porch that has now been glazed in. The kitchen, along with the

service rooms, is located between the reception and the garage. Beyond the garage is a study or an additional bedroom that was the original servants’ quarters.

The Park Cities: Volk Estates In 1922, the Dallas retail merchant Leonard W. Volk and his son Harold purchased a 37-acre tract in University Park Estates, originally 112 acres, where they platted a suburban community called Brookside (now Volk Estates).112 Bound on the east by Turtle Creek Boulevard, on the west by Brookside Road (now Vassar), and on the north by Lovers Lane, it overlooks the grounds of the Dallas Country Club on the south, with an additional north-south road, Eastwick (now Baltimore). The community was expanded in 1923 to include an additional 41.3 acres across Turtle Creek Boulevard along Turtle Creek. In 1890, the elder Volk, with his brother George, both natives of Baltimore, opened a shoe store in Dallas.113 Volk Brothers became an extremely successful business and was expanded to an apparel store with two branches: one opened in the Highland Park Shopping Village in 1935, the other in Lakewood in 1949. Harold Volk, who joined his father and uncle in the shoe business, was the business administrator for Volk Estates.114 On May 2, 1926, after two years of improvements, Volk Estates, consisting of twenty-eight estate lots intended for expensive houses, opened for sale. The Dallas Morning News announced: “In the development, the natural beauty has been freshened by the transplanting of more than 200 large forest trees, hedges, flowers and grass and by the construction of paved roadways with graceful curves and two large triangular parks, which

were beautified under the direction of L.  M. Jenney,” the landscape architect who worked in Highland Park and Highland Park West. Following the developers’ directives, Jenney created a lake, terraced and landscaped with shrubs, trees, and flowers along the full length of the eastern boundary of Turtle Creek. This linear park continued onto a twenty-two-foot planting space on Lovers Lane, most of which has now been converted into a paved median. The civil engineers Koch & Fowler improved Volk Estates by installing all public utilities, except light and telephone lines, in ten-foot easements behind the back lines of the lots. Ornamental light standards on Turtle Creek Boulevard and the other parkways were installed with their wires placed underground. To maintain the development’s park-like atmosphere, the Volks formed a property owners association “to perpetuate the beauty of the district.” Their deed restrictions did not permit the building of sidewalks parallel to the roadways, which had rights-of-way of sixty and seventy feet in width. Architectural styles used in Volk Estates were eclectic, as in Highland Park West, though all houses were intended to be built on a larger scale. The earliest house to be erected in the development was for Reanna Yankee and Leonard W. Volk on Turtle Creek Boulevard, with an eighty-five-foot setback. On each side of his property, Volk reserved lots, which together consisted of six acres that backed onto the creek,

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Reanna and Leonard W. Volk House, Turtle Creek Boulevard, Volk Estates, Dallas, 1926, Thomson & Swaine, architects (author).

Reanna and Leonard W. Volk House, floor plans. “Home of Leonard Volk, Esq., Dallas, Texas,” Southern Architect and Building News 54, no. 2 (February 1928): 48.

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Lucy Ball and Alvin M. Owsley House, south elevation, Turtle Creek Parkway, Volk Estates, Dallas, 1929, John Scudder Adkins, architect. Courtesy of City of University Park, City Hall Archives, Brown Book permit record.

for his son Harold and his daughter Mrs. C. M. Lombardi, although his daughter never built a house in the community.115 Designed by Thomson & Swaine in 1926, the two-and-a-half-story stucco and metal-lath residence is in the Tudor style, having a bold central projecting gable with cypress oak faux half-timbering ornamentation above the grand entrance. The base of the house, the chimney stack, and its window surrounds are composed of Oklahoma fieldstone, and the roof is of Vermont slate. The Volk House, Thomson’s largest and most fully developed Dallas house, was illustrated in 1928 in Southern Architect and Building News, although the library was not shown in the published plan. The house was a simple, yet spatially elegant, design, especially the first floor, which was dominated by the three

one-room-deep grand spaces of the dining room, stair hall, and living room placed on a lateral axis. As reported in the Dallas Morning News, “the dining-room is paneled and the library and living room are finished in oak,” with the living room fireplace of Cretan stone and marble “of correct English design.” The long sides of the house face east and west with the end of the living room facing south. The architects carefully placed terraces at the end of the living room, stair hall, and breakfast room to provide spaces to link with the outdoors. The most interesting element of the plan, however, was not the main block but the service wing. Following the curve of the street, Thomson pulled the two-story garage with servants’ quarters above the main block and linked it to the one-story kitchen. In-

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serted underneath the large front gable of the house was the main staircase, which was the same size as the upstairs sitting room located above it. To the south of the sitting room was the owner’s suite with the dressing room and bathroom placed between the bedroom and the sitting room. To the north of the sitting room was a single bedroom that was the guest room, thus creating a two-bedroom plan according to the clients’ wishes, since their children were grown and married. At the northern end of the second floor, on a slightly lower level, a maid’s room and service hall were connected to the servants’ stair, which led down to the kitchen. In 1929, the Cincinnati architect John Scudder Adkins designed a grand two-and-a-halfstory residence on Turtle Creek Boulevard for Lucy Ball and her husband Alvin M. Owsley, an attorney.116 Mrs. Owsley, a native of Indiana, had met the architect through her cousin in Muncie, whose house had been designed by Adkins. According to the University Park, City Hall Archives, Brown Book permit record, the

contract price for the house was eighty thousand dollars. Facing north, the main elevation of the random ashlar Indiana limestone house was modeled on seventeenth-century French architecture. The hipped roof is of Vermont tile; all of the corners of the house are quoined. A three-car detached garage with apartments above it matched the exterior design and materials of the house. The south elevation faces the rear gardens, in the manner of a country house. A one-story pavilion topped by a balustrade pro­ jects from the main body of the house, flanked to the west by a semi-octagonal, one-story bay and to the east of the pavilion is an enclosed arcaded porch. Photographs of the living room, dining room, and library reveal that the interiors were also of French inspiration. On the second floor were six bedrooms and an additional living room. During the Depression, lot sales in Volk Estates came to a halt, leaving the development virtually vacant. It would take several decades before Volk Estates would be fully developed.

East Dallas: Lakewood In East Dallas there was little building activity north of Munger Place until the mid-1920s, when the New East Dallas White Rock District was formed to open a number of subdivisions around White Rock Lake, today collectively known as Lakewood. Developers realized the appeal of Lakewood for a middle- to upper-income clientele wanting to live near White Rock Lake Park and the Lakewood Country Club and Golf Course.117 Thus residential building boomed in that section of the city. On May 2, 1926, the Dallas Morning News—in a feature article, “East Dallas Section Has Fast Growth: White Rock Lake Center of Big Development Program, Mil-

lions Invested”—reported that “Lakewood Boulevard and other driveways [were] landscaped on a scale as pretentious as some of the drives in Highland Park.” In fact, almost $2 million was spent on the pavement of roads, sidewalks with curbs and gutters, and other improvements, including connecting the sewer system with the city of Dallas and providing gas, water, and electric lighting. The newspaper article also commented on the expenditure of nearly $4 million in new houses, and “every subdivision is restricted to expensive homes of brick, tile, stucco or concrete. . . . The neighborhood is one of decidedly pretentious homes, with a leaning to-

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ward country estates.” Domestic architecture in Lakewood differed from that of Highland Park in that houses tended to be, for the most part, smaller in scale and predominately in the Tudor style, most of them constructed in the 1920s and 1930s by the builders and developers, the Dines & Kraft Building Company.118 On one of the oversized lots on Westlake Avenue in Lakewood, Sir Alfred C. Bossom, the architect who so strongly praised the Spanish style for Texas houses, designed a large manorial house for Camille and Arthur Kramer, president of A. Harris & Company, a downtown department store that opened in 1913 and catered to a middle- to upper-class clientele.119 Erected in 1927, the asymmetrical, two-and-a-half-story, red brick house is entered through a one-story, wooden gable-covered porch, which is echoed by the two-and-a-half-story brick gable behind it. Casement windows set in white stone surrounds accent the walls as well as the half-­timbering on the second floor that flanks the main body of the house. The tall slate roof has two tall fluted chimney stacks, which rise from each end of the house adding a vertical touch to the otherwise solid horizontal massing of the house. An extremely unique feature of this house is that it was built to sustain earthquakes with a foundation resting on stainless steel ball bearings.

Clifford Dorris Hutsell, a Dallas builder and designer of houses, moved his family to Lakewood in 1926, where he eventually built approximately fifty houses in a distinctive, eclectic Spanish Colonial Revival manner.120 Hutsell’s approach to this style seems to have received new inspiration from a month-long visit in 1929 to Los Angeles, where he studied and photographed new Spanish Colonial Revival houses. Upon his return to Dallas, he began to design his second family residence based on the California house that had made the deepest impression on him, the ca. 1922 Spanish Colonial Revival estate of the cowboy movie star Tom Mix at 1018 Summit Drive in Beverly Hills.121 Hutsell photographed the Mix House, and the image remains in the collection of his works owned by his daughter, Madeline Hutsell Boedeker.122 The architect for the Mix House appropriated details associated with the Pasadena architect Wallace Neff, who was known for his playful, theatrical designs, which were frequently published.123 Neff’s signature design features—the parabolic arch, the silo tower, and corbelled balcony running across the façade—were copied by numerous imitators. The construction of Hutsell’s second Lakewood house marks the beginning of his most creative and idiosyncratic period. Mrs. Boed­eker

Camilia and Arthur Kramer House, Westlake Avenue, Lakewood, Dallas, 1927, Sir Alfred C. Bossom, architect (author).

Tom Mix House, Summit Drive, Beverly Hills, California, ca. 1922, unknown architect or builder (demolished). Courtesy of the Madeline Hutsell Boedeker Collection.

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Florence and Clifford Dorris Hutsell House, Lakewood Boulevard, Lakewood, Dallas, 1930, Clifford Dorris Hutsell, designer and builder (author).

Speculative house, living room, Lakewood Boulevard, Lakewood, Dallas, 1931, Clifford Dorris Hutsell, designer and builder. Courtesy of the Madeline Hutsell Boedeker Collection.

aptly described her father as “a dreamer and . . . an innovator whose limit was really the sky.”124 In 1930, Hutsell and his wife Florence built their picturesque house, a two-story cream brick design with a multi-colored tile roof, on Lakewood Boulevard.125 Hutsell borrowed four major design elements from the Mix house, the most striking being the fifteen-foot-tall parabolic arched opening fitted with a stained glass window that dominates the gable end wall fronting the street facing north. Replacing the cowboy on horseback in the window at the Mix House, Hutsell chose the romantic image of a Spanish galleon. A theatrical touch was the placement above the window of an iron curtain rod hung with decorative blue drapery, which was duplicated above the two centrally placed windows staggered to provide light for the main staircase. This was a direct copy of the two second-story windows of the Mix House, but on a bolder scale, and can also be found as ornamentation at Neff’s own house in Altadena, California, of 1923.126 Inside the entry courtyard, Hutsell took the round entry tower of the Mix House and placed it at the angle formed by the L-shaped plan of his house. The second-story cantilevered wooden balcony

was the fourth element Hutsell borrowed. Judging from the photograph of the Mix House, it appears that Hutsell enlarged the balcony, making it longer and heavier in scale with painted blue bands on the balcony columns. Unlike the Mix House, Hutsell’s house has an exterior stair with a wrought-iron rail that connects the balcony to the entry courtyard. All of the metal work was produced for Hutsell by Henry Potter, owner of the Potter Art Metal Studios of Dallas.127 Not found at the Mix house are the decorative round terra-cotta pipes, which served as attic vents, placed over the massive front arched window. A pair of decorative iron gates set beneath a double iron arch holding a lantern accesses the courtyard wall, roughly five feet in height and capped by the same multi-colored tiles found on the roof of the house. Hutsell personalized the courtyard of his house by placing an outdoor fireplace on the front corner beneath the round-headed chimney stack and installing an ornamental octagonal fountain at its center. Hutsell’s daughter described the interiors of the house that thrilled her as a child: “[H]e used plaster formed to resemble tree trunks instead of molding in the huge living room . . . at the top of the four walls. . . . They

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conceal indirect lighting .  .  .  . [Her father] had the plaster walls in this house and others he built in Lakewood and other parts of Dallas glazed in earth tones with a rough texture to create an outdoors feeling,” and throughout the house, doors were composed of a combination of mirrors and leaded and stained glass.128 In 1931, Hutsell built a speculative house on Lakewood Boulevard. The ornamental details in the living room of that house have been magnificently preserved. This is significant because few of his interior designs have remained intact. The living room is highlighted by a centrally placed fireplace on the northern wall with

a mantel and hearth made of glazed Batchelder tiles and plaques containing landscape scenes placed above the fireplace opening as well as to each side. The fireplace is flanked by roundarched openings fitted with elaborate wroughtiron gates that lead to the dining room. Above these openings are built-in lighting fixtures with intricately designed wrought-iron forms composed of vines and flowers. On each side of the round-arched openings are doors with mirrored panels etched in a Spanish Renaissance pattern. The earth-toned, textured walls, the cove ceiling, and the parquet floors complete the decoration of the room.

Highland Park Shopping Village At the Third Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, held in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1919, J. C. Nichols addressed the group on the topic of neighborhood shops and commercial properties.129 Hugh  E. Prather questioned whether this would be a profitable investment, and Edward  H. Bouton of Roland Park responded, “It is dependent on the size of the district and the distance of your subdivision from the heart of the city. . . . If you are close to town in the same kind of district you won’t get the business.”130 Bouton had built one of the first small suburban shopping complexes, designed by the Baltimore architects Wyatt & Nolting, to blend with the community. It contained a grocer, a confectioner, and a pharmacist, with a community room upstairs. Completed in 1896, the half-timbered Elizabethan-style structure is filled in with yellow brick and topped by Flemish gables. Rather than resembling anything commercial, it looks like a large country house that is set back from the road and is fronted by a planted landscape. Bouton al-

lowed the shopping block to be built because of the distance between Roland Park and shopping in downtown Baltimore. Its design “probably had a significant influence on the many others that could be found in enclaves of the well-to-do nationwide by 1930.”131 Market Square in Lake Forest, Illinois, a wealthy town outside of Chicago, is a shopping complex laid out in a U-shaped plan intended to ease the flow of automobile traffic.132 Opened in 1916, it was designed by the Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, a resident of Lake Forest. The town was founded in 1857 in connection with Presbyterian College (now Lake Forest College), but in the mid-1890s, after a golf course and a country club, the Onwentsin, were opened, Lake Forest became a haven for the wealthy, who built grand country houses.133 For Market Square, Shaw blended English, Flemish, Italian Renaissance, and Bavarian ornamental architectural details, with two towers at the ends of the U, which are the architectural focus of the complex. Besides serving as a shop-

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Elevation drawing of the Roland Park Community Shopping Center, Baltimore, Maryland, 1894. Roland Park Company Papers, MS 504, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.

ping complex, Market Square had office spaces, apartments, a clubhouse, and a gymnasium. As with the shopping complex at Roland Park, Market Square serves as community center for the residents of Lake Forest, although on a larger scale. Nichols did not disclose at the 1917 conference that he had been purchasing land since 1912 and was finalizing plans for his Country Club Plaza, the second planned, car-oriented community shopping center in the country. However, he did mention that he had success in renting out retail space in his small community shopping centers. Nichols stated that “the very minute we gave them channel to do their buying in our community they ran to our community.”134 Moreover, he informed his peers that shopping centers were not only a profitable investment because of the income received from commercial rentals, but they also stimulated residential sales in the Country Club District. As early as 1907, Nichols had built small commercial centers in the Country Club District for the convenience of his residents. In 1917, he built Brookside Shops, a cluster of business and commercial services at the corner of Sixty-third Street and Brookside Boulevard.135 Designed with the aid of the city planner John Nolen, the

Market Square, Lake Forest, Illinois, 1916, Howard Van Doren Shaw, architect. Western Architect 26 (October 1917), plate 22.

Brookside Shops are in the Tudor style and were patterned on the English villages that Nichols had seen during his first visit to England in the summer of 1901. Nichols found that if he leased a commercial space based on a percentage of the lessee’s sales, he made a huge profit, yielding as much as 60 percent, a system he termed the “percentage-lease” concept.136 In 1920, Nichols assembled a team of professionals for the planning and design of the Country Club Plaza, a Spanish-style planned regional shopping center. These included Nichols’s consulting architect Edward Buehler Delk, who designed the 1922 plan of the Country Club Plaza, with George Kessler as his planning advisor and Hare & Hare as landscape architects.137 Deciding on a Spanish Renaissance and Baroque theme, Nichols sent Delk to Spain, Mexico, and South America to research architectural designs that inspired “the feeling of an old market place of picturesque Spain [in] Kansas City.”138 Designed in 1923 by Delk, the seventy-foot Tower Building with its Baroque ornamentation is one of the most distinctive buildings in the Plaza. During the 1928 construction of the Plaza Theater, Delk left and the Kansas City architect Edward W. Tanner completed the design. Delk and Tanner adopted the use of multiple foun-

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tains, brightly colored tile work, red-tiled roof­ lines, and wrought-iron ornamental from Spain for their commercial buildings in the Plaza. The use of Spanish architectural motifs represented Nichols’s scheme to elevate Kansas City to the status of a cosmopolitan center in order to attract patrons from beyond the city. He wanted to broaden the concept of a community shopping center into that of a regional one, the first one in the United States. He created a formula that he hoped would lure middle- to upper-­class customers, a financial investment that appealed to Flippen and Prather.139 Nichols’s immediate success stemmed from his firm management of the entire enterprise; his planning, which catered almost entirely to the automobile-oriented shopper by providing wide streets to ease traffic; and his recruitment and careful selection of tenants, who could offer such a wide variety of merchandise “that people [would] develop the habit of shopping there.”140 Nichols and his designers developed a unique street plan with short blocks radiating from a central core to create what he termed “one-­hundred percent locations” for the shops.141 The plan called for ultimately housing 250 stores. Some of the most innovative features adopted in the plan were the construction of a two-story parking garage for 144 automobiles; the employment of diagonal parking in “parking stations” or parking lots; and the construction of thematically consistent gas stations.142 The Plaza became “a major influence on retail design and marketing practices, commanding nationwide attention at least until the 1960s.”143 Influenced by Nichols’s Country Club Plaza, brothers O. P and M. J. Van Sweringen, the developers in 1905 of Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland, began their large-scale, red brick American Colonial–style Shaker Square shopping center in 1922 on a six-acre tract of land

along Shaker Boulevard.144 Yet little was accomplished until May 1928, when their architects, Phillip L. Small and Charles B. Rowley of Cleveland, finalized a site plan similar in concept to the Country Club Plaza. Like Nichols, the Van Sweringens planned to build multi-family units and apartment buildings to create a buffer zone between the single-family houses and the shopping center. Shaker Square, however, differed from Nichols’s project in design. Also, its frontage was on a public square with the rapid transit line running through the middle, leaving few areas for car-parking spaces. Instead of providing an automobile-friendly plan, as Nichols had championed at the Country Club Plaza, the Van Sweringens built garages to accommodate as many as seven hundred and fifty automobiles for non-residents, who could also ride mass transit to the shops. However, Shaker Square and the Country Club Plaza are significant as the largest, most ambitious regional shopping center projects built in the United States in the 1920s. In 1924, Flippen and Prather, in consultation with Hare & Hare, set aside a ten-acre section of land, labeled initially as “reservation,” in the Second Installment of Highland Park West. This land, at the northern boundary at the corner of Preston Road and Mockingbird Lane, was to be developed as a mixed-use commercial space.145 According to Hugh Prather Jr., his father first had lengthy consultations with Nichols and with Hugh Potter of River Oaks and then announced in 1926 his decision to build a shopping center, along the lines of Nichols’s exemplary model.146 Impressed by the Spanish designs for the Country Club Plaza, Flippen and Prather were aware of the use of this style for commercial buildings in California. They stated in their promotional booklet, Highland Park Shopping Village, that they chose this style “because Spanish designs are more adaptable

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Plan of Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri, 1922, Edward Buehler Delk, architect. State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City.

Tower Building, Country Club Plaza, 1923, Edward Buehler Delk, architect (author’s collection).

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Drawing proposal of the block of State Street Arcade between Canon Perdido and Carillo Streets, Santa Barbara, California, 1924, George Washington Smith, architect. Architecture & Design Collection, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara.

to the Texas climate and the needs of modern business. With the background and tradition of Spanish conquest and of the culture of Texas [particularly the Texas missions], we felt Dallas and Highland Park were just as appropriate for this type of development as in any of the California cities.” 147 In 1928, Flippen and Prather hired Fooshee & Cheek as architects for the project, and the design process for the shopping center began in earnest. That summer, Prather and Cheek traveled to California for two months to study new Spanish Colonial Revival commercial designs suitable for their regional shopping complex. Little is known about their California itinerary, but at that time several commercial projects were under construction or had been designed for both civic and suburban developers in the

Spanish style, and these could have served as inspirations for them. In Beverly Hills, there was the Spanish Renaissance block of buildings, designed by W.  Asa Hudson, which had been awarded first place by the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects “as the best designed building erected in Los Angeles during the past year,” and the Spanish Colonial Revival Arcade Building, which was opened on May 1, 1926.148 The Beverly Hills business triangle had been in existence since 1907, and numerous styles had been used in the district. In Santa Barbara, the Community Arts Association, under the leadership of Bernard Hoffman and Pearl Chase, began an aggressive civic improvement campaign in 1921 to remodel or replace existing buildings, both public and pri-

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Casa Primera (formerly the Gardner Building), Malaga Cove Plaza, Palos Verdes Estates, Palos Verdes, California, 1925, William F. Webber, Walter I. Spaudling, Sumner Maurice Staunton, architects. Photograph courtesy of the Palos Verdes Library District, Local History Collection.

Casa del Portal (formerly the Alpha Syndicate Building), Malaga Cove Plaza, Palos Verdes Estates, California, 1929, William F. Webber, Walter I. Spaulding, Sumner Maurice Staunton, architects. Photograph courtesy of the Palos Verdes Library District, Local History Collection.

vate, to create a Spanish Mediterranean Village theme for the city.149 The Community Arts Association and its Plans and Planting Committee, in association with the Architectural Advisory Committee, hired the planner of Palos Verdes Estates, Charles H. Cheney, to form a planning commission. In 1924, proposals for city blocks were submitted by such local and regional architects as George Washington Smith, who designed the State Street Arcade. Arcaded passages through buildings were a desirable feature not only in terms of design, but also as a means to protect pedestrians from the summer sun and winter rain. Even though these proposals were never realized, they set the tone for future Spanish-Mediterranean commercial building fronts on Santa Barbara’s main thoroughfare, State Street. On June 29, 1925, an earthquake struck Santa Barbara, destroying nearly twothirds of the business fronts of downtown commercial buildings. The City Council instituted an Architectural Board of Review, which processed more than two thousand projects in 1926 to rebuild the city’s downtown core in the

Spanish-Mediterranean style. In 1929, Frank J. Taylor, the former director of the Washington Bureau of the United Press, complimented the city’s commercial buildings: “Santa Barbara today is a city refreshingly different from the typical American small city. . . . Taking as their motif the legacy of the old Spanish adobes, they have evolved a style of architecture as quaint as that of an old city in Spain, yet striking in its simplicity.”150 Four areas for retail shopping centers were reserved in Palos Verdes Estates, California, but by 1924 only three renderings of the principal plaza and business centers—Malaga Cove, Valmonte, and Lunada Bay—were completed.151 These were exhibited in 1925 in New York and Los Angeles.152 Only two small Spanish Renaissance buildings of the Malaga Cove Plaza were built: Casa Primera (formerly the Gardner Building), an arcaded structure designed in 1925 by the Los Angeles architects William F. Webber, Walter I. Spaulding, and Sumner Maurice Staunton, and Casa del Portal (formerly the Alpha Syndicate Building), designed in 1929 by

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the same architects. The plain plaster walls of Casa Primera are topped by a corbeled cornice and a low-pitched, deep orange-brown, handmade Mexican terra-cotta roof. Its main function was to house shops on the first floor with the second floor serving as the offices for the Palos Verdes Project Engineering and Design Department, the Art Jury, and the Palos Verdes Homes Association.153 The round-arched open colonnades on the first floor provide shade for the shoppers. On the second floor, all of the windows with small wrought-iron balconies ventilate the upper floor. At the opposite, or east end, of the Plaza, the L-shaped Casa del Portal, with its large sallyport crossing over Via Chica, was intended to be connected to another building that was never realized. Like the Casa Primera building, Casa del Portal featured shops on the first floor, with offices above.154 On their visit, Prather and Cheek may have studied the renderings and the Spanish Renaissance Casa Primera Building for ideas for their Highland Park Shopping Village. Another Southern Californian community then under development was Rancho Santa Fe, which was inspired by a different branch of the Spanish Colonial Revival, the provincial architecture of Spain, mainly Andalusia, and Mexican sources. In 1924, the plan of the civic center for Rancho Santa Fe, as well as photographs of a filling station and garage with a Spanish corner garden, were published in the September 1924 issue of American City Magazine. Prather and Cheek most likely saw these illustrations because an article on the Highland Park Town Hall, written by the mayor, Henry R. Davis, as well as a rendering of the structure, had previously appeared in a 1923 issue of the journal.155 Therefore, even if they did not visit Rancho Santa Fe, they were probably aware of the designs, although the extremely austere character

of the commercial architecture of Rancho Santa Fe did not emerge in the final plans for the Highland Park Shopping Village. Westwood Village, situated between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, was under construction during Prather and Cheek’s visit to California. Developed by the Janss Investment Company, the largest Southern Californian residential developer, the Village project was announced a year after the company sold 384 acres to the University of California regents for the Los Angeles campus of the university in 1926.156 Janss retained the St. Louis planner Harland Bartholomew and his former associate, L. Deming Tilton, then living in Santa Barbara, to oversee the project. Most likely, Bartholomew was familiar with Nichols’s Country Club Plaza and had been hired for this reason, as he had seen or had knowledge of the use of towers to organize the shopping center.157 In plan, all of the building sites were of equal value and exposure in order to make all the locations desirable, a strategy never before employed in a row of commercial buildings. Construction of the Holmby Clock Tower building began in April 1928. Designed by the architect Gordon Kaufmann, the tall Renaissance-inspired tower was the first completed building in the complex. The Holmby Clock Tower, sited on Westwood Boulevard, which ran from Wilshire Boulevard to the gates of University of California, Los Angeles, is located in the center of the 900 and 1000 blocks at 921 Westwood. The other buildings were designed by the architects Allison & Allison, Paul R. Williams, Allen Hawes, and John and Donald B. Parkinson.158 The architectural guidelines were controlled by a board of architectural supervisors, perhaps based on the Art Jury at Palos Verdes Estates. Although influenced by the commercial architecture in Santa Barbara, the Janss Company

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design guidelines were less restrictive, permitting a range of Mediterranean sources. Their objective was to create a village atmosphere by constructing commercial buildings that seemed to have been built over time by various owners. This reflected their marketing strategy, which sought out smaller, independently owned businesses, as well as branches of large downtown stores. Westwood Village was advertised as “The Village within a City,” and the word “village” implies some association with the Highland Park Shopping Village, as does the placement of towers at strategic points to guide shoppers, a device that would be an important planning element at the Highland Park Shopping Village.159 It was the use of the casual, vernacular Spanish Colonial Revival style for commercial buildings and toney new communities in California, coupled with the use of the style at the Country Club Plaza—even though Nichols preferred the more ornate Baroque version—that probably

served as Prather and Cheek’s greatest sources of inspiration. Prather and Cheek’s research trip to Seville and Barcelona, Spain, in 1929 marked their most important encounter with the architecture of Spain. They primarily visited Barcelona to see the Barcelona World Exposition, including the popular attraction known as the “Spanish Village,” an exhibition of building types of all periods and styles from all parts of Spain.160 Prather’s son recalled that his father and Cheek took numerous photographs of the characteristic ornamental architectural details during their trip and brought back with them “wrought iron works, gargoyles, stone facings,” noting that “everything you see in that village, most of it had its origination in the study they made over there. They reproduced it here. They took the wrought iron work and old man Potter of Potter Ironworks would reproduce it.”161 And, he continued, “they had some good stone people here. They had some artists that even

Photograph of Holmby Clock Tower, Westwood, Los Angeles, California, ca. 1929, Gordon Kaufmann, architect. Photograph Collection, UCLA University Archives, Los Angeles, California.

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Plan of the Highland Park Shopping Village, 1931–1953, Fooshee & Cheek, architects.

painted some of the redwood they used—beautiful designs.”162 Among some of the items they brought back with them were rejas, or iron grills, usually placed over window openings. Prather and Cheek appeared to have been more influenced by the architectural design details they experienced in Spain than the spatial organization of the Spanish village, a cramped, medieval streetscape with no need to accommodate automobiles or modern shops. Before announcing the Highland Park Shopping Village, they made a final visit to see the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City and found Nichols in the process of trying to alleviate insufficient off-street parking for his plaza by adding parking lots.163 Prather then delayed the design of the shopping center until an off-

street parking solution could be resolved. He intended to accommodate as many as 650 to 700 cars for his shoppers, and he anticipated not only shoppers from Highland Park but also from the entire metropolitan area. The plan for the complex, Prather wrote in 1955, was “similar to early county seats in many parts of Texas, where the courthouse occupies the central plot. . . . The two main parking streets are divided by a parking sidewalk and one-way traffic expedites the parking of cars—no confusion for in or out parking.”164 The perimeter stores all faced the central plaza, like shops on a typical courthouse square face the courthouse, but in the plan for the Village, the “courthouse” was removed in favor of more shops.165 Behind the south side of the Village, Prather inserted a walled service

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yard to screen the service entrances from the residential section on Livingston Avenue. The parking solution was brilliant, allowing four rows of diagonally parked automobiles at sixty- and ninety-degree angles, two on each side of the plaza directly in front of the shops and two lines in the center of the privately owned streets, Avenue A on the south and Avenue B on the north, which are twice the width of those at the Plaza.166 The plan permitted four automobiles to be driven abreast in double lines in each direction on each side of the plaza, a system that reduced the number of traffic accidents. Unlike Nichols’s use of major public thoroughfares through the Country Club Plaza to provide his stores with “one-hundred percent locations,” the Flippen-Prather Realty Company had complete control of the planning of their ten-acre site with its privately owned streets.167 Prather later admitted that he wished that he had reserved even a larger space, thirty acres instead of ten, to provide more parking.168 On April 10, 1930, following the announcement about the construction of Highland Park Shopping Village, G. B. Dealey wrote a complimentary editorial in the Dallas Morning News: There will not be an ugly structure in the district. It is planned by an architect from end to end and from center to outer edge. Every part is in harmony with every other part, and individual tenants, instead of being lost in uniformity, profit by being in a design of distinction. . . . We are told that the projected group of shops is to be model in pattern and arrangements. But Dallas would have been disappointed had it proved less.169 An architectural rendering of the Village was prepared by the Dallas commercial artist Guy F. Cahoon as a presentation piece, which shows the proposed design for the entire proj-

ect, a collection of white stuccoed Spanish Colonial Revival buildings featuring red-tiled roofs and round-arched colonnades with decorative details either of cast concrete or carved stone.170 From the beginning, the design for the shopping village presented a uniform architectural treatment, regardless of the size or intended use of the buildings. The rendering’s elongated perspective gives the impression that the shopping village would be twice the size in depth and with more areas for parking than what was actually built. An architectural model of the proposed complex was also constructed and put on display in the front window of the FlippenPrather Stores Company rental leasing office at the construction site in Unit F.171 The rendering and the model indicate several changes in the design of the complex. Unit F has a one-story building with a tower in its center placed before a two-story building with the tallest tower that serves as the focal point for the entire Village in the rendering, which was replaced in the model by a very large single-story building as its center block. Unit C is not legible in the rendering or in the model, whereas that unit became the largest building in the complex, three stories in height. Neither the rendering nor the model exhibited what was eventually executed in Unit C, and the arcaded passageways were eliminated on the buildings as built. In the Dallas Morning News on October 12, 1930, the company announced that the complex was projected to cost $1.5 million and would consist of two-story buildings with shops on the first floor and offices on the second, as well as two filling stations and a movie theater. The Highland Park Shopping Village, as originally announced, was planned to be a largescale complex of seven units, A through G, and would accommodate one hundred and eighty thousand square feet of rentable space.172 Later

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Architectural rendering of the Highland Park Shopping Village, ca. 1930, Guy F. Cahoon, commercial artist. Courtesy of the Prather Family.

alterations to some of the buildings resulted in a less cohesive architectural design than that originally planned by Fooshee & Cheek, but, remarkably, the plan remained intact when they completed the project in 1953. By June 1932, only two filling stations and two store blocks—A and B, on the south side of the Village—had been completed, with the partial execution of Unit F behind the South Filling Station. At the main entrance, the 1930 South Filling Station, facing Preston Road in Unit G, was one of two originally planned stations to be built side by side at the Village. The other, the Texas (Texaco) Company Station (formerly the Highland Park Service Station), built the following year, was almost identical except that it faced the opposite direction.173 The South Filling Station’s façade had two large arched openings for the automobile service areas, ornamented by wrought-iron light fixtures and a large round opening fitted with wrought-iron bars. The sta-

tion was covered by intersecting red clay–tiled gable roofs, the highest of which marked the south elevation that contained the more elaborately ornamented office section of the building. There were two identical heavy, wooden batten door entrances on the east and west with four decorative wrought-iron grills between them, and above the doors were wrought-iron cross ornaments covering bull’s-eye windows. On the second story, a balcony with turned, wooden posts and railings was flanked by wood “look outs,” actually rafter ends, of redwood. In 1931, Group B Stores at the south end of the complex between Unit A and Douglas Avenue was the first commercial block to be completed.174 Composed of a series of round and square openings framing shop-front windows and doors, the façade elevation of Group B Stores established the tone for the entire complex in terms of the use of materials, massing, and decoration. Fooshee & Cheek visu-

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Highland Park Shopping Village, South Filling Station, elevation, 1931 (demolished). Fooshee & Cheek collection, the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

ally broke up the long rectangular unit by using different roof parapet heights and setbacks to simulate the appearance of a row of multi-level buildings built side by side over a long period of time. At the center of the block, above the entrance for one of the first tenants, the Hunt Grocery Company, Fooshee & Cheek placed a stone arch surround designed in the richly decorative sixteenth-century Spanish Renaissance Plateresque style, which could have been modeled after Spanish or later Mexican revival sources, such as the eighteenth-­century Mission Purísima Concepción in San Antonio, adapted for modern use. The main features stemming from the Spanish Renaissance Plateresque style are the ornate curvilinear surfaces that are

only loosely related to the structure. Additionally, this style of architecture had been photographed and published in Atlee B. Ayres’s book, Mexican Architecture: Domestic, Civic, and Ecclesiastical, which Fooshee & Cheek may have studied. As at the South Filling Station, ornamental wrought-iron light fixtures and railings were installed at intervals along the length of the main façade of the Group B Stores. To attract customers to the rear of the complex, a two-story, staggered, octagonal tower stands at the northwest corner, the point where the long east-west façade turns at an angle toward Douglas Avenue. The Dallas Morning News reported, “Numerous visitors have commented on the fact that the local development is similar

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Highland Park Shopping Village, Group B Stores, 1931. Fooshee & Cheek collection, the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

in attractiveness to the famous Wilshire Boulevard development (Westwood Village) in Los Angeles.” 175 Adjoining Group B Stores to the east in 1932, Group A Stores has a square tower with a pyramidal roof marking the entrance from Preston Road to the Village, a much more highly ornamented tower than had appeared in the initial rendering. The uppermost section of the tower is embellished with profuse florid-patterned, cast-stone Churrigueresque decoration borrowed from the early phase of the eighteenthcentury Spanish Baroque. A possible model for the tower was the 1915 Churrigueresque California Building, designed by Bertram G. Goodhue, at the Panama-California Exposition

in San Diego, which Prather and Cheek could have seen during their California trip. However, in the early 1920s, there were numerous California buildings, both commercial and domestic, reflecting this mode of design. Deviating from the original drawings, the two-story-long block was not built with arcaded passages. Instead, Fooshee & Cheek replaced them with a series of round and square openings like those on Group B Stores and reduced most of the building to one story. Fronting onto Avenue A, the long rectangular block is less fragmented by decorative details than Group B Stores, with the exception of the tower at the east end and the shop front of Skillern’s Drugs (later Skillern & Sons, Inc.) drugstore at the west end. Resembling the south

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Highland Park Shopping Village, Group A Stores, 1932. Fooshee & Cheek collection, the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

Photograph of Group A Stores, Fooshee & Cheek, architects. Photograph courtesy of HP Village Management, LLC.

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Village Theatre, Highland Park Shopping Village, 1935, Fooshee & Cheek, architects. Photograph courtesy of HP Village Management, LLC.

Highland Park Shopping Village, architectural rendering, Unit C, ca. 1939. Fooshee & Cheek collection, the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

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Highland Park Shopping Village, Unit E, Volk Brothers apparel store, 1939. Fooshee & Cheek collection, the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

elevation of the South Filling Station, the westend shop has a second-story redwood balcony with turned carvings and railings. The complex’s identifying building, the Village Theatre, was finished in 1935 at a cost of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars as part of phase I of Unit C at the western edge of the site along Douglas Avenue.176 The theater has the tallest tower, three stories high, and is ornamented with cast-stone elements of Churrigueresque origin that are repeated on the upper portion of its entrance bay. Originally the interiors (now remodeled) of the theater, which seated

fourteen hundred people, were streamlined and modernistic in their simplicity. The lobby featured two murals by the Dallas artist James Buchman Winn Jr., presenting a “pictorial history of Texas from the time the first men arrived in the State.”177 Between 1939 and 1940, three detached buildings were added south and north of the theater, breaking the site and massing pattern with the addition of balconies, angled siting, and a courtyard. At the southern end of Unit C, a U-shaped building with a courtyard in its center is one of the most picturesque buildings in the complex. Covered verandas with lat-

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ticework railing, all facing south, top rows of covered, round-arched arcades on the first floor. This design opens up the interiors to the outdoors, providing ventilation for the shops and offices above them. In 1939, the northeast section of Unit E was completed and leased to the Highland Park State Bank, which faced Preston Road, and a branch of the Volk Brothers apparel store, facing Avenue B. The remainder of this complex was not finished until 1953. Volk Brothers had previously leased a shop in Unit F for a children’s shoe store in 1935 as a branch of their downtown department store. A working drawing shows that the design for Volk Brothers con-

sisted of a three-bay, one-story structure with a low-hipped roof central tower, which resembles the tower over Skillern & Sons drugstore directly across the village. The main façade was divided by one-story piers with the central bay serving as the entrance, flanked on either side by wide shop windows. On the tower and the cornice of the store were similar patterned caststone Churrigueresque ornamentations like those of the Group A Stores and the Village Theater, creating an overall uniform appearance between the two buildings, although the Volk Brothers shop was built on a smaller scale. The four buildings of Unit F, when completed in 1940, were primarily one-story units with

A general view of the Highland Park Shopping Village, looking northwest, including Unit F Stores, 1940, Fooshee & Cheek, architects. Photograph courtesy of HP Village Management, LLC.

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Aerial view of Highland Park Shopping Village, looking northeast, ca. 1948. Photograph courtesy of HP Village Management, LLC.

glazed round-arched shop fronts. The gabled rooflines of these buildings ran from east to west. At the point where the pedestrian alleyway cut through the block of the four units, Unit F rises to two stories, with the roofline running south to north. The execution of the two-story, rectangular Unit D was under way in 1941. This was ornamented with Plateresque detailing along the cornice, its flat façade being divided by stylized

stucco pilasters broken in the center by a lowhipped roof tower, which mirrored the tower in Unit E. Although it took the developers twentytwo years to complete the Village, and despite the fact that designs for later buildings were modified from the original rendering to adjust to new tenants, the complex was erected following Fooshee & Cheek’s original plan, with all architectural elements derived from Spanish sources. The demolition of Unit G in 1966, where the

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two filling stations once stood, removed the picturesque entrance on Preston Road. The architect George Dahl designed the three-story modern office building with a tile roof that replaced the filling stations. In the beginning, the Highland Park Shopping Village was designed to accommodate seventy-five spaces for shops and businesses. After the arrival in 1935 of Volk Brothers, which catered to a moderate to well-to-do clientele, Prather succeeded in attracting small, independently owned specialty shops and restaurants, resulting in a mixed tenancy suitable for their market. The Flippen-Prather Realty Company succeeded in their vision of a cohesively designed shopping center, assisted by Fooshee & Cheek. Their interpretation of the Spanish Revival style incorporated highly decorative elements from the early Renaissance and late Baroque periods, the

Plateresque and the Churrigueresque. In choosing these sources for a shopping center, Fooshee & Cheek went beyond the less ornamented work Cheek saw in California, producing their personal interpretation of Spanish Colonial Revival–style architecture. An aerial photograph taken in about 1948 shows the overall arrangement of the buildings and the directional arrows painted on the pavement to direct traffic and mark parking spaces. The Highland Park Shopping Village has retained its original elements and character, a tribute to the foresight of its developers and architects. It has been nationally recognized in terms of its innovative plan, its incorporation of automobiles, and its stylistic distinctiveness. Highland Park Village is one of the most important architectural landmarks in Dallas.

Conclusion The Town of Highland Park was such a success that by 1955 Prather could claim, “We have no lots left unsold. . . . There are more than 12,000 people living in our developed properties .  .  . and the land values have steadily increased in demand and price.”178 What the developers did not foresee was that Preston and Mockingbird Roads would become too narrow for the current volume of traffic. These streets were originally intended for neighborhood use but have become major arteries in Dallas. Hence, traffic is hindered not only at rush hours but also throughout the day. Security is certainly a major drawing point, as the town’s police and fire departments are highly regarded and their response time is faster than that of their Dallas counterparts. Another key asset is the Park Cities Independent School District, with its reputa-

tion of offering the best public education in the Dallas metropolitan area. Families move to the Park Cities in many cases so that their children can attend these schools, which are almost like private schools in character. Additionally, high property values are a plus in the Park Cities but have also led to serious disadvantages. No longer are all of the residents a mixture of middle-class professionals and wealthy entrepreneurs, who frequently socialized together, attended neighborhood events, and lived in their houses for long periods of time. As of 1995, the average monthly turnover rate for house sales was fifty.179 The combination of stable property values and the highly regarded school system has attracted out-of-state corporate transfers and resulted in a less cordial atmosphere than that fondly remembered by

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longtime residents. Additionally, the high property costs have made Highland Park too expensive for anyone but the wealthy. As all of the original deed restrictions in the Park Cities have expired, there are no longer architectural review boards, which has led to less uniform houses. Flippen and Prather envisioned a careful blending of architectural styles on every street in the community. But the conformity of styles is disappearing due to the lack of aesthetic regulation by the Town of Highland Park. Zoning ordinances do not specify any style, material, or minimum size requirement for residences but do mandate dimensions, maximum lot coverage, heights of structures, and setbacks.180 As Prudence Mackintosh so aptly describes Highland Park: But the little town of Highland Park is only 2.2 square miles. The average lot is approximately 12,500 square feet, usually only 50 feet wide. The average house being built here now is 6,000 to 7,000 square feet. (An original two-story Highland Park house, now on display at Old City Park, has about 2,000.)181 Highland Park city building and zoning codes are based now on the percentage of the lot that can be covered by the house that can be built there. This has led to a significant reduction in the open spaces between houses, and new construction appears even bulkier than it is. In Highland Park, restrictions have preserved areas that were zoned for single-family residences, whereas in University Park, multi-family houses were allowed to be built in the place of older, smaller houses, with the exception of Volk Es-

tates. Demolitions are problematic in Highland Park, as the Park Cities real estate appraiser D. W. Skelton remarked: “It is certainly easier and less expensive to demolish an old house and rebuild than to ‘retrofit’ an old house with the amenities most people require today.”182 There have been fewer teardowns in Lakewood as most of the lot sizes are much smaller than those in the Park Cities, and, hopefully, preservation of the neighborhood will continue. Developed west of Volk Estates and northwest of Highland Park, Preston Hollow began in 1923, with limited success, as a collection of small independently developed subdivisions with no cohesively planned infrastructure, although some sections offered lot sizes larger than those in Highland Park.183 Preston Hollow would not be fully developed until after World War II, when ranch-type houses became the most popular mode of building. Because of the high cost of the land, Preston Hollow suffers from one of the highest residential teardown rates in the city, with late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century houses taking the place of earlier houses. Preston Hollow is part of the city of Dallas and the Dallas Independent School District. Suburban development in Dallas has now spread beyond Plano and even out as far northeast as McKinney, creating a continuous mass of suburban and commercial development. As of 2010, there were more than two million residents in Dallas County, with the Metroplex that includes Fort Worth bringing the population to 6.5 million.184 These facts make The Town of Highland Park even more desirable because of its now centralized location and stability.

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C h a p t e r fi v e T H E

H OGG

H U GH T H E

BROTHE RS,

P OTTE R,

A N D

D EVE LOP M E NT RIVER

O F

OA K S

“Homes to Last for All Time” O n J un e 1 , 1 9 2 4 , t h e Houston Post-Dispatch r e ported that Will and Mike Hogg, along with their friend and associate Hugh Potter, were planning to develop a one-thousand-acre residential park addition.1 The Hogg brothers began by purchasing the 178acre Country Club Estates subdivision three-and-a-half miles west of downtown Houston and were in the process of buying additional property, which would make it the largest residential community in Houston. Initially, the Hoggs and Potter adopted the company name Country Club Estates, but in April 1925, Will Hogg formed a corporation and renamed the community River Oaks, although the first tract of land retained the original name.2 According to Potter, “Our purpose is to create a large area of artistic beauty . . . . The location is along Buffalo bayou and has natural advantage, which will lend toward the beatification of the property. . . . It will be one of the largest additions in the South.”3 To achieve these goals, the Hoggs and Potter calculated that their expenditures would be “running into millions of dollars and extending over a period of

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fifteen years.”4 Estimating that the population of Houston would reach five hundred thousand by 1935, making it the most populous city in Texas, the developers realized the importance of a wellplanned, restricted neighborhood in the rapidly growing and developing city. Undoubtedly, their motive was to create a community comparable to Highland Park, as sales in Highland Park West’s Country Club Section had boomed. According to a survey at that time, Houston had only one-fifth as many houses costing more than twenty thousand dollars as Dallas. The developers of Country Club Estates anticipated that the wealth being produced in Houston would expand along with the desire of those accumulating it to erect expensive houses. Will Hogg and Potter wanted to mirror what the Highland Park developers had achieved in suburban development. Considering themselves to be “public-minded citizens,” they intended not only to create a high standard of residential development, but also to treat their project as a model civic contribution to all of Houston. Potter remarked, “The subdivider is planning your cities today and especially so in Houston, because it is unzoned.”5 Will Hogg and Potter’s goal was to see Houston rank among the major cities in the United States, “a city in which it is possible to live more abundantly and enjoyable[y]. . . . It is good for any city to have its River Oaks.”6 In a public address, Potter asked: Will we let her [Houston] grow carelessly and without plans? Will we continue to sit silent while the suburban belt of realty just beyond the city limits is being platted into a jumbled mass of

varying and conflicting uses? We proudly boast that this land will soon be a part of the city. . . . [W]e shoulder an immense burden and cost in later converting it into a well ordered city property, with residence sites of different sizes, shopping centers, schools, churches, parks, play grounds, golf links, bridle paths, etc., so that the composite result may be a civic contribution of significance and permanence . . . to endure for countless generations to come.7 In preparation, Will Hogg and Potter carefully studied suburban communities throughout the United States and stated in their promotional literature that they had visited the Country Club District, Highland Park, Roland Park, Beverly Hills, and many others, and from these inspection tours, “we sifted and adopted all the possible ways of making River Oaks comparable to anything in the country.”8 Their research extended to European cities, but they focused on a select number of cities in the Southwest and their “particular situation” in Houston for ideas on development plans, restrictions, and sales methods.9 As a result, River Oaks became one of the most desirable and expensive suburban developments in the Southwest. The River Oaks developers always anticipated that in their community, property owners would erect “homes ranging from palatial structures surrounded by large estates down to modest bungalows.”10 But the high quality and restrictive standards of River Oaks in the context of Houston’s wide-open, no-zoning environment led to its becoming available exclusively to those who accumulated significant wealth.

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The Source of the Hogg Fortune In 1901, former Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg purchased forty-one hundred acres of land, the Patton Place Ranch near West Columbia in Brazoria County sixty miles south of Houston and renamed it Varner.11 James Hogg was convinced the property contained substantial oil reserves, but he died in 1906 before he found any investors interested in drilling on his property. In 1918, oil production began at Varner in the West Columbian Field, and by 1919, the proceeds had made his four children wealthy. Before they began their River Oaks project, Will, Mike, and Ima Hogg had lived in Houston hotels and apartments since the turn of the twentieth century. Their younger brother Tom, who never participated in the family’s businesses, and his wife Marie lived at Varner until 1913, when they moved to Denver and later to San Antonio.12 In 1917, before the profits from oil, Will, Mike, and Ima took out a two-year lease for a house in Rossmoyne, a small three-block subdivision south of the Montrose addition, developed by the Sterling Investment Company, where they planned to live until they built a permanent residence in Shadyside.13 Will Hogg began negotiations in 1916 to purchase lot Q from Shadyside’s developer J. S. Cullinan.14 In 1917, he told Cullinan that he could not afford the lot and was interested in a less expensive property.15 He again contacted Cullinan about lot Q

in 1918, after his fortunes had improved, and he requested that it be reserved for him. The property came on the market in August 1919, and Will Hogg asked for an option on the lot to be held for a period of six to twelve months, due to his sister’s ill health. Cullinan declined to grant the extension on the purchase, and in 1919, he sold the property to the oilman William Stamps Farish.16 The Hoggs purchased the leased property, and the family remained in the house until they moved nine years later to their River Oaks residence, Bayou Bend. In 1921, Hogg Brothers’ Varner Realty Company, with its vice president, Henry W. Stude, entered into residential real estate investments to create a group of lower-middle-income subdivisions east of Houston Heights, collectively known as Norhill.17 Two years later, the company purchased a twelve-acre site north of Shady­ side near the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for a subdivision, which Will Hogg wanted to name Community Place. He intended to build a family residence there and considered hiring his friend, Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, to lay out the enclave. But commercial development appeared nearby, making the property less desirable. Therefore, the Varner Realty Company renamed the subdivision Colby Court and developed it instead as an upper-middle-class subdivision.18

Will and Ima Hogg’s Interest in the Arts In 1919, Will Hogg purchased an apartment in New York on West Forty-Fourth Street, and the following year, at the insistence of Ima, he

moved to two apartments in a more upscale neighborhood at 290 Park Avenue and asked her to help him furnish them. Around this time

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Reception room in the Hogg Brothers office, Houston. Hoskins, “American Furniture of Early Date,” 7, Frank J. Schleuter, photographer.

they began collecting art and decorative arts for Will Hogg’s apartments and for Varner, which was being remodeled by Briscoe, who based his reinterpretation of the rustic 1830s house at Varner on Mount Vernon, George Washington’s country house. Will Hogg commented, “I tried to fix up the old place as George Washington would do if he had a bank roll.”19 In 1921, the newly established Hogg Brothers—a family corporation consisting of Will, Mike, and Ima—built the Armor Building (now the Hogg Building). Designed by the Dallas architect C.  E. Barglebaugh, with his partner Lloyd R. Whitson, the Armor Building was a seven-story downtown office building, with a

partial eighth floor, located at 401 Louisiana Street.20 Their penthouse suite on the top floor contained an oval dining room, living room, guest room, offices, kitchen, and rooftop garden with a solarium. Here Will Hogg assembled his Frederic Remington painting collection and, with Ima, housed their seventeenth- andeighteenth-­ century American decorative arts collection.21 Illustrated in Will Hogg’s magazine, Civics for Houston, was the reception room with three paintings by Remington, The Call for Help, A New Year on the Cimarron, and The Herd Boy; a photo of antique furniture described as “a Connecticut Chest, a Dutch chair of about 1740, and an eight-legged Windsor

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settee with bulbous turnings” that “accompany a cricket table of 1690, a cherry tea table with carved apron and a fan-back Windsor chair”; and hooked rugs on the floor that made the setting look more like the interior of a house than part of an office building.22 Through their collection of art and antiques, Will and Ima Hogg became the leading cultural figures in Houston, bringing early American material culture and early twentieth-century painting and sculpture to the city, all of which would eventually become part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that Will Hogg worked so hard to establish.23 By 1924, only eighty thousand dollars of the two hundred thousand dollars needed to build the art museum had been raised. Will Hogg, in an extraordinary civic gesture, began a personal fund-raising campaign that led to pledges total-

ing one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in only three weeks, which enabled construction of the building to commence.24 With an additional twenty thousand dollars, also raised by Will Hogg, the first phase of the neoclassical-style art museum was completed in 1926, including the wings flanking Main and Montrose Boulevards. The architect for the project was William Ward Watkin, with Ralph Adams Cram of Cram & Ferguson as consulting architect.25 Both architects had been sent to Houston in 1909 by their Boston firm, Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, to design and supervise the construction of the campus and the first buildings of Rice Institute (now Rice University). By 1914, Bertram had left the firm to pursue his own architectural practice, after which the firm became known as Cram & Ferguson.

Country Club Estates In the spring of 1923, Mike Hogg purchased almost one hundred and twenty acres for a weekend retreat, called Tall Timbers, located west of Country Club Estates and the River Oaks Country Club on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou. Potter viewed the Country Club Estates during a horseback ride with Mike Hogg and later remarked, “The idea occurred to me, as I looked around at those lovely trees, that there might be some money in it, if one could get some of that land and cut it up into homesites.”26 Mike Hogg agreed with him, and they took an option on two hundred acres of land in Country Club Estates. The Houston Country Club was running out of memberships, so Will Hogg thought River Oaks Country Club would serve as a magnet to the community. He wanted to do something on a much larger scale by pur-

chasing additional acreage for the development of a subdivision. Such an ambitious venture had not been tried in Houston since the failure in the 1890s of Houston Heights, which had been developed for working-class citizens. The Hoggs were only interested in purchasing Country Club Estates if they could expand the size by acquiring contiguous tracts of land to the east, west, and south; create a large-scale suburb free of the more urban characteristics of its South End predecessors; and emulate Highland Park. Before acquiring Country Club Estates, the Hoggs observed that the property was adjacent to River Oaks, one of the finest country clubs in the city with a professionally designed golf club; the land was located on a picturesque waterway; it was ten to fifteen feet higher in elevation than any other residential district in Houston,

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a significant feature since Houston had a history of drainage problems and flooding; the soil was almost entirely loamy, excellent for growing flowers and shrubbery and superior to that of other subdivisions in the city; and the land had abundant vegetation, sections of it heavily wooded with native pine trees.27 The Hoggs, with their enormous wealth, along with Potter offered a trade in April to the original three hundred shareholders of the Country Club Estates Company. In return for the shares of stock, the Hoggs would pay the River Oaks Country Club $125,000, and deliver to the club an unencumbered deed to the land on which the clubhouse and golf course were located.28 The trade also would cancel all obligations to the club and the real estate company covering improvements, including the “installation of lighting, water, paving, storm sewers, etc. amounting from $50,000 to $75,000 . . . and would allow the country club to begin operation free from any indebtedness.”29 Realizing that the country club and subdivision were now $257,000 in debt, the board of directors wrote to the charter members that this was “an opportunity we cannot afford to overlook and your cooperation is earnestly requested.”30 On May 15, 1924, Hogg Brothers acquired Country Club Estates and the River Oaks Country Club and formed the Country Club Estates Realty Company. Potter was appointed company president, resigning from his law firm, Gill, Jones, Tyler, and Potter, to devote his full attention to the project. Mike Hogg and the cotton exporter Edwin L. Neville served as vice presidents. The board of directors was composed of Will and Mike Hogg; Hugh Potter; the president of the River Oaks Country Club, Kenneth E. Womack; the future Houston mayor, Walter E. Monteith; and the cotton exporter William L. Clayton, who built the first house in the subdivision.

Potter planned “to spend some time traveling around the country to obtain ideas for the project,” expecting that the Country Club Estates “will be something of the order of Highland Park in Dallas, but on a much larger scale.”31 Shortly after the transaction, Will Hogg hosted a dinner at the Rice Hotel for the club members and told them that anyone who had purchased property in Country Club Estates would be required to pay an annual maintenance fee, based on the size of their property, to raise enough capital to make the necessary infrastructure improvements.32 The Country Club Estates Realty Company sold the River Oaks Country Club at cost to its membership and gave them the clubhouse at no charge. The club became a separate enterprise. Will Hogg and Potter sought the advice of Hugh  E. Prather and J.  C. Nichols, and they formed a close professional relationship with them. On May 19, 1924, four days after the purchase of Country Club Estates, Will Hogg wrote in his diary, “We [he, Mike Hogg, and Hugh Potter] call at J. C. Nichols office at 11:00. .  .  . Mr. Hare lunches with us. Mr. [George] Tourtellot [the commercial property manager] of Nichols office drives us over Country Club District in afternoon.”33 The next day, “We call on Hare and Hare in forenoon and at J. C. Nichols residence at 2:30.”34 They left on May 22nd for Highland Park, undoubtedly to discuss further planning ideas with officials of the Flippen-­ Prather Realty Company. In August, Potter spent several days in Kansas City accompanied by his sales manager, Clarence Monrose. It was reported in the Houston Chronicle that Nichols “will personally conduct” a tour “over the district [Country Club District] and explain every detail in connection with the extensive undertaking there.”35 Quoted in the same newspaper article, Potter asserted, “In many respects the

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River Oaks section of the Country Club Estates is like the Kansas City development project and for that reason [we] desire to personally inspect the properties so that the same or similar ideas and plans may be included in our development.” He continued, “An effort will be made to have Mr. Nichols come to Houston late this fall or early in the winter to personally put his ideas into the development of River Oaks . . . and to make a public address upon the subject of city planning.” Since Highland Park was incorporated and never annexed to the city of Dallas, Will Hogg and Potter patterned their subdivision more after the Country Club District, and they seem to have spent more time studying suburban development in Kansas City than in Dallas. This was due to the fact that Nichols believed subdivisions should be annexed to the city, a philosophy that Will Hogg embraced.36 Nichols had remarked in 1912 that “subdividing must necessarily correspond to the growth of the city. . . . I worked out in Kansas City a method of platting a thousand acres of restricted residence property . . . and developed ideas which I believe can be profitably applied in every city.”37 It is noteworthy that Potter and Nichols formed a close friendship and both served on the boards of directors of various organizations dealing with suburban real estate development and civic improvement.38 As stated in a River Oaks Corporation memo, the first action of the Country Club Estates Company developers after the purchase was to employ Hare & Hare as consultants, who had been employed by Nichols and were working with the Flippen-Prather Realty Company in their development of Highland Park West. Their task, according to the memo, was: to improve . . . the lay-out of the residential half . . . and to plan at this time in advance a scien-

tific platting of the balance of the property, so as to make it a complete residential district, with perhaps, eventually, over 5000 people living in it. .  .  . Mr. Hare made very few changes in the original lay-out, finding that it had been very skillfully and artistically done by Mr. Kipp.39 Thus, the Country Club Estates Realty Company made minor changes to the original plat. Herbert  A. Kipp, chief civil engineer for the project, revised it by taking five feet of property on either side of Ball Boulevard (subsequently River Oaks Boulevard) and enlarging it from eighty feet in width to ninety feet, which was paved from San Felipe Road to the clubhouse, with five-foot-wide sidewalks placed on each side, along with a twenty-foot-wide median esplanade planted with flowers.40 The revised plan retained the oval park, Sleepy Hollow Court, with Hare & Hare’s design for a fountain having an octagonal base ornamented by Federal-style swags. However, when the fountain was completed in 1926, the basin was replaced by a statue of a putto, a Renaissance or derivative sculpture representing a child, usually naked.41 The statue, Bronze Boy, was the work of the Houston sculptor Julian Muench. Because of the high costs of improving the first plat in 1924, the Country Club Estates Realty Company decided that it would be uneconomical to develop tracts of land greater than 80 or smaller than 40 acres at a time, as the company had already spent almost $615,000 on improvements.42 The major expenditures were $215,275 for the grading and paving of streets; $125,000 for improvements to the River Oaks Country Club; $70,000 for storm sewers; $54,000 for a water system; $53,000 for sidewalks; $25,000 for engineering and surveying; $24,000 for sanitary sewers; and the remaining $48,725 for a sanitary sewage pumping plant,

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Country Club Estates–River Oaks, advertisement, Houston Post-Dispatch, October, 12, 1924. Country Club Estates, di_07414. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

electric lights, telephone extensions, clearing streets, tree surgery, landscaping, grading lots, and drainage. The high costs for the River Oaks Country Club resulted from the decision to expand its facilities and add a $32,000 ballroom, a dining room, a men’s grill, and a swimming pool with bathhouses for both men and

women. Staub was again retained to revise his V-shaped plan into an X-shaped form to accommodate the additions. Expensive for the time, a sprinkler system was installed on the fairways of the eighteen-hole golf course. Streets were platted in long blocks of a thousand feet or more, which cut down on the cost of paving. Trees

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were planted on building sites and not in the right-of-ways, leaving curves and esplanades unobstructed and creating wide vistas to facilitate traffic movement and safety. No longer anticipating a profit from the initial investment, the developers aimed to break even.43 There was such a demand for house sites in Houston that “several subdivisions have been forced to develop additional sections in order to cope with the situation.”44 The Houston Post praised Country Club Estates, commenting on the “abundance of shade trees” and noting that “the large home tracts [are] highly terraced . . . [that] allows ample room for home development and improvement, such is not offered on smaller tracts.”45 To promote Country Club Estates, the realty company ran numerous newspaper advertisements, one of which illustrated Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, and a grandiose scheme for a River Oaks gateway, which opened onto the landscaped River Oaks Boulevard. The company intended to conjure a bucolic image of a suburban retreat suitable for the finest houses in Houston. The advertisement claimed that River Oaks Section of Country Club Estates is a subdivision of “HOMESITES, NOT LOTS,” which “front on permanently paved streets, not of the straight, monotonous variety, but that curve gracefully in and out between tall, old trees.”46 As to pricing, “the homesites range from 22 to 28 cents a square foot, which equals about $1,200 for the ordinary city lot.”47 This financial arrangement was similar to those employed in Highland Park and the Country Club District.

Some lots in Houston were selling for as high as 75 cents per square foot; the majority of them, for around 40 to 45 cents.48 Instead of considering a front-foot price, the Country Club Estates developers thought it best to quote the price on a square-foot basis to emphasize the depth of lots. According to a River Oaks Corporation memo, “You can, without question, then feel that you are selling this property at such a price as to make it an excellent investment for anybody.”49 In a letter to Potter, Will Hogg wrote, “Most real estate developers use continuous stream of newspaper advertising—newspaper advertising is mostly seasonal.”50 In addition to newspaper advertisements, Will Hogg found direct mail was “worth while, more or less. . . . I think our advertising problem is not a complicated one. In fact, it is a simple one. We can change by tieing [sic] direct mail into the newspaper advertising and vice versa.”51 Will Hogg confirmed to Potter that “a 270 word letter would be about $100.00 per thousand, including addressing, enclosing, stamping and stationary”; he compiled a list of approximately three thousand names and addresses for a direct advertising campaign.52 He used billboards, although, as he explained to Potter, “I am against billboards as a matter of principle. . . . I think there will come a time when we will take all billboards off of our property.”53 But in the beginning, every method of advertising Country Club Estates Realty Company could conjure up from billboards, newspaper ads, brochures, pamphlets, “and even bound volumes [were used] to beckon new residents.”54

The Clayton Summer House In 1924, the first house was built in Country Club Estates. It was designed by Birdsall P. Briscoe and Sam H. Dixon Jr. for Sue Vaughan and

William L. Clayton on Inwood Drive.55 Clayton was a co-founder and partner in Anderson, Clayton, and Company, which he had built into one

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of the largest cotton brokerage firms in the world. The Claytons’ two-story house, with its main elevation facing north toward the golf course, was not initially a year-round residence for them, as their city house was at 5300 Caroline Street in the Southmore addition. They used the Country Club Estates house as a summer house, which may have contributed to their appropriation of the eighteenth-century Palladian plan of George Washington’s Mount Vernon because Sue Vaughan Clayton, who was from Kentucky, was entranced by Southern architecture. The shared preoccupation of client and architect— rather than an awareness of the Flippen House in Highland Park, which by 1924 had been sold to another family and remodeled in the Tudor style—perhaps explains their interest in Mount Vernon. Imitations of famous American Colo-

nial houses were encouraged in the River Oaks section of Country Club Estates, as had been the case at Highland Park and the Country Club District. The Claytons treated their Country Club Estates site almost as a resort in the provision of leisure and recreational amenities: a swimming pool, tennis courts, a screened room, and a small horse stable. A rendering of the house was published in 1926 by the River Oaks Corporation in one of their newspaper advertisements, which showed the Clayton Summer House as built, complete with figures wearing eighteenth-century costume in the foreground. The house was described in the Houston Post as a “masterpiece in art” that “occupies one of the most attractive sites in the new addition. . . . Further improvements, now contemplated will make it among the leading homes in the state.”56

Sue Vaughan and William L. Clayton Summer House, north elevation, Inwood Drive, River Oaks, 1924, Birdsall P. Briscoe and Sam H. Dixon Jr., architects. © Paul Hester Photographer.

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Sue Vaughan and William L. Clayton Summer House, River Oaks Corporation advertisement, Houston Post, October 11, 1926. MSS 0012, River Oaks Collection, Scrapbook, Vol. 4. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

The detailing of the north-oriented porch was copied directly from Mount Vernon, with slender square columns supporting the portico roof. The north front is completely symmetrical, as opposed to the irregular fenestration of the river façade of Washington’s house, with two windows on each side of the central doorway. The porch roof is topped by a Chinese Chippendale ornamental railing, which partially obscures the hipped roof of the house and the single dormer window that breaks out of the north side of the

Sue Vaughan and William L. Clayton Summer House, floor plans. Architectural Forum 49, no. 9 (September 1928): 338.

roof. The entry front of the house, facing south, is dominated by the tripartite arrangement of the main house and its flanking one-story dependencies, connected to the main block with curving hyphens and columned arcades. The eastern dependency contains the kitchen; the western, a single room open to the outside via five screened, round-arched openings similar in detail to the arcades of the connecting hyphens. The interior of the Clayton Summer House is organized around the central hall and stair on

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the ground floor. The stair ascends to the second floor in three stages, with the landing set in front of the large round-arched window on the second floor of the south façade. The living room, which runs the length of the west side of the house, features a rather simple Colonial style chimneypiece and later-applied wallpaper with

scenes of tropical landscaping stemming from eighteenth-century sources. Across the hall are the dining room and den, the latter paneled in dark-stained wood. The second floor contained two bedrooms and a sleeping porch in the original design, with the sleeping porch converted into a third bedroom at a later date.

The River Oaks Corporation The developers of Country Club Estates formulated a master plan for the entire property, based on a suburban, rather than an urban, theme. They had learned from observing older, large developments, where lack of comprehensive plans caused subsequent problems. One of the first instructions Will Hogg gave to Potter was to raise the price on building sites without public notice at 40 percent across the board to raise more funds to pay for improvements.57 Adopting the original restrictions, the Country Club Estates Realty Company did not permit the erection of buildings other than single-­family houses, which they stipulated in individual deeds. They were determined to protect and enhance the natural beauty of Country Club Estates because, unlike Houston’s suburban developers before them, they went “beyond providing basic urban needs,” and they “viewed planning as a technique to mold the environment, ensuring the desirable qualities of beauty, exclusivity, and especially [financial] security.”58 Adjoining acreage for the venture was purchased under a newly formed company, the Widee Realty Company, which then commenced to acquire the contiguous acres, extending west to the Southern Pacific railroad tracts, east to Shepherd’s Dam Road (changed to Shepherd Drive, now South Shepherd Drive), north to Buffalo Bayou, and south to Westheimer

Road to an extent coincident with the width of the original tract.59 Initially, the realty company paid $500 an acre, but when word got out that they were buying up land, prices rose as high as $3,150, or an overall average of a little less than $2,000 an acre.60 With the inclusion of the almost 120-acre Tall Timbers tract owned by Mike Hogg, the company expanded its property to approximately the size of Highland Park in Dallas, eventually culminating in a total of 1,200 acres. The name River Oaks was adopted for the entire subdivision, although Country Club Estates was retained for the first plat of 1924 and the name Homewoods was reserved for the most exclusive section of the development. Will Hogg told Potter, “I do not favor the Nichols system of naming and I believe if he started over again and had a thousand or fifteen hundred acres with which to start, he would use one name for the entire development. .  .  . As Nichols bought in units of a few hundred acres, as his operations expanded, naturally there was some excuse for his changing the name of each section.61 It was also around this time that they purchased an additional one hundred acres of land that connected San Felipe with Westheimer Road, expanding the length of River Oaks Boulevard to a major artery. In January 1925, Nichols visited the River

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Oaks section of Country Club Estates and commented that it “ranks high among the best subdivisions of this country,” and it was not only “technically correct, but very pleasing and in accordance with the best modern scientific planning.”62 On March 4, 1925, Will Hogg wrote a letter to S. Herbert Hare, in which he sought advice on several planning matters, adding, “we want you to talk it over with Mr. Nichols, as you will do. . . . Tomorrow night I am going to Los Angeles where I will stick around for two or three weeks. . . . I may come back by Kansas City and spend two or three days loafing, when I hope to see you and Mr. Nichols as much as practicable. . . . If there is any particular district or development or developer that you want me to see in the Los Angeles section, drop a line to me c/o Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles.”63 On March 8 and 17, Will Hogg noted in his diary that he visited Palos Verdes Estates. On March 30, he arrived in Kansas City, where he stayed for several weeks, meeting with Nichols and Hare. Potter joined him there on April 24. By March 1925, the Country Club Estates Realty Company had sold approximately 65 percent of the original 178 acres to 75 of “the leading citizens of Houston,” and in their promotional literature, the developers outlined their philosophy as follows: Care will be taken to fix the minimum monetary building limit sufficiently low to allow the family of moderate income to enter. While wealth is not frowned on, the modern developer does not seek to build an aristocracy of wealth but rather an aristocracy of culture. To produce for the Houston citizen of discriminating taste, a complete residential community in the most advantageous locality. To concentrate upon the undertaking,

from varied points of view, the minds of men of talent, experience and worthy accomplishment. . . . Then, having created a beauty spot, to keep it just that, by a most rigid and thoroughgoing maintenance. All at a cost within the reach of the family of moderate income.64 But the River Oaks section was not open to everyone. As Will Hogg wrote to Potter, “Do not promote or undertake to sell anyone who couldn’t, if financially able, meet the qualifications of a congenial member of the River Oaks Club.”65 In fact, they had encouraged their sales department to sell the larger lots to attract a more influential class of residents as the “initial builders and livers in River Oaks,” but it did not mean that they would not accept those who could afford to purchase less expensive lots.66 “You will have good neighbors, you may be sure,” the corporation advertised, “neighbors who are your kind of people.”67 At this point, they still had 30 lots for sale at $2,500 each and 20 at $2,750, all between 75 by 150 to 75 by 180 feet, and now their strategy was to completely sell everything in the first plat. Their terms of sale were onefifth down, with a balance over four years of 7 percent semiannually, with maturities—annually, semiannually, quarterly, or monthly—to suit each purchaser. In instances where the purchaser was considered “a good moral risk sales will be consummated upon as small a cash payment as 10%, but the Sales Department pursues the policy of holding this information back until it is necessary to give it in order to close a sale.”68 Will Hogg instructed Potter to readjust prices two, three, or four times a year, suggesting the best months for this were March, June, September, and December.69

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Riverside Terrace Riverside Terrace, a subdivision in Houston’s South End along Brays Bayou and east of Hermann Park, was platted beginning in 1924 (several months before the River Oaks section of Country Club Estates was open to the public) by Clarence  J. Malone, vice president and future president of the Guardian Trust Company.70 Malone, in a 1925 letter to one of his prospects, Miss Julia Ideson, the director of the Houston Public Library, wrote that most of the lots in the property were 50 by 120 feet or larger, with prices beginning at $2,100, which included all improvements.71 He pointed out his subdivision was no farther from downtown than Montrose and was within walking distance to a grade

school, a junior high school, a high school, and the Rice Institute. He also mentioned he had sold 166 lots upon which forty houses had been built or were under construction. When Peggy Stevens MacGregor donated park land east of Riverside Terrace as a memorial to her husband, the real estate developer Henry F. MacGregor, the city of Houston retained Hare & Hare in 1926 to design South and North MacGregor Ways, flanking Brays Bayou between Hermann Park and Memorial Park. This stimulated the growth of Riverside Terrace, which never attained the mystique that eventually accrued to River Oaks.

River Oaks Corporation: Improvements and Model Houses Handicapped by inadequate streets approaching River Oaks from the city, the corporation failed to attract the interest of some prospective purchasers. This was of such great concern to the developers that they convinced the city of Houston in 1925 to pave eight thoroughfares leading out of downtown and the South End to River Oaks: West Dallas, West Gray, Nebraska (now Welch), and Westheimer from the east out to Shepherd Drive; West Alabama and Richmond from the southeast; and Washington from the northeast. Since part of Westheimer Road from River Oaks Boulevard to Kirby Drive was not then in the city limits, the corporation paid for the pavement of this section of Westheimer Road, as they felt that “Westheimer is at present by far the best approach to the property [River Oaks].”72 Potter arranged to purchase nineteen acres to extend West Gray east of South Shep-

herd Drive, where the River Oaks Corporation planned someday to build a business center. “The Mayor has agreed,” Potter wrote to Hare, “to condemn through that which we could not buy, so we are reasonably certain of getting the street put through .  .  . you can make plans accordingly, including the business center.”73 He continued, “As soon as the plans . . . arrive, I will submit them to Mr. Kipp.”74 In addition, under contract with the city of Houston, Hare & Hare were preparing plans for a landscaped one-hundred-foot-wide scenic parkway, Buffalo Drive (now Allen Parkway). The parkway was to run two-and-a-half miles from Sam Houston Park in downtown, along the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, all the way to the eastern boundary of River Oaks at Shepherd Drive, where it would then cross the bayou and terminate at the entrance to Memorial Park.

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This was significant because there were no paved roads from downtown to River Oaks and the African-American neighborhood of Fourth Ward stood between River Oaks and downtown. Having only three intersections, no traffic lights, and no railroad tracks, Buffalo Drive offered an uninterrupted passage to downtown, an approximate eight-minute drive. Will Hogg told Potter, “We are going to be thrilled beyond all measure when that thoroughfare [Buffalo Drive] gets in first class usable condition.”75 It was always Will Hogg’s intention to limit all through-traffic in River Oaks—with the exception of the north-south thoroughfare, Kirby Drive—to emphasize “the park like isolation, quietude and freedom from disturbing traffic in all that area, especially between San Felipe, Shepherd’s Drive and the Southern Pacific Railroad.”76 As he told Hare, “We would like to minimize the means of access east and west on Shepherd’s Drive. . . . [T]here will be no access from the north side . . . which would justify any one going through the property to go to town . . . except that traffic that would naturally flow through Kirby Drive to Buffalo Drive as part of the Boulevard system.”77 In Hare’s letter to Will Hogg on May 23, 1925, he expressed his support for widening Kirby Drive from eighty to one hundred feet with a planted center median, as he knew that Will Hogg planned to link Kirby Drive to Buffalo Drive.78 In Potter’s August 20, 1926, letter to Will Hogg, he strongly suggested the existence of an unwritten agreement between the city and the River Oaks Corporation with respect to the intersection of Buffalo and Kirby Drives.79 Potter was relieved to report that the city was spending more money than they had originally indicated on the project, in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars, thus reducing the corporation’s share of the expenses, as they decided to go ahead and pave where the

city stopped and not delay its completion to the subdivision at an estimated cost of five thousand dollars. Hare & Hare’s design for Buffalo and Kirby Drives thus continued the park and boulevard pattern established in Dallas by George Kessler’s Turtle Creek Parkway, which offered a splendid, beautiful drive from downtown to the entrance of Highland Park, later connecting to Armstrong Parkway to run through the center of Highland Park West. In advertisements titled “River Oaks Assures You Permanent Satisfaction,” which appeared in Houston newspapers in the spring of 1925, the corporation promised, “Your future advantages are assured by protective restrictions and proper provisions for maintenance and restrictions that safeguard your home and ever conserve your homesite value.”80 Like Edward  H. Bouton, J.  C. Nichols, and Hugh  E. Prather, Will Hogg and his cohorts formed a homeowners association to protect the financial security of River Oaks and to ensure that it remained a permanent, homogeneous neighborhood. By requiring association membership of all property owners, the River Oaks Corporation raised a maintenance fund through the assessment of an annual surtax on each property owner, and it used the fund to enforce deed restrictions, install street lights, organize fire and police services, and maintain garbage collection, as well as for the “beautification, care and upkeep of the streets, sidewalks, esplanades, parks and vacant lots.”81 The deed restrictions encompassed the alteration of existing structures and vigorously enforced land use conformity, even extending to the placement of garbage cans and clotheslines. The River Oaks Corporation maintained architectural control by placing restrictions in every deed to prevent repetition in style, color, and the overall appearance of houses. Every house de-

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sign had to be approved by a panel of architects. According to one corporation advertisement, “Whether a Man desires a $7,000 Cottage, or a $17,000 House, or a $170,000 Mansion, his needs can be taken care of in River Oaks.”82 On Kirby Drive, for example, the architectural styles permitted for houses were limited to English Tudor or Colonial Revival.83 “For sale” signs, overhead utility lines, and alleys were banned.84 Utility lines were installed on easements at the rear of the lots or placed beneath the streets in lead conduits. The maintenance fund also paid for a staff of gardeners and repairmen who aided owners in maintaining their commitment to the overall beauty of the development. Will Hogg pointed out to Potter that he and Mike Hogg felt that, by developing a horticultural and garden landscaping service, “we could encourage a number of homeowners . . . to start planting and piddling with their home sites, which would lend interest to the neighborhood, create more attention and traffic and would hasten the actual construction of homes that are now more or less in the air.”85 Mason Coney served as the development’s first staff landscape architect from 1925 to 1927, and he planted a flower garden “with bright and harmonious colorings” in the River Oaks Boulevard esplanade.86 The River Oaks Corporation emphasized gardening and nature in their promotional campaign. Potter wrote to prospective clients that they should “witness the transformation of a virgin forest into a garden.”87 In other literature, River Oaks was described as a “wild life sanctuary” that “will not be polluted with gasoline fumes and the feathered and furry creatures will not be frightened by the roar of motor cars.”88 To sell their country-suburban house theme, the corporation published a booklet that read: “If the City stirs their intellect, it has a tenden-

cy to breed material ideals, and if the country appeals to fine emotions, it often leads to dullness through isolation [and] contact with both seems necessary to normal development.”89 In other words, there was no need to live in the city during the cooler months and to leave it during the summer for health reasons because River Oaks country-suburban houses solved this problem. The corporation insisted that businessmen could enjoy the benefits of outdoor exercise and still be within easy reach of their downtown workplaces. By providing larger lots, the corporation enabled families to spend more time outdoors and have room for gardening. River Oaks offered the advantage of being close to Memorial Park, the Houston Polo & Riding Club, and the Houston Gun Club. In addition, the country club offered golf, tennis, horseback riding, swimming, shooting, walking, and places to socialize. Hugh E. Prather visited River Oaks in the summer of 1925 and in a letter to Hugh Potter, which was published in the HoustonPost Dispatch, he wrote: I have not been able to get your property out of my mind since leaving Houston. I was charmed with the plan that you have adopted for the entire property. I think the street layout is one of the finest I have ever seen and the fact that you will have so many direct thoroughfares from Houston serving your property will make it a most convenient section to reach.90 On December 5, 1924, Will Hogg had requested that “Mr. Hare, Mr. Potter and Mr. Kipp should designate 15 home-sites, of modest type, throughout River Oaks, that would be most advantageously improved within the next 12 months or two years.”91 Furthermore, he asked the men to select three architects, naming John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and William

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Country Club Estates, Inc. model house, “Redbird House” (Lula and William T. Campbell Jr. House), Inwood Drive, River Oaks, 1925, Birdsall P. Briscoe and Sam H. Dixon Jr., architects (author).

Ward Watkin, to sketch houses “of their own conception . . . to conform in style and compete [complete] in detail” that would not exceed a construction cost of $18,000 to $20,000, but preferably could be built for $17,500, including the architect’s fee, garage, and driveway, so that they could be sold for between $25,000 and $27,000.92 By employing Nichols’s idea of the “package house” and financing the lot and the house together, a practice that Nichols had initiated in 1915, the River Oaks Corporation profited from financing their own sales and could offer more affordable payments to middle-income customers.93 As with Nichols’s system, the corporation required a 10 percent down payment for a house. A first mortgage was set up for five years at an interest rate of 6 or 7 percent, depending

on the current rate, and two points, or 2 percent of the mortgage amount, was charged for arranging the financing. The principal amount ballooned in five years, with a second mortgage due that required interest on the principal until the balance was paid in full. The Houston architects who accepted the River Oaks commissions were Staub, Briscoe and his partner Sam H. Dixon Jr., and Joseph W. Northrop Jr. Will Hogg instructed that all house plans must be approved by himself, Mike Hogg, or “Miss Ima,” as he affectionately called his sister, and most of the plans were built under Ima Hogg’s tutelage.94 In fact, little is known about Ima Hogg’s close collaboration with architects in designing River Oaks model houses. Model houses had been successfully sold in Highland Park and the Country Club District, which

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Country Club Estates, Inc. model house, “Redbird House,” site plan. River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Weill.

Country Club Estates, Inc. model house, “Redbird House,” first-floor plan. River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Weill.

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probably prompted Will Hogg’s decision to build them. Potter later remarked in an article in House and Garden that a good developer should have a group of ready-made houses for sale that should be “regarded as his stock of exhibition merchandise . . . a tailor-made home . . . of sound construction and good design.”95 Designed by Briscoe and Dixon, the pink stucco Country Club Estates, Inc. model house on Inwood Drive was called Redbird House because of profiles of redbirds that appear on decorative grilles at the base of the entrance porch and in front of the ground-level French doors that flank the front door. A surviving architects’ drawing shows that the original house was somewhat smaller, without the additional block on the western end. The design was loosely based on the French Provincial Revival style. Quoins accent the corners of the main block, which is topped by a slate roof. The wrought-iron portico is decorated with Chinese Chippendale details. Shuttered casement windows pierce the secondstory wall. The site plan shows the placement of the garage well behind the main residence. It was of the same construction material as the main house. The original plans for Redbird House were quite simple, with only three major rooms on each floor. The original first-floor plan shows the entrance at one end of the stair hall, with the dining room behind it and the living room to the left, taking up the entire east end of the first floor. A pair of pantries separated the dining room from the kitchen, which was flanked by a powder room. To the west of the kitchen were a small rear entry and a boiler room containing the heating system. There were originally three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. What is striking about the house is its overall impression of graceful simplicity and stately elegance. The model house was sold during construction to Lula and William T. Campbell Jr. A friend

of the Hogg family, Campbell was co-founder of an oil field equipment company, Mission Manufacturing Company.96 Five of the seven model houses featured in an April 1926 Country Club Estates, Inc. promotional booklet, What About the House Next Door?, were Colonial Revival designs by Northrop: 3352 Del Monte Drive, 3215 Avalon Place, 3232 Huntingdon Place, 3326 Avalon Place, and 3257 Avalon Place. In another River Oaks Corporation booklet, the text explained that the term “Colonial” was “generally used to apply to the architecture of the English provinces in America during the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . . The appeal of the Colonial home is perennial, for it is a type which is American in tradition.”97 In a letter to Potter, Will Hogg noted that “Miss Ima and I looked at the two Northrop sketches last night and they look like excellent, saleable houses for the estimated money, and it might be possible to start two of these small houses in advance of the others.”98 He specified that the houses range in price, including the architect’s fee, from $7,500 to $9,000 on lots costing $2,500, and he thought they could sell them, including the lot, for $10,000 to $12,500.99 Will Hogg wrote to Potter that Prather was sending plans and specifications for model houses built in Highland Park.100 Though these may have been studied for ideas, Houston architects’ designs were used. Featured in a River Oaks Corporation advertisement in the May 12, 1925, Houston Press was Northrop’s drawing for a two-story brick house, depicted with trees and landscaping, that was nearing completion at 3352 Del Monte Drive. The Georgian-inspired, five-bay, rectangular block of the house had two lower two-bay wings on either side, and it featured a paneled front door set beneath an arch with an

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elliptical fanlight and sidelights framed by columns. Above the columns was a large scrolled pediment surmounted by a twenty-paned window, about the same width as the doorway. The shutters were two-thirds louvered with a solid panel in the upper portion featuring cut-out heart-shaped patterns. Chimneys stood at either end of the shingle-covered ridge roof. Charles J. Gerner, of the Gerner Lumber Company, the contractor for the house, and his wife Ida Mae purchased this house.101 Among the other houses pictured in the booklet, 3215 Avalon Place, upon completion, was shown as a completely furnished house on October 21, 22, and 23, 1925, and was sold to Belle and John S. Marshall, president of the Marshall Ice Company.102 Facing north, as did all of the odd-numbered houses in River Oaks, the house was a modern rendition of a Colonial house because the fenestration does not follow Colonial precedent. One of the least expensive model houses built in River Oaks was the twostory house at 3232 Huntingdon Place, three bays wide but with a one-and-a-half-story wing on the east topped by gambrel roofs.103 The front pent roof of the house was interrupted by a hooded pediment placed over the front door, which conformed to the conventions of the Dutch Colonial style. It was reported in the Houston Chronicle that the house’s “garage entrance and drive enters from San Felipe Road, the site having frontage on both streets,” and “it is the only house in Country Club Estates which has the garage and servants quarters directly connected with the house by an open roof passage.”104 On June 1, 1926, the corporation advertised the house by mailing forty-six hundred invitations for a “private showing of a completely furnished house. .  .  . Furnishings by Stowers [Furniture Company].”105 It was purchased by Dr. A.  C. Greer and his wife.106 Advertised as the smallest

house in River Oaks, the painted brick house at 3326 Avalon Place appeared to emulate a Pennsylvania farmhouse, with a simple front porch across the façade protected by a pent roof.107 The house at 3257 Avalon Place was a twoand-a-half-story brick-veneered Georgian style design with a colonial porch shading the front door and its arched fanlight. F.  H. Sheffield, a Country Club Estates, Inc. salesman, and his wife Helen became owners of this house.108 Whether the houses faced north or south, all of them featured a room with an eastern exposure that served as an outdoor room, either a porch or a sun room. Despite their claims of being perennial, all of Northrop’s model houses have been replaced by larger houses. An undated River Oaks Corporation pamphlet, announcing the construction of another Colonial Revival residence drawn by Northrop, stated that “a home built by a famous architect in Old Salem” had “furnished the inspiration for it.”109 The pamphlet was referring to the Salem architect Samuel McIntire, whose designs for American Federal houses were nationally known and frequently published. The Inwood Drive house, built in 1927 for Pauline and Henry K. Arnold, the executive assistant to R. Lee Blaffer at the Humble Oil and Refining Company, was squatter than those designed by McIn­tire, being only two stories high rather than three.110 Its ornamentation was also less attenuated and refined than that of American Federal houses in Salem. From Inwood Drive, a winding flagstone walk led to the red brick house’s doorframe, topped by a fanlight and surrounded by sidelights set between white cypress pilasters with a wrought-iron railing above them. The roof was of cedar shingles, and the bluish-green shutters added color. Depicted in the pamphlet were drawings of people in Colonial costume, suggesting an idealistic lifestyle free from the

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Pauline and Henry K. Arnold House, 2516 Inwood Drive, 1927, Joseph W. Northrop Jr., architect. “A Modern Expression of OldWorld Charm,” advertising pamphlet, River Oaks Corporation, 1927, Hogg (William Clifford) Papers: River Oaks Corporation, di_07412. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

“What About the House Next Door?” advertising booklet, Country Club Estates, Inc., 1926, CN 10635. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

cares of the modern city. Imagery of this type was even used for the corporation’s letterhead. Also illustrated in What About the House Next Door? were two speculative houses built by Country Club Estates, Inc. on Chevy Chase Drive. The houses were designed by Staub, seemingly under the direction of Ima Hogg, at the same time that he was building his own

house in River Oaks. Neither of these speculative houses sold immediately. Ima Hogg introduced Staub and Briscoe to the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Creole-inspired architecture of the French Quarter in New Orleans, which was Spanish in origin, rather than French. The three traveled to New Orleans to study architecture in the city, particularly the

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Absinthe House, French Quarter, New Orleans, ca. 1806. Ricciuti, New Orleans and its Environs: The Domestic Architecture, 1727–1870, plate 8.

Country Club Estates, Inc., model house, “Latin Colonial” (Martha Nance and David Means Picton Jr. House), Chevy Chase Drive, River Oaks, 1924, John F. Staub, architect. Photograph courtesy of Alice Picton Craig.

use of ornamental nineteenth-century castiron.111 Staub purchased some scrap cast-iron to incorporate into his house designs in River Oaks, and he used it also for the 1926 River Oaks gate piers and the 1929 Junior League Building (now demolished). In 1924, Staub and Ima Hogg collaborated on their first model dwelling on Chevy Chase

Drive. Their design exhibited a shared fondness for New Orleans architecture. Advertised as being “Latin Colonial,” a term Staub used to describe this creole type of architecture, the speculative house was modeled after the ca. 1806 Absinthe House in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which Staub transformed for twentieth-century use.112 In Staub’s 1930 essay,

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“Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” he explained why he fused the two styles and why it was appropriate for Houston’s climate: “Our Gulf Coast possesses a rare heritage in the rich deposit of French and Spanish work and the later development of the Greek Revival. Southeast Texas is climatically associated with Louisiana rather than with Southwest Texas or New Mexico.”113 The hipped roof of the Latin Colonial is taller than the prototype, and the height of the ground floor openings are much shorter, as the Absinthe House had a mezzanine above its ground floor that Staub’s design did not. Borrowed from the prototype are the antique cast-iron railings, which form the shallow ornamental second-level balcony and the arched openings filled with fanlights, and French doors, providing very large openings for the living room and dining room facing south to obtain a southeast breeze. Staub later said in an interview: I felt that down here in Texas, inside and outdoors were sort of tied together. That’s why a great many of the houses have so many openings that go right into the garden. I felt that in this climate where we live outside—more in those days than we do now—the outside was an important part.114 Staub and Ima Hogg, feeling that “one of the greatest contributing factors to the romantic charm of these old houses is their color,” chose so-called New Orleans colors of pale apricot for the stucco walls and dark blue-green for the shutters.115 Embellished by the second-floor balcony that was supported by stepped iron consoles, the three-bay house partially conceals a rear addition to the house that Staub designed in the 1930s. The main elevation of the house faces south, with the living room joining an enclosed

loggia east of the central hall. West of the hall, the dining room was placed in front of a pantry and a kitchen. There were three bedrooms and a sleeping porch on the second floor. Access to the backyard was from the living room onto the covered loggia on the east end, the coolest place in the house, which relates to Staub’s comments about living indoors and outdoors in Houston. Originally, the concrete slab spanned the entire footprint of the house to prevent dampness, and it rested on reinforced concrete pilings that were placed five to six feet into the hard clay subsoil. Each of the pilings was tied to another by steel reinforcing rods “thus tying the home firmly to the earth beneath, much after the fashion of downtown sky-scrapers.”116 The care given to the construction must have been due to concern over possible instability of the soft topsoil and the effects of Houston’s notorious humidity. Even the timber studs that frame the walls of the house were joined to the plate by tongueand-groove joints securing the wall framing to its foundation. The house was designed and built to present an accurate example of an urban New Orleans building type, with the first floor essentially laid on top of the ground. Staub and Ima Hogg also selected such building materials as cypress and oak for the window sash and sills and expensive copper sheet metal work for the flashings, gutters, and downspouts. The roof shingles were “made of asbestos, then coated with slate, then with copper,” and they thought that the roof would “last indefinitely.”117 In the interior, five coats of paint covered the walls on the first floor and four coats upstairs, with fireplaces on both levels faced in slate and brick. Perhaps they overspent on this model house because Potter commented to Will Hogg, “I do not think it [the Latin Colonial] can be sold except in trade.”118 He suggested that they lease the house to one of their present property

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Country Club Estates, Inc., model house, “Latin Colonial,” floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

owners, who were planning to build a house in River Oaks and could live in the Latin Colonial while their house was under construction. In the meantime, they could show the house for sale and make a provision in the lease that would cancel out the lease within thirty days if the Latin Colonial sold. Potter explained, “In this way we would get the house occupied, the grounds and house kept up without expense to us, the insurance rate substantially reduced, and the public would generally not know whether it was leased or sold . . . the house would look more attractive to a purchaser . . . if furnished and occupied.”119 In the beginning, Will Hogg did not

Country Club Estates, Inc. model house, “Latin Colonial,” interior views. Chillman, “A Blending of Periods in Harmonious Design,” 9.

want to furnish the house, but he changed his mind and every room was furnished, mainly with antique reproductions from the Stowers Furniture Company, shortly after the model house was completed in 1926.120 Photographs of the main stair hall, living room, dining room, and master bedroom were illustrated in the February issue of Civics for Houston. American Colonial Revival furnishings, combined with English and French antique reproductions, filled the rooms. The main stair hall featured an armchair and side table, which had a Chippendale mirror above it, the most ornamental piece in the room. A view of

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the living room shows the northwest corner of the room filled with reproduction furnishing in various styles. A round-arched built-in bookcase emulates the floor-length opening facing north, which was fitted with glazed French doors that matched those of the main façade. In the dining room, a grandfather clock was placed against the west wall, along with a Sheraton dining room set and sideboard. The most prominent piece of furniture in the master bedroom was the Hepplewhite four-post bed and its bed dressings. Although reproductions, the furniture in this house reflected Will and Ima Hogg’s taste for collecting American antique furniture. In 1927, Mike Hogg’s friend and attorney, David Means Picton Jr. and his wife Martha Nance Picton, purchased the residence. Thus, the Latin Colonial was never leased. Picton was also a business associate of Will Hogg’s and a partner in Ingleside, the deepwater port development in Corpus Christi Bay from which oil tankers docked and sailed. The Pictons lived in the house for sixty-one years and raised seven daughters in it.121 Subsequent owners made significant changes to the house, creating a design that can no longer be said to be the work of Staub. Intended for a more conservative buyer, the second model house designed by Staub in 1925, on Chevy Chase Drive, was in the Federal style, or, as it was referred to in a River Oaks Corporation advertisement, the “Early Republic” style.122 The label must have come from Fiske Kimball’s 1922 book, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic.123 The model house was described as a “large, hospitable structure, set upon a smooth slightly terraced lawn which is dignified by stately pines.”124 New Orleans ironwork scraps from the Latin Colonial were used to create

the semicircular inset in the fanlight above the front door, which is flanked by sidelights. Five bays wide, the house’s white-painted brick walls were articulated by elongated pilasters and “warmed with flecks and tints of the ruddy brick beneath.”125 Costing almost $24,000 to build and priced at $39,000, including the furnishings, the house upon its completion was the most expensive model built in River Oaks.126 Hoping to encourage others to move into River Oaks, Potter and his wife Lucille purchased the house in 1926 after it had been on the market for eight months. He wrote to Will Hogg, “I am taking Staub No. 2, and am moving into it now. . . . It doesn’t exactly suit my needs, but it is close enough, and I think it almost essential for me to live in River Oaks.”127 In plan, the house is almost identical to the Latin Colonial; however, it is more rectangular, as Staub was making changes with regard to style, not plans. It is likely that the similarity in the placement and size of rooms of the two houses was an effort to climatically control the ventilation, but they differ in that the Early Republic house was built on a pier and beam foundation. Both of the model houses on Chevy Chase Drive are still standing. For Staub and his wife Madeline’s own house, built in 1926, on Del Monte Drive, he adapted certain New England characteristics by combining brick and clapboard and using a Connecticut River Valley door motif.128 Ornamentation was limited to the broad white doorframe beneath an oversized scrolled pediment. Imparting a vertical emphasis to the design are steep roofs, sharp gables, and a tall, banded chimney. The interior plan was not adopted from New England for, as Staub noted, it was “designed for a hot climate so the living, dining and master bedrooms all had three exposures for maximum air circulation.”129 It differs in plan from the model

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Country Club Estates, Inc., model house (Lucille and Hugh Potter House), Chevy Chase Drive, River Oaks, 1925, John F. Staub, architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson.

Country Club Estates, Inc., model house, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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Mrs. John F. Staub House, Del Monte Drive, River Oaks, 1926, John F. Staub, architect (author).

Mrs. John F. Staub House, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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houses, especially in the first-floor room arrangement, which has a small vestibule and no central hall. The living room was placed on a transverse

axis, rather than a longitudinal one, and access to the porch on the rear elevation of the house was through the living room.

The Sewall House Between 1923 and 1926, Blanche Harding Sewall commissioned Ralph Adams Cram of the firm Cram & Ferguson, who designed the Rice Institute, to design one of the first Spanish Colonial Revival houses built in Houston and the first in River Oaks for her and her husband, the cotton factor wholesale grocer Cleveland Sewall.130 The two-story, red-tile-roofed house is faced in pale pink stucco over its extremely thick walls and sited on a six-acre triple lot on Inwood Drive. Mrs. Sewall, a native of Fort Worth and a 1917 graduate of the Rice Institute, was an artist, a philanthropist, a patron of the arts, and the founder of the Library of Arts at Rice Institute.131 As a founding member of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she probably encountered Cram, who served as a consulting architect, when he and William Ward Watkin were in the process of designing the museum building between 1922 and 1924. In 1922, Cram had written a series of articles on Spanish architecture, published in The American Architect, and some of the architectural fea-

tures he described in his articles were integrated into the Sewall House, including the thick walls and the ornamentation in the living and dining rooms.132 The Sewall House design differs from other Houston Spanish Colonial Revival houses in its grand scale and the vertical character of its massing. In contrast to Hugh E. Prather’s highly ornamented Spanish Revival house of 1923, the exterior of the Sewall House is nearly devoid of ornamentation, the exception being the classically inspired surround of the voussoired round-arched front doorframe. On each side of the doorframe, Tuscan columns rise to meet an entablature framing a plaque set between two large urns with asymmetrical fenestration and decorated by wrought-iron grills. The plan of the house is in the form of a T, with a service wing canted to the northeast. The entrance hall contains the main stair, with the living room to the west and the dining room to the north. The plans show that the rectangular living room has a teak floor, measures approximately 31 by 21

Blanche Harding and Cleveland Sewall House, dining room. Cram and Ferguson, The Work of Cram and Ferguson, Architects, including Work by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, 337.

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Blanche Harding and Cleveland Sewall House, Inwood Drive, River Oaks, 1923–1926, Ralph Adams Cram, architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson.

Blanche Harding and Cleveland Sewall House, first-floor plan. Courtesy of Stephen Fox.

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Blanche Harding and Cleveland Sewall House, second-floor plan. Courtesy of Stephen Fox.

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feet, and is flanked by flagstone terraces on the north and west. A stenciled, exposed wooden joist ceiling, or artesonado, ornaments the living room. Throughout the rest of the first floor are tile floors. The second-floor plan shows three bedrooms, the master suite with a sleeping porch above the living room, a library above the dining room, and Mrs. Sewall’s studio above the servant wing. In their 1925 book, Provincial Houses in Spain, Mildred Stapley and Arthur Byne recommended the Spanish house “because it is so simple, to adapt it to the needs of the twentieth century. . . . A style that minimizes the use of expensive materials and makes but limited demands on expert handicraft is worth the consideration in a country where material is costly and where good craftsmanship is not yet an age-old tradition.”133 It is obvious that Mrs. Sewall read their book because, upon completion of the house, the Bynes accompanied her to Spain to acquire furniture and artifacts. In May 1928, photographs of the house and gardens taken by Calvin Wheat were featured in Will Hogg’s magazine, Civics for Houston, and the 1929 book, The Work of Cram and Ferguson, Architects, including Work by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, contained photographs

of the entrance approach, entrance hall, and two views of the dining room.134 The photographs show the use, throughout the main floor, of wooden beam ceilings, decorative wood doors and interior shutters, and highly decorative and colorful tile work, including a tile dado in the entrance hall, which continues up the stair. The dining room was ornamented by a vaulted ceiling, a tile floor, a tile surround around the fireplace, tile wainscoting, and an elaborate Moorish-type tile fountain in a niche on one wall. In sixteenth-century Andalusian houses, such a fountain would have been called a lavabo, or wash basin.135 The border frame of the wash basin is of green and blue floral tiles, with the inset covered in larger square tiles with a repetitive pattern of white flowers amidst green leaves. The dining room was furnished with a long, rectangular Spanish-style wooden trestle dining room table topped by two large silver candelabra, wrought-iron sconce lighting fixtures, and heavy wooden doors, all setting the tone of a Spanish villa. Blanche Sewall also had a great interest in gardening, and in the 1930s, she hired the New York landscape architect Ellen Shipman to design their gardens.136

Homewoods In July 1925, Will Hogg sent out fifty-four special delivery letters to prospective buyers to announce the opening of an elite ninety-acre tract of “wooded shade and quietude” in a “residential retreat.” 137 He called it “the choicest property within the boundaries of River Oaks, which for natural beauty, natural protection, immediate access, and park-way approach, can never be duplicated in Houston.”138 Will Hogg believed it would be “the most ambitious 90-

acre secluded residential area that I know of in the South.”139 He first labeled the retreat Contentment, then referred to it as Woodside, and finally settled on the name Homewoods in early 1926.140 Its boundaries are Buffalo Bayou to its north, the River Oaks golf course to its west, and Inwood and Kirby Drives to its south and east, respectively. Designed by Herbert A. Kipp, Homewoods was restricted to fifteen estates varying from 3

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Plat map of Homewoods, River Oaks, 1926, Herbert A. Kipp, engineer. CN_10632. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

to 14.25 acres in size, with a little more than six acres for the winding Lazy Lane and sidewalks and three acres for a park.141 By this time, Kipp had been named vice president of the Country Club Estates, and he supervised the development of almost all of River Oaks from 1926 to 1947, initially in consultation with Hare & Hare.142 Compared to Kipp’s plan for Shadyside of ten years earlier, Homewoods had more land on which to design much larger, irregularly shaped lots and enlarged what was called The Court in Shadyside to a three-acre central park, Homewoods Park. Prices ranged from thirty-five thousand to eighty thousand dollars for each lot, depend-

ing on the amount of acreage purchased because some of the owners wanted more or less acreage, and changes were made to the original lot sizes to accommodate them.143 The terms of payment were 25 percent cash on closing with the balance due in four years. In a confidential letter to Judge Frederick C. Proctor, a future Homewoods homeowner, Will Hogg described the property as secluded yet accessible to downtown within ten minutes via Buffalo Bayou Drive. He stated: Here we will build our permanent home on the same terms that are offered to you. . . . We would welcome you as a neighbor and hope you will

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participate in this underwriting which, aside from the alluring means of obtaining a restful and charming environment for our family life, will contribute materially to the rapid growth and unequalled success of the entire River Oaks development which we appraise as a wonderful and charming adjunct to Houston’s metropolitan growth.144 Homewoods was never advertised, shown to the general public, or shown by their River Oaks Corporation sales representatives. Ownership was offered exclusively by invitation to purchasers who shared in a “community of interest.” Acting as the secretary of the Homewoods homeowners association, Will Hogg requested that those interested in the property contact him directly and he would “take pleasure in explaining every feature of the proposal in person.”145 Will Hogg played the role at Homewoods that J. S. Cullinan had at Shadyside, exercising control over whom he allowed to live in this section of River Oaks. On April 10, 1926, Potter filed the “Agreement Creating a Residential Retreat

in River Oaks, Houston for Homewoods” at the Harris County Courthouse, in which he outlined thirty-three conditions, restrictions, and reservations to be signed and notarized by each property owner, a twenty-one-year contract not to exceed a period beyond December 31, 1975.146 Potter, Mike Hogg, and Judge Proctor served as the trustees in this agreement, based on restrictions similar to those in Shadyside, although only the trustees were to maintain the improvement of sidewalks and streets, street lights, and utilities, and the care of unimproved land, trees, and grass outside homeowners’ property lines. Property owners were not allowed to participate in these duties, whereas Shadyside property owners had the authority to do so.147 Among the restrictions, purchasers were required to build on their lots within a three-year period, no temporary structures were permitted, and no signs were allowed to be posted on their property. After a disappointing response to Homewoods, Potter acknowledged, “We are going to find it difficult to dispose of these estates because of their large size.”148

Homewoods: Bayou Bend In 1926, Will Hogg purchased the largest lot, C, which was over fourteen acres, for $61,078.07. On this lot he, Mike, and Ima Hogg would build their family house, Bayou Bend.149 Given the dispute over lot Q in Shadyside, Will Hogg sought to make a much grander expression for the site of his family house and asked his sister to take responsibility for the project, adding that she could decide on the layout of the house and gardens. Ima Hogg named Bayou Bend and mainly worked with Staub, in association with Briscoe, in the planning and design of the house between 1926 and 1928.150

Set well back and hidden from the street by trees and shrubbery at the end of a winding drive, the twenty-eight-room, pink stucco “plantation” house presented a more fully realized version of the Platt and Lindeberg country house and provided an incentive for others to build grand houses in Homewoods. The construction cost of Bayou Bend was approximately $217,000. According to Staub, Bayou Bend is “really English Regency with a New Orleans flavor.”151 The austere, minimally detailed exterior walls and tall chimney stacks were derived from simple yet elegant neoclassical nineteenth-

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Miss Ima Hogg House, “Bayou Bend,” north elevation, 2940 Lazy Lane, Homewoods, 1926–1928, John F. Staub and Birdsall P. Briscoe, architects. RG08-341-001: Photograph by Rick Gardner, courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Archives.

Miss Ima Hogg House, “Bayou Bend,” floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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century English designs built during the reign of George IV. The use of cast-iron porches, balconies, and railings with floor-length windows was associated with nineteenth-century New Orleans, creating a blend of styles in an eclectic manner characteristic of the 1920s. For the most impressive external feature, the giant order portico of the garden façade, Staub appears to have looked at Greek Revival plantation houses in his native state for inspiration, particularly to Belle Meade, south of Nashville, built in 1853 for John Harding. Staub duplicated the parapet detailing of the Tennessee house, but modified the columnation, using four round Doric columns instead of the six square columns at Belle Meade. On the arrival front of the house, Staub placed an arched door frame flanked by Doric columns, derived from the front door of the 1803 Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike the original, however, Staub’s front door is inset, which projects slightly from the wall surface, and above it is a decorative cast-iron balcony rail. Staub’s eclectic approach to design is also apparent on the interior of Bayou Bend, where he cleverly modified a historic plan inspired by the parti of the one-story country house, Homewood, built in 1801 outside Baltimore for Charles Carroll. Bayou Bend was organized in a formal block plan with dependencies and arranged to separate Ima Hogg’s section of the house from that of her brothers. The central section of Bayou Bend contains the dining and living rooms, as was the case at Homewood, but Staub deleted the out-of-date parlor and greatly expanded the size of the living room and stair hall, which extends the entire depth of the house and opens onto the rear portico and terrace, further freeing up access from the public rooms to the landscape grounds. The wings spanning from the core of Bayou Bend repeat the Homewood arrangement, with the west

wing devoted to the kitchen and service rooms, separating them from the house’s private spaces. The east wing departed from the Homewood model, which contained bedrooms. The Bayou Bend east wing instead housed a library from which one entered Will and Mike Hogg’s bachelors’ living room, taproom, and kitchen, with their bedrooms directly above them. Placed on the east wall of the bachelors’ apartments was a two-story, cast-iron porch that provided a covered outdoor living space. Separated from her brothers’ suite of rooms by the upper end of the stair hall and the sitting room, Ima Hogg’s bedroom was set above the living room. Her adjoining sitting room overlooked the north gardens, with her maid’s room directly across the hall from her bedroom, facing south, with a guest’s bedroom and a sitting room above the west service wing. Bayou Bend took advantage of the site, which sloped north toward Buffalo Bayou, with the house placed on high ground and the gardens cascading down from it in a manner in which Louisiana plantation houses were often sited along a river or bayou. Throughout the South in the 1920s, during what has been termed the “Southern Garden Renaissance,” there was a renewed interest in the revival of antebellum gardens, when domestic gardening became a popular pastime.152 Both Will and Ima Hogg had a passion for gardening, making their own sketches for Bayou Bend’s grounds and encouraging gardening activities in the subdivision as well as in the city.153 In 1927, the River Oaks Garden Club was organized with Ima Hogg as one of the early members. After working with the Houston landscape architect Ruth London to design the east garden of Bayou Bend, the Azalea Garden, Ima Hogg helped organize the annual Azalea Trail in 1936, which was open to the public.154 After Will Hogg died in 1930,

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Mike Hogg married and bought Dogwoods, the house next door, which was formerly owned by Judge Frederick C. Proctor. Ima Hogg, who never married, became the sole occupant of Bayou Bend. In 1957, she donated the house and her collection of American decorative arts to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in 1961, the River Oaks Garden Club began the

maintenance of her gardens.155 The Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens were opened yearround to the public in 1966 after Staub, again working with Ima Hogg, completed alterations to the house to accommodate its new function as a house museum. She remained at Bayou Bend until 1965 and died ten years later after complications from a traffic accident in London.

Homewoods: Dogwoods In the 1920s, only one other house was built in Homewoods, a painted brick French Norman manorial residence on the nine-acre lot D next door to Bayou Bend. Called “Dogwoods,” the house was built on Lazy Lane for Judge Frederick C. Proctor and his wife, Lucy, who paid $60,750.00 for the oversized lot.156 Designed by Briscoe in 1928, Dogwoods—with its steeply pitched roofs, tall chimney stacks, and round entry tower, the point around which the façade was designed—featured an elongated, secondstory window with a decorative wrought-iron balcony above the front door. The design was very vertical in its massing, which disguised the unusual floor plan. The footprint of the house was in the form of an H, but, in an asymmetrical arrangement, the left side of the house was

advanced forward, while the right side was set back at the juncture of the entry and hall. The entry hall contained a spiral stair and was connected to a living room, facing south, attached to a living porch on its left. The book room, or library, stood behind the living room and had entrances from the living room and the hall. The master bedroom, sleeping porch, two bathrooms, and large closets were above these rooms. To the right of the downstairs hall was the dining room, also with a southern exposure, with the pantry and kitchen behind it. Upstairs were two bedrooms and two baths. Mike Hogg married Alice Nicholson, from Dallas, in 1929, and they purchased Dogwoods in 1931.157 Mike Hogg lived in the house, which has been demolished, until his death in 1941.

Houston’s West-End Most well-to-do Houstonians were skeptical of the west side development, preferring to reside in the South End near the Rice Institute. Because River Oaks was surrounded by undeveloped land and farms, few believed that the west side of the city had potential. Will Hogg’s plan for River Oaks was only a part of his vision for the entire conversion of the west side of Hous-

ton. In their 1925 newspaper advertisement, Our Story of River Oaks, Hogg Brothers stated that they conceived River Oaks as “more than a mere commercial real estate company; we aim to make it a permanent civic corporation, closely identified with Houston’s progress and improvements.”158 They pointed out that “the beauty and civic efficiency of American cities in

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Proctor-Hogg House, “Dogwoods,” Lazy Lane, Homewoods, 1928, Birdsall P. Briscoe, architect (demolished). MS19-054-002: Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Archives.

Dogwoods, first-floor plan. Courtesy of James Charles Susman, “The Architecture of Birdsall Parmenas Briscoe,” 56.

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general has been blighted by failure to foresee, to gauge, and to direct the dynamic rapidity of their growth and expansion.” Furthermore, they claimed, “[t]he hit-or-miss fashion of making small acreage developments of fine homes—has marred every city in the United States that has attained the size of Houston today.” It was recorded in the “Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting of the Country Club Estates,” held at Potter’s office on March 30, 1925, that Will Hogg was “imbued with a strong yen to get ‘West-End’ stamped on that sector of property occupied by River Oaks from the bayou south to Richmond Road and east to Taft Street.” During the meeting, Will Hogg said, “Let’s brand that neighborhood as the ‘West-End’ for there may come a time when we will run cooperative advertising.” He continued, “We may want to carry the slogan—‘Go west, young man.’” Furthermore, he noted, some of the finest residential districts in the United States and Europe were known as “West-End,” and the name could be a “trade mark” for generating prestige. To begin the improvements of the west side of the city, Will Hogg organized the West-End Improvement Association in 1925. This was “an organization of all the owners of the undeveloped property on the west side to bring about the careful planning and zoning of residential Houston as it takes its inevitable course westward.”159 Will Hogg hosted a barbecue on May 2 for people living in the western section of Houston to outline his plans for his newly formed West-End Improvement and Development As-

sociation. His goals for the organization were to banish free-ranging cattle and hogs; widen and pave roads; remove signs, unsightly structures, and fences; plant and protect trees and shrubbery; prevent dumping; install street lighting and drainage; implement general restrictions on the entire district; and prepare a comprehensive working plan to be laid out and supervised by the City Planning Commission and Herbert  A. Kipp, with Hare & Hare as consulting engineers.160 In a letter to Hugh E. Prather, Will Hogg wrote that he wanted to change the name of Westheimer Road to West-End Drive, and he proposed naming a high school in the area the West-End High School.161 The Hoggs and Potter felt strongly that the public regulation of private property would “prevent the erection of barbecue pig stands or large apartment hotels” and preclude “grocery stores, filling stations and chili joints from crowding at random among private residences.”162 The developers thought that once the city of Houston adopted a zoning code, zoning would stabilize land use patterns in their residential community, as well as in the rest of Houston. As Will Hogg wrote to Potter, “we are interested in Houston first, the success of River Oaks second, your advancement third, and our own compensation last.”163 As each section of River Oaks was improved and opened to the public for sale, it was annexed by the city of Houston. Unfortunately, Will Hogg’s master plan for the so-called West-End was never implemented.

River Oaks: Section One On March 15, 1926, a “Room for All Pre-­ tional 134 lots, which nearly doubled the numdevelopment Sale” was announced for a new ber of house sites. The advertisement called extension of River Oaks that added an addi- for purchasers to file their reservations soon, —  20 1  —

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as the developers were aware of the quick sale of lots in 1924 in Highland Park West’s Country Club Section. Prices would advance to full market value at the end of the sale. The corporation promoted this section in an advertisement: “Every purchaser who secures a River Oaks homesite at this sale is assured of a profitable increase in value.”164 Kirby Drive runs through the middle of the property northeast to Pine Valley Drive, with its small, irregularly shaped, round park, Pine Valley Court, then out to meet Buffalo Drive. The eastern boundary of the addition was Piping Rock Road, which Ima Hogg later renamed Chilton Road “for sentimental reasons.”165 Inwood and Del Monte Drives were extended east from the lots facing River Oaks Boulevard to Kirby Drive, and lots in Block 40 on Skokie Drive (renamed Pelham) served as the addition’s southern boundary. Blocks 41, 42, and 54 were shown in the advertisement as reserved for an unspecified use, while a 14.8-acre section between Kirby Drive and Block 10 was reserved for a park and recreation ground. The smallest lots were 65 feet in width by 150 feet in depth, with larger lots having frontages from 100 to 135 feet. Prices started from $1,950—or twenty-four to thirty cents per square foot—with all taxes paid to 1927.166 “A River Oaks homesite,” the advertisement claimed, was “within the reach of almost anyone.”167 Potter and the corporation’s secretary, Ethel B. Brosius, with advice from Kipp, wrote “Reservations, Restrictions, and Covenants in River Oaks, Houston, Texas” for Blocks 31–40, which were recorded by the Harris County Clerk on March 15, 1926, signed by Potter and Mrs. Brosius, and enforced until January 1, 1955. To renew the restrictions, a written declaration had to be recorded with the county five years prior to this date. The county would extend them for a period of ten years and “then similarly, for suc-

cessive additional periods of ten as often and as long as the owners of the majority of the square feet of the property may desire.”168 The general restrictions stipulated that no single-family residences could be built fewer than two stories in height, with the exception of twelve lots in Block 39, and thirteen lots in Block 40.169 These restrictions extended to the building lines that included garages, galleries, porches, porte cochères, and every other permanent improvement. No property could be conveyed to any person other than of the Caucasian race (in the renewal of 1985, this restriction was deleted); no trash or other refuse could be dumped on a vacant lot; no livestock were permitted with the exception of rabbits or poultry and only by written permission; no building materials could be placed on a lot until construction of the house commenced; vacant lots had to be maintained with lawns mowed and kept in a “neat and attractive manner”; fences had to be approved and could not be more than four feet in height; and no signs, billboards, posters, or advertising could be erected without written permission. Violation of any restriction would result in the corporation’s right to enter the property and remove the violation at the owner’s expense, and only the River Oaks Corporation had the right to modify or release any restriction. Houses were required to be built at a cost of no less than $7,500 on the least expensive nine lots in Block 40 on Pelham Drive, with price restrictions from $12,000, $15,000, and $18,000 on others. The most expensive building sites were one lot in Block 32, which faced Kirby Drive, and two lots in Block 35, which faced Pine Valley Drive, on which the corporation placed requirements for houses to be built at a cost of no less than $20,000. Setbacks varied between 35 to 75 from the front property line, depending on the lot and its location.

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Plat of River Oaks and vicinity, Houston, Texas, revised July 1957. Photograph courtesy of River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection. For a larger version of this plat, please see http://utpress.utexas.edu/images/RiverOaksPlat.pdf.

On April 11, 1926, the Houston Chronicle reported that “more than half a million dollars worth of homesites in River Oaks changed ownership on that day alone” and “brought a new real estate record to Houston for the largest day’s sale of residential property ever made in this part of the United States.”170 In the same issue of the newspaper, a publicity photograph published in a supplement called “River Oaks, The Fountain in Sleepy Hollow Court” showed the landscaping at the southern end of the culde-sac. “Another Low-Price Pre-development Sale in River Oaks” was announced on May 9, as the “record-breaking sale in April could not supply the demand for moderate priced River Oaks homesites. We have prepared more—to be

improved in the same thorough way . . . for FIVE DAYS ONLY—and MORE THAN A MILE NEARER TO TOWN than most of the homes in River Oaks.”171 This was the corporation’s second and final spring sale, with lot prices starting a little higher than the first, at twenty-two hundred dollars and up.172 At this point, the slogans that Will Hogg suggested for advertising River Oaks were: “Drive Thru River Oaks,” “A Residential Park,” and “Homes for All Time.”173 In a move similar to the Flippen-Prather Realty Company’s planting of oak trees in Highland Park West, Will Hogg planned to transplant approximately two thousand to three thousand small oak trees in this relatively barren section of the subdivision.174 Gardens and the planting

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of trees were important elements to beautify the neighborhood, especially since trees were desirable, slow in growth, and needed to be planted early.175 Not only were the advisory services of Mason C. Coney, the corporation’s landscape architect, available gratis to all property owners, but a staff of handymen, yardmen, and horticulturists were also available for hire. In promotional literature, the corporation stated: “If a housewife wishes the windows washed in her home, the lawn mowed, or a new coat of paint applied to the garden gate, all she has to do is call the River Oaks office and let her wants be known.”176 Because River Oaks initially seemed to be so far outside Houston, this promotion provided on-site workers and was an incentive for property owners to take care of their houses and yards. By maintaining River Oaks with such discrimination, the River Oaks Corporation had the advantage, like Highland Park, of keeping property values high. In other advertisements, they suggested, “Successful men . . . are just as keen in the field of Home Investment as in others. . . . If you build a better home at a moderate cost, River Oaks will reward each dollar you spend with extra value—and endow your family with unsurpassed and increasing enjoyment thereof. . . . There is but one such community in Houston.”177 The corporation noted in advertisements that work had begun, under the supervision of Kipp, on the paving, water, electrical circuits, sanitary and storm sewers, and telephone and telegraph lines. In 1926, natural gas became available to every house site, the first domestic use of this

fuel in the city. It had been reported in the March 2, 1926, Houston Chronicle that natural gas lines had been installed in the first section of River Oaks. “The first meal to be cooked in River Oaks by natural gas was for Mr. and Mrs. J. S. Marshall, 3215 Avalon Place [the speculative house designed by Northrop], Monday evening . . . turned on by the officials of the Houston Natural Gas Company.”178 The corporation began to provide police protection for their residents, as well as fire-fighting service. In addition, the River Oaks Line, the first express bus service in Texas, operated on an hourly schedule, and it took fewer than fifteen minutes to deliver passengers from the River Oaks Country Club to Main Street downtown. Welch Avenue had been recently paved to Shepherd Drive, improving another street leading to downtown, and a second bus line, the Welch-Webster, opened along this route. In Our Story of River Oaks, Chapter II, the developers stated, “A new formal gateway, the eastern entrance to River Oaks, will soon be built where Buffalo Drive crosses Shepherd Drive. With only three cross streets between River Oaks and Walker Avenue downtown, this gateway is actually nearer Texas-and-Main than is the entrance to Hermann Park on Main Street itself.”179 Not mentioned in the booklet was that Staub, who was serving as their consulting architect, was the designer of the gateway. Soon to be open to the public, both the one-hundred-foot-wide Buffalo and Kirby Drives were then being paved with asphalt on concrete, with their center esplanades planted in grass.180

River Oaks Corporation’s Consulting Architect: Charles W. Oliver In a letter to “All River Oaks Property Owners” of May 10, 1926, Potter announced the services

of Charles W. Oliver, “as community consulting architect[,] are now at the disposal of any River

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Oaks property owner without charge. . . . [And he] is now a member of the Country Club Estates staff, with offices in the Country Club Estates Building.”181 “He will supervise all building done by and for our company . . . his services are at your disposal prior to your selection of an architect . . . upon the standard fee basis.”182 Furthermore, the announcement stated, “This letter marks the official opening of our new Department of Architecture and Building under Mr. Oliver’s direction, a department which we believe will be an important and useful addition to the community service in landscape gardening which has been in effect for more than a year.” That service, under the direction of the landscape architect Mason C. Coney, “has been exceptionally useful.” Potter described Oliver as “one of the principal architects in the Russell Brown organization for six years,” and noted that “four of the homes in the Spanish, English, and Early American styles of architecture, which have been built by Russell Brown in River Oaks, were done from plans drawn by Mr. Oliver.”183 Oliver employed many styles—including Tudor, English, French, Dutch, Colonial Revivals, and Louisiana plantation houses—in designing houses for the River Oaks Corporation and individual clients, but his personal favorite seems to have been the Spanish Mediterranean Revival. Though influenced by the work of George Washington Smith, Oliver was mostly inspired by the work of Wallace Neff. He embraced Neff’s playfulness, spatial juxtapositions, diminutive scale, and his flamboyantly theatrical approach to Spanish domestic architecture. Integrated into Oliver’s designs were the picturesque elements of curved wall surfaces, shallow roof pitches, low-slung eaves, spur walls and low gateways, and outdoor stairs with curved stucco parapets leading to small balconies. Oliver

chose to ornament interiors with exposed ceiling beams made of untrimmed logs, wroughtiron fixtures, broken-tile paving, and stair landings that overlooked scenic landscapes. Pierre L. Michael, owner of the Houston Poster Advertising Company and a real estate investor, and his wife Adele retained Oliver in 1926 to design a Spanish Mediterranean stucco house. 184 It was built on one of the smaller lots in the subdivision on Bellmeade Road in Country Club Estates. Pleased by the design, Potter wrote to Will Hogg: “The house he [Oliver] is about to complete for Michael is the only small Spanish type structure I have seen anywhere that really looked decent. Michael insisted upon a Spanish job on a small house, and Oliver has done it excellently.”185 In 1927, the house and its plans, along with photographs of the interiors, were published in Southern Architect and Building News.186 Spanish details are evidenced in the open flagstone terraces, ornamental grills of iron and masonry, one-quarter round turret, and decorative wrought-iron loggia and balcony railings. Casement windows of multiple shapes pierce the textured walls of the house, which is covered by a red-tiled roof with two chimneys rising from it.187 A curving flagstone walk leads from the street to a doorway that contains a bracketshaped embrasured arch with a rustic paneled door, resembling an antique form from an old Spanish house. Following the asymmetry of the exterior, the asymmetrical interior plan had a dining room, living room, lounge, kitchen, pantry, and small entrance vestibule on the first level. Outdoor terraces or outdoor living spaces opened out from the dining room and the living room. The Spanish theme continued into the living room in arched openings and doorways, tiled floors, and an ornamental wrought-iron rail between the vestibule and the living room,

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Adele and Pierre L. Michael House, Bellmeade Road, River Oaks, 1926, Charles W. Oliver, architect (author).

Adele and Pierre L. Michael House, first-floor plan. River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection. Courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew McFarland.

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as well as wrought-iron sconces. On the second floor, there were three bedrooms and two bathrooms, all above the right-hand side of the house, with the master bedroom opening onto two balconies, one facing north and another facing west. As one of their marketing strategies, the River Oaks Corporation submitted newspaper articles to publicize the opening of new houses. On November 21, 1926, an article appeared in the

Houston Chronicle reporting that the “Pierre Michael House Opens.” By the end of 1926, Oliver had so many commissions, he had to hire a draftsman to keep up with his work. According to the River Oaks Corporation Sales Department, “there will be plenty of building activity this spring, especially in the new section, and our architectural department should get a good share of this work.”188

River Oaks: Section Two Section Two was opened on July 1, 1926, with the “Additional Reservations, Restrictions and Covenants in River Oaks Addition Supplementing Resolution of March 15, 1926,” filed and recorded with the Harris County Clerk’s office.189 These required some houses to be built at a cost of no less than fifteen thousand dollars, with the general restrictions and setbacks remaining the same as those for Section One. With the addition of these eighty-four lots, Blocks 40–48, the total number of lots placed on the market for sale in 1926 was 218. According to the River Oaks Corporation, more than three hundred families had purchased lots in their subdivision.190 To make the community more attractive, Potter offered property owners trees at wholesale prices through the Edward Teas Nursery. The success of River Oaks had been established and, with the opening of these sections, the Hogg family now had eastern and southern buffers for Homewoods. On October 5, 1927, the Houston Post reported that Oliver had spent two weeks visiting American cities—including Kansas City, Denver, and Salt Lake City—to study suburban house design. He spent three days in Beverly Hills, perhaps examining Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean houses. Eloise and

Charles Oliver’s own house was built in Section Two in 1927 on Pelham Drive. When construction began, the River Oaks Corporation published and distributed an announcement illustrated with a perspective drawing of the house, a practice for advertising house designs the corporation deemed appropriate for River Oaks. Oliver’s design for his family was for a two-story, red-tile-roofed, rough-textured stucco house with ornamental grills and surrounded by a low, stucco wall with an iron entrance gateway. A wood-beamed ceiling covers the front porch, and a large, rough-hewn cedar lintel over the front door is ornamented by small, geometrically shaped raised panels to suggest elements taken from an old Spanish rambling farmhouse. On the first floor of the T-shaped house, there is a small entry hall, with the dining room, kitchen, pantry, guest room and bathroom in the western section of the house; a large living room fills the eastern section. The living room, as seen in a 1929 photograph, has an exposed-wooden-beam ceiling, a red-tiled floor, and a winding staircase, with various colored, patterned tiles on the risers and wrought-iron scrollwork on the mezzanine and stairway. Walls of Caen stone rise up to meet a cornice that is designed to look like hemp

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Mrs. Charles W. Oliver House, Pelham Drive, River Oaks, 1927, Charles W. Oliver, architect (author).

Mrs. Charles W. Oliver House, floor plans. “An Architect’s Own House: The House of Mrs. Charles W. Oliver, Houston, Texas,” 33.

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Mrs. Charles W. Oliver House, master bedroom. “An Architect’s Own House: The House of Mrs. Charles W. Oliver, Houston, Texas,” 31.

Mrs. Charles W. Oliver House, living room. “An Architect’s Own House: The House of Mrs. Charles W. Oliver, Houston, Texas,” 32.

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rope and from which artwork was hung. Electric wrought-iron, hand-forged lighting fixtures were designed to fit their location. Spanish rugs, furniture, and various decorative objects completed the room. At the northeastern corner of the living room is a traditional Spanish Colonial chimneypiece, described as being “reminiscent

of Mexico,” that rises into the master bedroom above it. A Spanish Colonial Revival chair, Pueblo Native American pottery, and a rug with a Western motif helped to lend a Spanish/ Mexican atmosphere to the bedroom. The Oliver House was illustrated in the October 1929 issue of American Architect.191

River Oaks: Section Three On May 2, 1927, the “Additional Reservations, Restrictions and Covenants in River Oaks Addition Supplementing Resolutions of March 15, 1926, and July 1, 1926,” written by Potter and Brosius, was filed with the Harris County Clerk for Section Three, Blocks 34–35, 49, and 51– 52, and the completion of 44–47. This section contained 210 lots, almost the same number of lots placed on the market for all of 1926.192 The new restrictions stipulated that houses must be at least two stories in height with the exception of eleven lots in Block 43 and two lots in Block 44, which were the least expensive lots in this section. Houses on the less expensive lots were to range in price from seventy-five hundred dollars to nine thousand dollars, with setbacks of either thirty-five or forty feet.193 The most expensive lots were six lots in Block 34 and nine lots in Block 53, located on Kirby Drive between Troon Road and Pine Valley Drive. Houses on these sites were required to cost from twelve thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars, with setbacks from fifty to ninety feet and built only in Colonial Revival or English styles. Among other restrictions on the expensive lots, all garages and servants’ quarters must be erected with the roof and outside walls of the same materials and colors of the main house. Also, stipulated in the restrictions was the required prompt removal of dead trees, shrubs, vines, and plants from all

building sites, with the corporation reserving the right to remove them at the owner’s expense. The lots were offered for sale at 6 percent for the first lien without commissions or fees, with all taxes and maintenance fees paid until 1928. This section was advertised with a banner that read “Live in a Park . . . Ride Home over a Parkway Drive [Buffalo Drive] with all improvements in place.”194 Lots could be reserved for twenty-five dollars from April 25th until the end of the month, and then a Pre-development sale would be held beginning May 1, 1927, for a twoday period. Prices began at $2,250, which the corporation claimed was less than $1,400 “per standard city lot,” and “Prices Advance 20% on the full market value at the close of this sale . . . this sale saving the public $200,000.”195 Potter reported to Will Hogg in a letter that eighty-six sites had been sold for a total of $320,000, and the advertising cost for the Pre-development sale was 2 percent of the sales. He added, “In general the sale was far more carefully planned and better executed than our last one [in 1926], and had the market been as good, in my judgment we would have sold 75% property offered.”196 By this time, the River Oaks Corporation had completed their corporate offices, designed by Staub and Oliver in a Latin Colonial style, at 2506–2516 River Oaks Boulevard, at the southern entrance to River Oaks. The offices

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had a decorative stuccoed gateway, designed by Staub, with wrought-iron arches supporting an iron lantern. The invitation to the opening of their offices read: “For the convenience of all residents and owners in River Oaks as well as all prospective owners, River Oaks now offers a complete residential subdivision service, housed under one roof.”197 The service included

an information bureau and departments for architecture, landscaping and home service, engineering, home financing, accounting, sales, public relations, and maintenance.198 Significantly, the River Oaks Corporation had grown to be an organization that operated much like the J.  C. Nichols Company in Kansas City. Although Staub did not design any more

River Oaks Georgian gateway, Houston, 1926, John F. Staub, architect. In the background, a view of the shopping and office complex, the River Oaks Community Center, Houston, 1927, John F. Staub and Charles W. Oliver, architects (demolished). Photograph by R. M. Luster. Riddle, River Oaks: A Pictorial Presentation of Houston’s Residential Park, 1.

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model houses for the River Oaks Corporation, he would eventually have more than thirty clients in the community. The last of his projects for the corporation was the design of a pair of Georgian gateways at River Oaks Boulevard, which appeared in a photograph in the Houston Chronicle on May 1, 1927.199 Other Staub-­ designed gateways were placed at the entrances to Kirby and Buffalo Drives and on Shepherd and Inwood Drives. In August 1927, the corporation announced that a new landscape architect had joined the River Oaks Corporation. Henry Hutchinson, a native of England, was a graduate of Kew Gardens, London, and had worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Berlin.200 O. J. Cadwallader, assistant secretary-treasurer of the River Oaks Corporation, told Will Hogg that “the new landscape man strikes me as a capable, industrious and efficient addition to our force. I don’t believe he will get in a rut.”201 In April 1927, Will Hogg asked Potter about having the Houston city limits extended to the “west side of Kirby Drive and to the north side of Westheimer, going west to Buffalo Trail, then north along the club ground property to Buffalo River.”202 Later that year, Potter responded that Mayor Oscar Holcombe wanted to wait until 1928 before annexing River Oaks to Houston.203 Potter informed Will Hogg that

“speaking among ourselves, there is an awful lot of depression talk going on in the town,” and he had “talked during the past week to most of the men in the residential real estate business and to a number of our retail and wholesale merchants . . . [and they] without exception report business is less than this time last year and prospects poor.” Potter reported that sales were slow, there had been an increase in the number of resale listings, and some purchasers who were planning to build had postponed their plans. “Of course,” he wrote, “we are taking the position here that things are normal and that such slowing up is only temporary. . . . Anyway our salesmen are apparently working harder than ever and are not discouraged.” Delighted with Oliver’s house and the Michael House, the executives of the River Oaks Corporation decided in 1927 to build the next speculative house on Bellmeade Drive in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. The model house, known as the Mediterranean Villa, proved difficult to sell and was purchased in the following year by the contractor who built the house, Charles J. Gerner of the Gerner Lumber Company and his wife Ida Mae. The Gerners had earlier bought the Northrop-designed Country Club Estates house at 3352 Del Monte Drive, but sold this house to cover the construc-

River Oaks Corporation model house, “Mediterranean Villa,” living room. Houston Chronicle, May 1, 1927. MSS 0012, River Oaks Collection, Scrapbook, Vol. 5. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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River Oaks Corporation model house, “Mediterranean Villa” (Ida Mae and Charles J. Gerner House), Bellmeade Drive, River Oaks, 1927, Charles W. Oliver, architect (demolished). “River Oaks Mediterranean Villa, Houston, Texas.” Western Architect 36, no. 12 (December 1927): plate 210.

River Oaks Corporation model house, “Mediterranean Villa,” floor plans. “River Oaks Mediterranean Villa, Houston, Texas.” Western Architect 36, no. 12 (December 1927): plate 211.

tion costs they incurred building the Mediterranean Villa.204 In this design, Oliver again evoked the romantic image of a Spanish farmhouse that had been added on to over time. The irregular character of the exterior of the house was achieved through a series of multi-level, red-tiled roof­ lines, one story in height in the main block, flanked by two-story projections at the end of the wings; a winding stucco-faced exterior stair, which led to a second-floor porch, facing south,

attached to a guest bedroom; and a variety of window shapes. The windows ranged from a hooded projection from the north wall to long, rectangular windows with pattern-work in their panes across the west façade, to more rectilinear windows with shutters on the main elevation. Some of the windows had ornamental masonry grill openings with glazing behind them. The entrance door, with its irregularly shaped raised panels and large wrought-iron handle, was set in an opening framed by ashlar blocks and flanked

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by two small wrought-iron lanterns. The side yard was surrounded by a low, stucco wall and entered from the driveway through a stucco gateway with double wooden doors and a gabled roof topped by red tiles. The piazza across the back of the V-shaped plan of the house provided access to the backyard. The center portion of the house contained the entry hall and a large, rectangular living room with a double-faced fireplace that opened on the piazza. As illustrated in the Houston Chronicle on May 1, 1927, the living room featured an open-gabled ceiling spanned by exposed wooden beams made of untrimmed logs; smooth plaster walls that had round-arched openings, some of which included decorative wrought-iron rail-

ings; a brick floor laid in a herringbone pattern; and a monumental fireplace flanked by halfround columns, which supported a horizontal member intended to resemble a tree trunk. On either side of the fireplace, French doors with a diamond-glazing pattern opened onto the rear piazza. The north wing of the house contained a dining room, pantry, kitchen, and garage with the maids’ quarters above it. In the south wing of the house, a triangular corner bathroom and two bedrooms were situated along the corridor that opened onto the piazza. The master bedroom, with a private bath, was located at the end of the wing beneath the guest bedroom and the balcony.

Potter’s 1928 Resume to Will Hogg In a monthly report dated January 6, 1928, Potter informed Will Hogg that River Oaks had been annexed to the city of Houston, and he was trying to obtain city services in River Oaks in exchange for the taxes to be paid to the city. Potter requested assistance from the city for street maintenance; the installation of storm sewers on Shepherd Drive, West Gray Avenue, and San Felipe Road; and the repair of potholes on Buffalo Drive, which were apparently the result of poor engineering work when it was built. He also sought the city’s support in the maintenance of water lines and service, street lighting (which could not be installed until five years after annexation), police protection, and a bridge across Buffalo Bayou.205 Mayor Holcombe “after first demurring” responded by sending two mounted police to patrol the western section of the city and double back through River Oaks. Apparently, the biggest problem was the “troublesome cattle and parking-petting situa-

tions” because animals escaped from their pens and roamed through River Oaks, requiring that police officers round them up and take them to the city pound. When Potter asked the city engineer about the Buffalo Bayou bridge, he was told that no plans for it had crossed his desk, adding to Potter’s frustration. Potter estimated that the River Oaks maintenance had expended sixteen thousand dollars in Country Club Estates; twenty-three thousand dollars in the east sector, including Sections One, Two, and Three; and five thousand dollars for Homewoods during 1927. Potter also reported that the Houston Electric Company, the public transit corporation, had added four round trips between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. to the River Oaks express bus service, which ran from the country club to downtown. For the east sections, which now had a population greater than Country Club Estates, service on the Welch-Webster bus line was inadequate

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as it did not extend far enough into that section of River Oaks and had a “more tortuous route.” Potter was pleased with the light and telephone service provided by Houston Lighting & Power and the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, but the mail service was a problem because mail for residents was sent either to the corporation’s office or to a post office box at the downtown post office and had to be sorted and delivered by one of the corporation’s employees. Potter said he had made a proposal to the U.S. postmaster to have a post office built near River Oaks, and he, in turn, responded by sending a recommendation to the Postmaster General in Washington, D.C., for consideration. The report noted that there was an interest among homeowners in establishing a private school and that the River Oaks Garden Club, established in 1927, was meeting twice a month at different residences, with the River Oaks secretary Ethel B. Brosius or their landscape architect Henry Hutchison or both in attendance. In terms of landscaping, the corporation had purchased oak, Arizona ash, Chinese tallow, and hackberry trees, ranging in size from seven to three feet in height, and had planted five hundred in the eastern sector. In some cases, smaller trees were planted next to larger ones due to the fact that the landscape experts claimed the smaller trees would grow more rapidly than the larger ones. Houston merchants were having difficulties making deliveries to houses with no addresses posted, and, as a goodwill gesture, Potter had sent small stone blocks with aluminum numbers affixed to them for homeowners to place on their front lawns. In addition, Potter had personally telephoned every prospective resident of River Oaks and offered a year’s subscription to House and Garden. Potter wrote that the head of the advertising department, Don Riddle, “has finally struck his

stride” by establishing liaisons with the newspapers, and River Oaks was receiving “excellent news publicity.” Riddle had also developed a series of color advertisements and had placed them in three local publications: Will Hogg’s own Civics for Houston monthly magazine; Allen Peden’s new weekly magazine, the Houston Gargoyle (Houston’s version of the New Yorker); and Warwick Window. Potter thought the monthly cost for the advertisements, eight hundred dollars, was too high, and he planned to trim the number of ads placed each month and use less color. His goal was to keep the entire advertising budget in 1928 to thirty thousand dollars. The architecture department, Potter commented, “instead of being a burden as was originally anticipated, is really a money maker.” The most important commission at that moment for Oliver was a $35,500 Colonial Revival house on Chevy Chase Drive for the insurance company owner R. B. Bowen and his wife Sarah. Bowen was so pleased with his house that he called the River Oaks Corporation’s office and gave them names of potential prospects. Total sales in River Oaks in 1927 exceeded one million dollars, yet lot purchasers were building fewer houses. In response to this problem, the corporation developed a campaign to encourage building. Resale of lots and houses was up, as the original purchasers were making profits, and Potter suggested that the corporation take a more conservative stance on the sale of River Oaks inventory. The corporation also permitted property owners in Colby Court, the Varner Realty Company’s subdivision, to trade their property if they would buy and build in River Oaks. Potter noted that the developers of Braeswood, a garden subdivision south of downtown, were now making improvements, and there was a rumor that an advertising campaign promoting it would begin in the spring.

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One of the greatest opportunities being overlooked by the River Oaks Corporation, Potter thought, was building a River Oaks shopping center, as residents needed a grocery store, as well as other shops. But the corporation had not been able to convince a grocery company to build a store because it would take at least two years for it to make a profit in what still seemed like a remote location. He recommended that, in order to have a “first-class” grocery store and shops in the first unit of the River Oaks Community Center complex, the corporation would have to absorb the interest and depreciation for

two to three years and operate the stores as well as control their management and ownership. He told Will Hogg, “While it is unusual, it is not an experiment. It has been done elsewhere and successfully. I strongly urge that we do it now. . . . The tone of this shopping center for years to come will be determined by the first stores here.” By this time, Will Hogg was traveling frequently and Mike Hogg had begun to spend more time in Austin, busy with his duties as a state representative, leaving Potter to assume greater responsibility in running the corporation.

Honeymoon Cottage Competition On Sunday, February 26, 1928, the Houston Post-Dispatch announced an architectural competition in the Real Estate Building Section: “Post-Dispatch and River Oaks Will Build ‘Honeymoon Cottage,’ Prizes Aggregating $675 Offered for the Best Cottage Design, Antique Chest Containing $500 in Gold Given as First Prize.”206 The second prize was $100 in gold; the third was $76 in gold, with the prize money contributed by both the River Oaks Corporation and the newspaper. This so-called dream house, a starter house for hypothetical newlyweds, was to be built of brick, stone, and wood on one of the winding drives “in some quiet nook among the trees.”207 Any Houstonian would have a chance to win the competition by submitting drawings of a house and its plan, and, if needed, a rough draft could be taken to an architectural draftsman who could work out the details in accordance with the rules of the competition. The final designs had to be in pen and ink on a single sheet of white paper about thirty to forty inches in size, with plans for the location of the house,

driveway and garage, front elevation, side elevation, and floor plans drawn in one-quarter-inch scale. Drawings for the entrance and one interior detail were required to be drawn in a threequarter-inch scale. All of the room dimensions and overall dimensions had to be clearly identified, and each room designated as to its purpose. Drawings had to be labeled by a nom de plume to identify the competitor along with a sealed envelope bearing the nom de plume on the outside and, on the inside, the name and address of the competitor. The jury was composed of a representative of the River Oaks Corporation, a representative of the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects, a Houston interior decorator, and a Houston housewife. The architectural style was optional, as well as the number of rooms and their sizes, but the house had to be built for a cost of no less than $7,000 and meet the River Oaks Corporation building requirements. The lot size ranged from 65 to 75 by 150 feet with a setback of 35 feet from the front property line and 10 feet on each side of the house.

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On April 15, 1928, the Houston Post-Dispatch announced that the architect/artist E. M. Schiwetz, in collaboration with the architect Vance D. Phenix, had won first prize in the competition.208 It was a one-story, white-washed, brick and shingled gable Colonial Revival house, facing southeast with a trellised front porch and

dark green shuttered windows. A large Palladian window faced south, lighting the living room. Behind the living room were the dining room and service rooms, separated from the two bedrooms and a bath by the central hall. The judges particularly liked the plan of the house and considered it to be the best arrangement for

“The Honeymoon Cottage Competition.” Pencil Points, 444.

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a housewife to work within. The interior circulation and economical arrangement were equally important factors in the competition. One week later, it was announced in the Houston Post-Dispatch that the River Oaks Corporation planned to begin building the first-prize house in the spring. The same issue featured the design of the second-prize winner, Roy Ainsworth.209 Ainsworth had been employed by Birdsall Briscoe and was an architecture student at the Art Institute of Chicago. The wood frame house was in the French Colonial style, with a shingled roof that kicked out over the front porch. The front elevation drawing de-

picted a woman, probably meant to be the new bride, dressed in antebellum costume and standing on the front porch. All three competition winners were illustrated in the July issue of the architectural journal Pencil Points, which identified J. W. Northrop Jr., then president of the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects, as chairman of the jury.210 In March 1929, Potter told Will Hogg that the Honeymoon Cottage on Locke Lane in the newly opened Section Four remained unsold and that he realized that “the demand for one-story houses in property of this type in Houston is practically nil.”211

River Oaks: Section Four In an April 11, 1928, letter, Potter informed Hare that the River Oaks Corporation was planning to develop a section restricted to cottages in which they permitted one-and-a-half-story houses.212 Section Four was open to the public for sale that summer in an area south of Country Club Estates. Its boundaries are Ella Lee Lane on the north, River Oaks Boulevard to the west, Locke Lane to the south, and Bellmeade Road to the east. The restrictions allowed 76 sites of the total 102 lots in Blocks 20–24 to have houses erected on them that were one story or one-and-a-half stories in height, with the remaining sites held for two-story houses.213 As in the restrictions for portions of Section Three, but now for the entire addition, all the exterior walls and roofs of garages and servants’ houses had to be faced with the same construction materials and be the same color of the main house. Lot prices started at $2,450 with a required $25 deposit. Houses were to cost between $7,500 and $10,000 with setbacks from the front prop-

erty lines ranging from 25 to 40 feet. There was an exception for the four lots facing River Oaks Boulevard, which were restricted to houses built for no less than $25,000, and had front setback requirements of 100 feet. In Block 25, where the River Oaks Corporation offices and shopping center stood, the remaining land was reserved for an extension of the shopping center. An aerial photograph from about 1927 shows a large, oval-shaped Rebecca Meyer Park under construction and illustrates both the amount of undeveloped land in Section Four and the typical placement of the main houses and their detached garages to the rear of the lots. Advertised by the River Oaks Corporation in 1929 as “A Real Homeplace for the Family of Modest Income,” the houses in this section cost from $10,000 to $15,000, with house sites available at $2,825 and up, slightly higher than the previous year. The advertisement consisted of a map with drawings of Colonial- and Englishstyle houses, Rebecca Meyer Park with walk-

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Aerial photograph of River Oaks east of River Oaks Boulevard, ca. 1927. Courtesy of River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. Collection.

River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, Rebecca Meyer Park, “A Real Homeplace for the Family of Modest Income,” 1929. Houston Subdivision Collection, Plat Maps, MSS 118, Map no. 9. Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

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ways delineated with hedgerows and a fountain in its center, the first unit of the River Oaks Shopping Center on River Oaks Boulevard attached to the River Oaks Corporation offices, and the new River Oaks Elementary School. Designed by Harry D. Payne, who was a consultant to the Houston Independent School District and had designed Houston’s newest neighborhood elementary schools, the Colonial Revival elementary school was under construction on a fifteen-acre site at the corner of Kirby Drive and San Felipe Road, just outside of River Oaks, and would be open in the fall.214 Potter told Will Hogg he particularly liked the H-shaped plan with a rectangular auditorium projecting from the rear of the building. The River Oaks Corporation had purchased the fifty-thousand-dollar site for the school and offered it to the Houston Independent School District for half that price to ensure they would have a permanent educational facility as quickly as possible. A panel including Hare and Kipp worked on the landscaping layout, which Potter thought was “highly attractive.”215 He added, “I know of no thing that would help operations here in 1930 more than the successful start of this school and the good impression upon the community.”216 Potter wrote to Will Hogg on August 11, 1928, informing him he had been appointed to the National Association of Real Estate Boards committee.217 Nichols, also a member, had strongly suggested he accept this position. Thirty houses were now under construction, which Potter felt was a “large volume for this time of year . . . at an aggregate price of around $800,000,” and he attributed this expenditure to the easier loan terms he arranged. Since the

River Oaks Corporation had substantially increased the price of their lots, resales by private owners became a serious problem because they could offer their lots at lower prices. One way of dealing with the situation, he felt, was to find builders who would buy these bargain-priced lots from the private owners and construct speculative houses that would reduce the corporation’s inventory of lots. According to Potter, builders “have considerable influence with the buying public and they boost for the addition in which they are erecting homes . . . [and] it is highly advantageous to have them build in River Oaks.” The Welch-Webster bus line still had not been extended into River Oaks, prompting the eastern property owners’ main complaint that the lack of adequate bus service created a serious shortage of servants. Residents had filed a petition with the Public Service Commissioner and the Houston Electric Company. Potter said he did not sign the petition but helped file it. His biggest problem was that he had not been able to convince Mayor Holcombe and the City Council to construct storm sewers on Westheimer Road and Shepherd Drive, even though he had presented them with a petition signed by four hundred property owners and other interested citizens. He was still trying to negotiate the paving of Westheimer from River Oaks Boulevard west for a distance of 8.1 miles, as well as of 42 feet on Shepherd Drive. The paving of a portion of West Gray Avenue had been delayed because the mayor claimed the city had no money. Obviously displeased with the lack of responsiveness of the city government, Potter stated, “My oft-expressed opinion that petitions are time-­ wasters remains unchanged.”

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Braeswood Around 1926, Will Hogg named Kirby Drive after the Houston lawyer and financier John H. Kirby. Will Hogg had hoped to work with him to construct a southern extension of the drive through Kirby’s property along Brays Bayou to create a continuous parkway drive from downtown through River Oaks, then south of the Rice Institute, and back along Main Street to downtown.218 No records have been found to indicate his response to Will Hogg, but on June 25, 1927, Kirby sold 456.26 acres of his 600-acre tract of land along Main Street south of downtown to the banker and suburban real estate developer George H. Howard. This tract stretched from Brays Bayou north to Bellaire Boulevard (now West Holcombe Boulevard). Howard formed the Braeswood Corporation with a group of investors to develop a garden suburb on the tract.219 It was the last upscale residential community in the 1920s established along the axis of Main Street, which had risen to prominence as a residential district in the mid-1870s. Designed by Hare & Hare with the assistance of the Houston civil engineer William G. Farrington, Sections 1 and 1-A of Braeswood were opened on September 19, 1928, platted in a triangle between North Braeswood Boulevard to the south, Main Street to the east, and Kelving Drive, which formed an arc that intersected Maroneal Boulevard, to the west. Winding streets curved through the property. Landscaping and improvements to the bare plain were added, at a projected total cost of $3 million, in a manner similar to the eastern sectors of River Oaks. Several parks, including the Sunken Garden and Frog Pond designed by Hare & Hare, were placed at intersections.

In an effort to rival River Oaks, the agents for Braeswood, the San Jacinto Trust Company, of which Howard was president, marketed the subdivision. During 1928 and 1929, Braeswood was advertised in the Houston Post-Dispatch, its publisher, former governor William P. Hobby, being one of the investors in the Braeswood Corporation. Beginning in October 1929, the corporation placed full-page ads in the Houston Gargoyle, with such slogans as “Exclusive Yet Inexpensive” and “12 Minutes Out Main Boulevard.” River Oaks was running competitive full-page ads in the same magazine. Yet Braeswood was a smaller-scale development, and its developers could hardly keep up with the progress River Oaks had already achieved. The restrictive covenants for Braeswood were similar to those for River Oaks and were to run for a period of twenty-five years. The Braeswood Corporation permitted only singlefamily houses, with the exception of five lots, where duplexes could be erected, on Maroneal Boulevard. Blocks 1 and 2 were reserved for a shopping center. Like the River Oaks Corporation, the Braeswood Corporation imposed minimum cost restrictions on houses, and architectural plans had to be approved by the corporation. The smallest lots, somewhat larger than the smaller ones in River Oaks, were 70 by 140 feet and ranged in size up to 7 acres. The price of lots started at $3,500 or 40 cents a square foot, whereas the lots in River Oaks started at $2,825 and up. Potter noted that the Braeswood Corporation was offering very liberal prices for their sites, and he did not see how they could afford to offer such low prices. The first speculative house built by the Braeswood Corporation,

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designed by Harry D. Payne, was purchased by Hobby. Carl A. Mulvey, who had been employed by Briscoe for two years, became the corporation’s architect and designed a handful of suburban houses in French Colonial and manorial styles, reflecting elements from both Briscoe’s and Staub’s designs. Braeswood opened

barely a year before the stock market crash of October 1929, and it did not survive intact. In fact, only one-half of Hare & Hare’s master plan was realized. Both Kirby, who was on the board of directors of the Braeswood Corporation, and Hobby filed for bankruptcy in 1933.220

Potter’s 1929 Resume to Will Hogg In March 1929, Potter wrote in his River Oaks Resume to Will Hogg that the city had not approved the permanent paving of Buffalo Drive but rather agreed to a temporary job. Kirby Drive, he thought, would take a long time to be paved, but it needed to be paved at least from San Felipe to Westheimer Roads for better access to the elementary school.221 Although state and county taxes would be the same as in 1928, the city was going to raise River Oaks’s taxes. The total taxes for 1928, including city, county, and state, had been approximately twenty thousand dollars. Potter said he would make the argument with the city that the corporation was spending almost three times as much on maintenance and street lighting that were, legally, the city’s obligations. The maintenance fund continued to be the corporation’s greatest expense—fifty thousand dollars in 1928—and until the city assumed the cost of lighting and street cleaning, those expenses could not be lowered. The corporation paid the Houston Electric Company $125 a month to extend the Welch-Webster bus line into River Oaks’s eastern sector. The extension alleviated the servant problem, although the lack of transportation had reduced sales in ten blocks in that sector during 1928. Sales of vacant lots, Potter told Will Hogg, had almost “come to a standstill with just a casual one being sold in River Oaks and Riverside Terrace . . . we

have been practically forced to repossess almost as much property as we have sold. . . . Most of the business has been in the sale of completed jobs . . . houses already built.” The demand for onestory houses was down, and he had decided not to restrict sites for them, as people who wanted to build them usually built in cheaper subdivisions. Large speculative houses in River Oaks were currently under construction by the Russell Brown Company and by Katharine B. Mott, and Potter regarded both as “substantial builders.” The biggest demand in Houston was for houses priced between $35,000 and $60,000; the second largest demand was for those priced from $25,000 to $35,000. Potter had started an advertising campaign called “River Oaks Residents Speak” in the Houston Gargoyle in which several residents wrote letters praising the River Oaks Building Department. Among those who participated were R. B. Bowen, Judge Proctor, and Pierre Michael. The first unit of the River Oaks Shopping Center had been completed, and the tenants included a grocery store, meat market, drugstore, barbershop, and beauty parlor; all were under the control of the corporation. Potter was also beginning negotiations with the Humble Oil & Refining and Gulf Petroleum companies to have filling stations built as part of the shopping center complex on 100- by 100-foot sites, with

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the condition that Staub design the stations in harmony with the present buildings. By June 1929, the demand for residential properties in Houston was so slow that Will Hogg told Potter he did not want the River Oaks Corporation to build any more houses except those under con-

tract for specific clients.222 In August, the River Oaks grocery and drugstore had been burglarized. Crime in River Oaks seemed to be on the rise and, at the request of the corporation, the city replaced the mounted police with an automobile patrol.

River Oaks: Section Five Advertising that “39 Houstonians Will Find Contentment Here .  .  . New Section of River Oaks where Every Homesite Fronts on a Park,” the corporation opened Section Five of River Oaks in August 1929. Located in a small area near the River Oaks Elementary School on Blocks 29 and 30, it was organized around the oval-shaped Mary Elliott Park. The decision to develop Section Five must have been based on its close proximity to the school. The restrictions were the same as in Section Four, and Potter seems to have changed his mind because one-story houses were permitted to be built on twelve lots in Block 29, facing San Felipe Road, at a cost of at least $8,000, with front property setbacks of 30 feet.223 On Chevy Chase Drive, house prices were set to between $12,000 and $17,000 with 30- to 60-foot setbacks. Two lots facing Kirby Drive were restricted to houses costing between $15,000 and $18,000, respectively, with 60-foot setbacks. The corporation advertised in 1929 that completed houses were available for as low as $13,000 in River Oaks.224 At the corner of Westheimer and Shepherd, the first unit of St. Anne’s Catholic Church was under construction on ten acres of land donated by Will Hogg, and parish members accepted his monetary donation and his offer to plant oak trees and landscape their property under the supervision of the corporation’s third landscape architect, William B. Anderson. This was dur-

ing a period when there was an aggressive landscaping program in River Oaks. Four hundred willow oak trees, ranging in height from thirty to forty feet, had been removed one at a time from southeast Texas forests and transported to River Oaks on specially constructed trucks at a cost of fifteen thousand dollars.225 The corporation was planning to install seven hundred Chinese tallow trees to supplement the oaks during spring 1929 and in the winter to plant more than one thousand shade trees in areas not heavily wooded. The program called for the planting of at least two trees on each lot, unless suitable native trees were already on the property. Double rows of oak trees were planted along the street fronts of River Oaks Elementary School on Kirby Drive and San Felipe Road. Will Hogg requested that Edward Teas’s nursery plant a hedgerow walk along Chevy Chase Drive toward the school with crape myrtles of various colors as well as redbud trees.226 Will Hogg had enjoyed seeing Southern gardens filled with magnolia trees, particularly in Charleston, South Carolina, and he developed the idea of creating a “Magnolia Walk” along Shepherd Drive from Buffalo Boulevard south for a mile to San Felipe Road.227 The magnolias were installed in staggered double rows by planting one tree between the curb and sidewalk and the other behind the sidewalk. Under the second row of magnolias, Will Hogg wanted

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an elaborate ornamental evergreen hedge and flowerbeds planted beneath. Potter had trouble finding large magnolia trees of uniform sizes, and the project was delayed until fall 1929.228 Some of the magnolias are still standing. Magnolias were also planted in Homewoods, Rebec-

ca Meyer Park, and Mary Elliot Park. Because of drought conditions, an automatic sprinkler system was installed in the parks, esplanades, the Magnolia Walk, and in other sections of the subdivision. The beautification of River Oaks was one of Will Hogg’s primary objectives.

An Illustrated Book of Houses in River Oaks In spite of the economic downturn of the Depression, there were individuals with the means to erect houses in River Oaks. These houses were designed by the River Oaks Corporation architect, Houston architects, or nationally known country house architects. In 1929, the corporation published River Oaks: A Pictorial Presentation of Houston’s Residential Park, a hardbound book written by Don Riddle and filled with photographs by R. M. Luster that presented an excellent representation of the quality of houses built. The majority of the designs illustrated were by Charles W. Oliver, with works by nine other local and national architects and several designers. Oliver’s designs ranged through a variety of revival styles, although most of those illustrated were interpretations of various English types. As noted in one of the corporation’s advertising brochures: “The English house . . . is ours . . . if not by national heritage,” and as these houses “are particularly well adapted to local living conditions, they are proving very popular in River Oaks.”229 The following discussion of River Oaks houses, built from 1926 to 1929, are those illustrated in the corporation’s book. Oliver designed a diapered, red brick house for the dentist Dr. E. M. Cuenod and his wife Nadine on Pelham Road, borrowing elements from the Norman style.230 A conical tower, containing the main stair lighted by elongated leaded windows, fronts the two-story rectan-

gular main block of the house with double sash windows. In front of the tower, an oversized gable with a massive chimney stack in the middle sweeps down in front of the tower to frame the main entrance to the house. The massing of the house is tightly balanced, using cylindrical and rectilinear forms, into an L-shaped composition. Another richly colored red brick house, the Davis House was designed by Oliver for Ileyn and Hal Davis, vice president of a construction equipment company.231 The Bellmeade Road house has a T-shaped plan, with a large, external, fluted chimney stack rising in front of the one-story rectangular living room and a veranda placed behind it. The entrance is through a gabled front porch built of rough-hewn timbers of hand-adzed oak. On the other side of the front porch is the dining room, with service rooms behind it and bedrooms and bathrooms above. With the multi-level rooms, the various levels of the roofs create a striking effect. Only casement windows were used in this design. A large, two-and-a-half-story red brick Jacobean residence was designed by Oliver for the supervisor of the Gulf Petroleum Company, J. H. Tucker, and his wife Rose, on Del Monte Drive, with a projecting vari-toned weathered fieldstone entrance.232 In their book, the corporation described the entrance as “expressive of the strength, character and charm that prevails throughout.” A projecting gable over the en-

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Nadine and Dr. E. M. Cuenod House, Pelham Road, River Oaks, 1929, Charles W. Oliver, architect (author).

Ileyn and Hal Davis House, Bellmeade Road, River Oaks, 1929, Charles W. Oliver, architect (author).

Rose and J. H. Tucker House, Del Monte Drive, River Oaks, 1929, Charles W. Oliver, architect (author).

River Oaks Corporation model house (Alice and Mike Hogg House), River Oaks Boulevard, 1929, Charles W. Oliver, architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson.

trance is half-timbered, pierced by leaded casement windows, and behind it is a plain projecting gable. Another small gable to the right of the two other projecting gables is ornamented by half-timbering. On the left wing of the house, the second-story sash windows have wroughtiron ornamental railings below them. One of the largest speculative houses the corporation erected in River Oaks was a French Colonial design by Oliver on River Oaks Boulevard. Set back from the road approximately one hundred feet, the red brick house has a center projecting block five bays wide. A stone door frame accents the center bay and features Tuscan pilasters that frame a voussoired round

arch around the front door. The most evident French detailing of the house is the use of fulllength, round-arched openings on either side of the front door, with wall dormers above to accommodate the second-floor windows. Oversized quoins were placed at each corner of the main block and were duplicated at the corners of the two wings. Advertised and illustrated in the November 17, 1929, issue of the Houston Gargoyle, the house was furnished for display by The Shabby Shoppe with French décor acquired in France and offered to the public for sale. The first residents of the house were Alice Nicholson and Mike Hogg, prior to their purchase of Dogwoods.

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Theodosia Campbell and George R. Christie House, Inwood Drive, River Oaks, 1929, Charles W. Oliver, architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson.

In 1929, the first of several River Oaks houses modeled on the plantations of Louisiana’s River Road was under construction. Oliver designed the house for the insurance broker George R. Christie and his Louisiana-born wife Theodosia Campbell.233 At first glance, the house, located on Inwood Drive, appears to be a copy of the most famous Louisiana plantation house, Oak Alley, located near Vacherie, with its monumental peripteral porch framed by Tuscan columns. For the Christie House, however, Oliver did not wrap the entire main block in a colonnade, only the southern front. On the north side, the footprint expands to form a blocky T-shape, with the wings terminating at the colonnaded porch.

The exterior details derived from Oak Alley are the French doors opening onto both the firstand second-floor porches, the round-arched single doorways placed at the center of the main elevation, and the smooth-finished columns. Oliver chose to substitute cast-iron railings on the second-story porch for the wood railings of the original. The deep setback of the house from the street and the heavily wooded character of the front yard enhance the illusion that the house was built long before the rest of the development. On the interior, the house has a double parlor, which may have been inspired by the 1925 restorations at Oak Alley, the first plantation in Louisiana to be restored, by Mr. and Mrs.

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Andrew Stewart.234 Part of the project was to join two parlors originally separated from each other by pocket doors. Theodosia Christie filled their house with expensive nineteenth-century furnishings, mantels, fireplaces, and railings. One unusual feature was the mock French provincial kitchen placed in the attic. It, along with the double parlor and library, was photographed and published in 1930 in the Houston Gargoyle.235 George Christie’s insurance business went bankrupt in the Great Depression, and the couple was forced to sell the house two years later. Potter explained to Will Hogg that Christie “was worse than broke” and that he and his wife had spent $110,000 on building the house.236 A speculative two-story, brick house on Brentwood Drive was built by Katharine B. Mott and her husband Harry and designed by the Indianapolis architects Burns & James. With no architectural training, Mrs. Mott began designing houses in Indianapolis, first for her family and then a block of twelve houses commissioned by her husband’s firm, the Indianapolis Title Company.237 Searching for a warmer climate, the Motts decided to settle in Houston in 1927, but they retained their relationship with the Indianapolis architects who were building more than twenty speculative suburban houses in Houston, including ten in River Oaks. Both

skilled craftsmen, their Indianapolis carpenter and brick mason followed the Motts to Houston. What set her “apart from Houston’s other female real estate entrepreneurs is that Harry Mott remained inconspicuous in order that Katherine Mott might feature more prominently.”238 In reference to the Motts, Potter told Will Hogg, “The houses built by .  .  . [Katherine B. Mott] and her husband have done more to attract prospects than any other one thing, and are by all odds the most attractive structures in these additions,” referring to those built in Riverside Terrace, Edgemont, and Devonshire Place.239 The irregular, rectangular-planned house on Brentwood is typical of their work in Houston, making use of intricate brick detailing borrowed from Tudor and Norman models, but with elements of the Renaissance style as well. The brick-banded, off-center, double-arched Italianate entry porch is supported in the middle by a Tuscan column. Above the entrance porch is a keystone dormer. Elements of the Tudor style are evident on the second floor of the main façade, where the wall dormer above the large first-floor window is flanked by panels of diapered brickwork laid up in a diamond pattern. The monumental tripartite window bay below is highlighted by the use of contrasting materials, red brick and cast stone, in a manner that

Speculative house (Pauline and Seth S. Lamb House), Brentwood Drive, River Oaks, 1929, Katherine B. and Harry Mott with Burns & James, architects (author).

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Katherine B. and Harry Mott House, Del Monte Drive, River Oaks, 1930, Katherine B. and Harry L. Mott with Burns & James, architects (author).

recalls the initial buildings at the Rice Institute and allows an abundance of light into the living room. Floor-level casement windows were placed to the left of the entrance. The steeply pitched roofs with their clipped eaves create three separate masses to form the main façade of the house, adding to the complexity of the overall design, which appears at first glance to be only one story in height. The Motts used wood stud framing faced with brick veneer, which was becoming more commonplace in the 1920s, in place of more expensive hollow-tile block-­ bearing wall construction. The Houston stockbroker Seth S. Lamb of the firm Sherwood & Lamb and his wife Pauline purchased the house in February 1929, prior to its completion.240 The Motts built their white-washed, brick, two-and-a-half-story manorial house with a

steep pitched roof for their family on Del Monte Drive in 1930. It was not illustrated in the River Oaks Corporation book. Double gables mark the central entrance, with the first ornamented on the second story by half-timbering filled with brick nogging. To the east of the gables is a round, two-story tower containing a spiral stair that became one of the identifying features. It has a decorative wrought-iron rail and is lighted by an elongated stained glass window, which contrasts with the light-colored plaster walls and ceiling. Mrs. Mott built a cottage behind their house for her studio (which no longer stands). Their earlier houses were priced at twenty thousand dollars and rose to as much as thirty-five thousand dollars by 1930, when the Motts finally closed their business due to the poor economy. They had to sell their house, give up their membership

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Katherine B. and Harry Mott House, spiral staircase. © Paul Hester Photographer.

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in the River Oaks Country Club, and move to an apartment.241 In 1936, Harry Mott became a real estate salesman for the River Oaks Corporation, and the family built a house in the village of Piney Point, west of River Oaks. On February 14, 1926, the Houston PostDispatch announced “Largest Homesite in River Oaks Sold.” Agnes Carter and Haywood Nelms purchased the 71,321-square-foot lot on Sleepy Hollow Court for an undisclosed price. Haywood Nelms was a partner in both the W. T. Carter & Brothers Lumber Company and the Houston Airport Corporation with a group of businessmen, including his brother-inlaw W. T. Carter Jr., Jesse H. Jones, T. P. Lee, George Noble, and W. S. Patton.242 The New York architect Frank J. Forster, the nation’s leading exponent of the rustic French

Norman style in the 1920s, designed his only Texan commission, creating an extraordinarily long, one-room-deep, two-story, white-washed brick country house with half-timber detailing and a terra-cotta shingled roof that has one massive chimney stack for the breakfast room and a clustered chimney for the great hall.243 Most of the windows are small and filled with casements of leaded or plain glass. The Nelms House was extensively illustrated in the architect’s 1931 book, Country Houses. The majority of the exterior images are of the south elevation, the garden side of the house, which includes elaborate halftimbering, a major feature of all of Forster’s designs, with two bays projecting from it that flank an open, uncovered flagstone terrace. Behind this elevation on the three-acre site was a twostory garage and a servants’ quarters, as well as

Agnes Carter and Haywood Nelms House, rendering of the south elevation, Sleepy Hollow Court, River Oaks, 1929, Frank J. Forster, architect. Forster, Country Houses, plate 116.

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Agnes Carter and Haywood Nelms House, floor plans. Forster, Country Houses, plate 118.

a tool house masquerading as a pigeon cote, enhancing the picturesque character of the house. Completed before the residence was a children’s playhouse, a stable, and kennels that were of the same character as the main house and were illustrated under construction in River Oaks: A Pictorial Presentation of Houston’s Residential Park. The north, or entry, elevation of the house differs from the south in terms of the limited size of the window openings and the use of halftimbering. The paneled wooden front door is protected by a rustic wood porch through which one enters a manorial great hall that has mahogany linen-fold paneling and rises two stories to a timber-trussed ceiling. At the east end of the

Agnes Carter and Haywood Nelms House, great hall. Forster, Country Houses, plate 128.

hall, a fresco painted by the Santa Fe artist Gerald Cassidy with a theme based on the legends of Robin Hood decorates the wall surface above the large hooded stone fireplace.244 At the west end is the main stair, which ascends to an indoor balcony that links the rooms of the second floor. To the right of the hall is the dining room. Its pargetted ceiling, resting atop the dark mahogany walls of the room, is quite low in height in comparison to the hall. Directly behind the dining room is the breakfast room, and west of the two rooms are the kitchen and servant rooms. Left of the great hall is a narrow passage paneled in a mahogany linen-fold pattern that contains the concealed stair to the upstairs master and

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guest rooms. East of it is the living room, which is set two steps below the level of the first floor and ends in a conservatory. The second floor of the house is divided into two units at either end of the void of the great hall. The east section contains the master bedroom suite with an

exterior oriel window facing east, along with a guest bedroom facing south. The western unit contains a bedroom for the Nelms’s son and the twin daughters’ bedroom, each with a private bath, along with a dressing room, a large service room for linens, and a sleeping porch.

Homewoods: The Neal Chateau In the 1930s, grand houses continued to be built in River Oaks, principally in Homewoods. These houses were mainly the work of Staub. The grandest from this period is the 20,000-square-foot Louis XV Chateau Revival house designed by Staub for Marion Holt Seward and James Robert Neal on Lazy Lane in Homewoods. Built from 1931 to 1933 on a 3.75-acre site, the house cost $169,659.245 ­Neal’s father, J. W. Neal, had sold the Houston branch of the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company in

1928 to the Postum Company, which became General Foods, and profited about $5.25 million. He reinvested it in the Houston Second National Bank, where he became chairman of the board of directors and appointed his son James vice president. Built of reinforced concrete frame construction faced with Texas crème limestone, the oneroom-deep house has steeply pitched slate roofs and is entered from the east-southeast via the central pavilion from which the two wings of the

Marion and James Robert Neal House, Lazy Lane, Homewoods, 1933, John F. Staub, architect. Photograph by John C. Ferguson.

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Marion and James Robert Neal House, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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symmetrical house are accessed. Above the double front door is a round-arched window topped by Rococo foliate carvings and flanked by Ionic pilasters. The formal wing running south-north contains a library, a living room with windows facing east-west, and a garden room with exposures east, west, and north. All of the rooms have coved ceilings, parquet flooring, and sliding French doors. In the living room, a pair of antique red, Rococo marble mantelpieces face each other on the north and south walls, with another neoclassical marble mantelpiece in the garden room. Beyond the large, T-shaped entry hall, which has an elaborate iron Louis XV Revival railing for the stair and a diapered black and white marble floor, the dining room, with service rooms attached, runs east-west at a right angle. Distinctive in the Empire Revival dining room are the anthemia cornice, mirrored west wall, terrazzo floor, and the marble columns and

pilasters, making it the most ostentatious room of the house. On the second floor, there are five bedrooms with the master placed above the formal wing, a bedroom above the reception hall, and two bedrooms to the rear on either side of a nurse’s room. Throughout the house, the combination of expensive materials and lavish ornaments—such as Rococo bolection moldings, crystal chandeliers, fanciful ironwork—with the addition of the period French furnishings and decorative arts made the house among the most pretentious in River Oaks at the time. The Neals commissioned the Olmsted Brothers in 1931 to design their gardens.246 The company also constructed outdoor limestone terraces that wrap around the ground floor of the formal rooms, with the exception of the dining room. The Neal House is considered the most extravagant work of Staub’s career, probably due to his clients’ instructions.

Potter’s 1930 Resumes to Will Hogg Potter explained in his February 1930 Resume to Will Hogg that no high-class subdivisions in the South or Southwest were successful in financing improvements—with the exception of older, established districts such as Highland Park— and that there were now many foreclosures in Houston, including in Riverside Terrace.247 To avoid foreclosure, the Braeswood stockholders had relinquished all their interest in their property, and it had been purchased by the Belmain Company, a syndicate run by the lumberman Charles Robertson, who had closed a few sales at about half the former listing price. Potter said the “character of competition [from Braeswood] is hurting us a little. . . . Two of our prospects . . . bought there, explaining that the price appeal was the whole thing with them.” New house

construction did not resume in Braeswood until 1935, and it would not be fully developed until the 1950s. The River Oaks Corporation’s revolving loan fund of a quarter-million dollars was almost totally committed, Potter reported, and it led to more building activity than ever before. Obviously, Potter was implying that River Oaks was more financially sound than its competitors. Residential building in Houston, as in the rest of the country, he noted, had fallen off by one billion dollars in 1929, due to the difficulty in obtaining financing. In terms of the city providing infrastructure improvements, Potter explained, “Difficulty in getting the present administration to do anything with any show of efficiency still oppresses us. . . . If the present administration ever accomplished anything worth-

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while it will be by accident. They are in a hopeless and demoralized state.” He also mentioned that the grocery and the drugstore in River Oaks shopping center were struggling and running “at a greater efficiency than ever before.” In his last report to Will Hogg in August 1930, Potter told him that the loan fund discussed in the February Resume had led to the

construction of seventeen houses with a total value of one-half million dollars, but the real estate business throughout Houston was at its lowest ebb in fifteen years or more. Potter questioned how long he would be able “to hold together a group of worthwhile salesmen under conditions existing at present.”248

River Oaks after 1930 After Will Hogg’s untimely death in 1930, the future of River Oaks was left in the hands of Potter. To this date, Will Hogg had spent approximately $3.65 million of Hogg Brothers’ funds on River Oaks, and by 1933 it was reported that half of the suburb had been developed and 75 percent of that had been sold.249 In 1935, Kipp platted a new section of River Oaks on Blocks 41 and 42, consisting of eight greenway courts organized in cul-de-sacs along Stanmore Drive and Sharp Place, where houses share community driveways. Potter continued to manage the corporation, purchasing it from Mike and Ima Hogg in 1936. He ran the operations as it had been intended when Hogg Brothers first obtained the property. Charles W. Oliver had been laid off in 1932, and the corporation’s building department, in both design and construction, was being supervised by the William  G. Farrington Company, which Farrington began after he was laid off as the San Jacinto Trust Company’s civil engineer. Opened to the public for sale in 1936, Blocks 27 and 28 contained only eight lots, four of which face River Oaks Boulevard; the others are accessible from the boulevard by a cul-desac and Ella Lee Lane. In 1937, the River Oaks Corporation reserved a five-acre lot on Westheimer Road for the River Oaks Recreational

Park, with its playground designed by Hare & Hare and the recreational building designed by the Houston architect Hiram A. Salisbury. This is a part of a large section on Blocks 57–64 and 66 that formed a portion of River Oaks’s southern boundary, with Claremont Lane to the east, Timber Lane to the west, and San Felipe Road to the north; a rendering of it was advertised in the Houston Chronicle.250 The oval-shaped Clare­mont Park on Larchmont Road divides the tract into two sections. When this section of the development opened in 1938, Potter priced lots for a limited time at 1927 prices to boost sales, which began at $1,790 for house sites 64 by 140 feet. Mike Hogg’s retreat Tall Timbers was incorporated into River Oaks in 1939. This expanded the development’s boundaries west along Buffalo Bayou from the grounds of the River Oaks Country Club and Country Club Estates on Blocks 88–92; in 1940 Blocks 93–95 were opened. Because of the land’s uneven terrain, other sections northwest of Homewoods backing onto Buffalo Bayou and the northernmost part west of Shepherd Drive, part of Block 55 and all of Block 56, on Tiel Way were the last of the eastern additions to be developed. Architects designed modern houses after World War II that took advantage of the heavily wooded,

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Postcard of the River Oaks Shopping Center, intersection of West Gray Avenue and South Shepherd Drive, 1937, Stanley Nunn, Milton B. McGinty, and Oliver C. Winston, architects (author’s collection).

sloping sites there. Kipp did not complete the entire layout of River Oaks until 1947, with some necessary changes to the master plan to allow for more residential development.251 Will Hogg had intended to expand the shopping complex on Westheimer Road across from River Oaks Boulevard to one thousand feet in length with fifty shops and stores, all to be owned and controlled by the corporation.252 He planned to plant a grove of trees between large parking lots and the shopping units, which, when completed, would form a plaza with a series of buildings connected by colonnaded arches. This project was never begun because Potter thought the space was too small for the scale of shopping center that Will Hogg wanted to develop. In the 1940s, the shops and the of-

fices Staub had designed for the River Oaks Corporation on River Oaks Boulevard were demolished. The property west of the foot of River Oaks Boulevard at Westheimer Road was sold to the parish of St. John the Divine for a chapel, school, and church.253 On the east side of the boulevard, the corporation built the LamarRiver Oaks Shopping Center in 1949. Prior to 1940, Potter had invested in a series of commercial ventures, the largest of which were the Community Shopping Center (now the River Oaks Shopping Center, partially demolished) and two apartment complexes called River Oaks Gardens and the San Felipe Apartments (both now demolished). Beginning in 1932, Potter commissioned the Houston architects Oliver  C. Winston and Edward Arrantz

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to make preliminary studies for the shopping complex. After Arrantz died in a traffic accident, Stayton Nunn took over his position. In 1934, Winston moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a project planner for the Public Works Administration housing division. After carefully studying economic conditions in Houston and realizing the value of Nichols’s Country Club Plaza, Potter decided to commence construction of the shopping center in 1937. The project was designed by Nunn and his partner Milton B. McGinty, with Winston serving as a consulting architect.254 In 1940, the River Oaks Shopping Center appeared in the June issue of Architectural Record in a series of photographs showing the pre–World War II phase of the project.255 Possible prototypes for the design include an unexecuted drive-in market project by the Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra, illustrated in 1929 in Architectural Record, and the automobile-­ friendly Washington, D.C., Park and Shop Shopping Center, featured in 1932 and 1934 in Architectural Record.256 The modernistic, stucco-finished River Oaks stores were the only portions of the original scheme that were realized in a homogeneous effect. One of the two symmetrical wings has been demolished. Two compatibly designed service stations (now demolished) were built at the northeast and southeast corners of West Gray Avenue facing Shepherd Drive, framed by crescent-shaped retail stores behind them with ample parking in between. The San Felipe Apartments, designed by the Houston architects Harvin Moore and Hermon Lloyd, were built in 1936 at 22192225 San Felipe. Designed by the Dallas architects Fooshee & Cheek, the River Oaks Garden apartment complex was built in 1939 south of the River Oaks Shopping Center with ten buildings grouped around a central garden.257

Other schools and churches would only appear on the edges of River Oaks. The modernistic Mirabeau  B. Lamar Senior High School was designed in 1937 by Staub and Kenneth Franzheim—with consulting architects Louis A. Glover, Lamar Q. Cato, and Harry D. Payne— at 3325 Westheimer Road, on the axis with the River Oaks Country Club.258 Faced in part with fossilized Texas limestone, the high school terminated the vista on River Oaks Boulevard. Several churches were also built on the perimeter of River Oaks, as was St. John’s School, a private elementary to high school opened in 1947 adjacent to St. John the Divine. In Potter’s role as a suburban real estate developer, he always strongly recommended that real estate land developers maintain close cooperation with municipal authorities and, most importantly, stressed the need for adequate financing on their part to ensure the success of their projects. In a 1933 article in Architectural Forum, Potter was described as the developer of “Houston’s famed . . . River Oaks.”259 In the article, he stated that “River Oaks, successful from its inception is still growing . . . as an investment which has withstood the economic crisis and had its soundness forcefully emphasized.”260 Upon dissolving the River Oaks Corporation in 1954, Potter advised the residents of River Oaks not to terminate the homeowners association. Accordingly, River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. was founded in 1955 and has served the community by continuing to enforce deed restrictions, which have been observed in River Oaks for almost seventy years. Because Houston has never adopted a zoning code, River Oaks Property Owners, Inc. is the legal defender of the community’s integrity. Potter died in his River Oaks house on Chevy Chase Drive on June 11, 1968, where he had lived for forty-two years.

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Conclusion After World War II, River Oaks redirected residential real estate growth west of downtown to Tanglewood and the Memorial Drive communities, just as Highland Park redirected suburban growth in Dallas in a northward direction.261 Built out with 1950s and 1960s ranch houses, Tanglewood has survived, but in the late 1980s, the original houses began to be demolished and replaced with bigger, bulkier, stylistically more aggressive houses. This process of redevelopment from within has also eroded the appeal of Memorial. There, subdivisions are generally quite small in scale. In the mid–1950s, the City of Houston acquiesced in the incorporation of four suburban towns. Most of the Memorial neighborhoods fall within the jurisdictions of Hunter’s Creek, Piney Point, Bunker Hills, and Hedwig Village, or the “villages,” as they

are collectively known. Municipal zoning in the villages takes the role of deed restriction enforcement in Houston neighborhoods as the primary legal instrument of land use planning and construction regulation. In 2010, Houston’s population stood at almost 2.1 million, Harris County at more than 4 million, with the metropolitan statistical area, composed of ten surrounding counties, at more than 5.9 million.262 For Houston, subdivision growth has addressed, and must continue to address, the cooperation of other county governments, as the majority of this newly developed suburban property is unincorporated. Even though River Oaks is part of Houston, it nevertheless stands apart as an oasis of harmonious, regulated development of the sort that no zoning code could produce.

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C h a pt e r si x

H IGHLAND A N D

RI VE R

PA R K

OA K S

Their Texas Influence and Permanence

The gar den s ubu r b a n co mmu n i t i e s o f H i g h la n d Park and River Oaks are, in Texas and the nation, synonymous with economic status, quality of life, and commitment to the maintenance of their planning features. Yet, their influence on similar residential real estate developments in other Texas cities has never been explored. This issue is pertinent because several of the planners and architects who helped make Highland Park and River Oaks successful also contributed to the formation of restricted suburban communities in other Texas cities. The fact that development activity appeared in other cities with smaller real estate markets is a testament to the appeal of the restricted and regulated garden suburbs that Highland Park and River Oaks represent.1 The first of these subdivisions was in Fort Worth, followed by planned garden suburbs in Wichita Falls, Amarillo, and San Antonio, along with a much smaller subdivision in Corsicana.

Fort Worth: Arlington Heights and San Antonio: Alamo Heights Suburban development in Fort Worth and San Antonio in the late nineteenth century was similar to that of Oak Cliff in Dallas and

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William J. Bryce House, “Fairview,” Bryce Avenue, Arlington Heights, Fort Worth, Texas, 1893, Messer, Sanguinet, and Messer, architects (author).

Houston Heights in Houston in that all these initial projects suffered from financial difficulties and a lack of purchasers. In 1890, the Denver-­ based Chamberlin Investment Company acquired land for the development of two large-scale Texas suburban communities, Arlington Heights in Fort Worth and Alamo Heights in San Antonio, both intended for a wealthy clientele.2 The company purchased a 2,000-acre tract on Lake Como, located three miles west of downtown Fort Worth, for Arlington Heights. The lots in Arlington Heights, which were platted in a right-angled grid of streets and blocks, measured, on average, 25 feet in width and 125 feet in depth, with some a little larger or irregular

in shape, with 16-foot-wide alleys. Streets were laid out 60 feet wide running north-south and 80 feet wide running east-west, with the exception of the 125-foot-wide Arlington Boulevard (now Camp Bowie Boulevard), a grand avenue with a streetcar line that led to Lake Como. The developers built a pavilion at Lake Como, as well as a boathouse and the Single-style resort hotel Ye Arlington Inn, designed by Messer, Sanguinet, and Messer (predecessor of Sanguinet and Staats). The developers engaged the firm to design twenty speculative houses, mostly the work of Marshall R. Sanguinet. The company lost the property during the Panic of 1893, and, in the following year, Ye Arlington Inn was destroyed by a fire and never rebuilt. Arlington

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Heights was annexed to the city in 1922 and the development of it began in earnest, but the houses that were built were on a much smaller scale than had been originally intended by the developers. One of the finest houses remaining in Arlington Heights from the nineteenth century is the William J. Bryce House of 1893, built for the owner of Denton Press Brick Company, who also served as mayor of Fort Worth from 1927 to 1933.3 Designed by Messer, Sanguinet, and Messer, the Bryce House, or “Fairview,” on Bryce Avenue is a large two-and-a-half-story brick house with Romanesque details. The most pronounced of its Romanesque ornamentation is the wide parabolic entrance arch on the east end of the house. A Richardsonian carved floral spandrel between the first- and second-story windows on the central bay and rusticated caststone lintels above the doors and windows provide texture to the smooth surface of the brick walls. In 1891, the development of Alamo Heights began on a 3.4-square-mile tract five miles northeast from the center of downtown San Antonio. Working through its local agents, the Ala-

mo Heights Land and Improvement Company, the Chamberlin Investment and Land Company purchased a ranch from Hiram McLane for the suburban residential development. They also bought his house, known as the AndersonMcLane House, which they remodeled for the Argyle Hotel.4 The company platted large lots that were, on average, about 85 by 150 feet around the resort hotel, and they furnished water and an electric streetcar for transportation to and from the city. Because of the hilly terrain in the other sections of Alamo Heights, the developers did not use a grid pattern, resulting in the platting of smaller lots of irregular size and shape. But, by the onset of the Panic of 1893, only a dozen houses had been built. Over time, Alamo Heights was sold to multiple developers, who continued to develop the area north of San Antonio in a piecemeal fashion. In 1922, it was incorporated as a city and, in the following year, established an independent school district, making it one of the most desirable residential communities in the city. Even though Alamo Heights began to fill up in the 1920s and 1930s, smaller houses were built in the neighborhood than originally planned.

Fort Worth: Ryan Place Cattle ranching had been Fort Worth’s most profitable industry until the discovery of oil in what became known collectively as the Wichita County Regular Field.5 William T. Waggoner, while drilling for shallow water wells on his cattle ranch two miles north of Electra in 1903, found oil instead and exclaimed, “Damn the oil, I want water!” Drilling for oil commenced in 1911 on one of the largest oil strikes in the state.6 Soon such major oil companies as Humble Oil and Refining Company (Exxon-Mobil), Texas

Company (Texaco), and Sinclair Refining Company opened offices in Fort Worth, which led to a boom in the city. In 1911, the John C. Ryan Land Company, a real estate and construction firm, developed Fort Worth’s fashionable Ryan Place, a private gated community in the Southside District laid out in the manner of Courtlandt Place in Houston.7 Its 90-foot-wide grand avenue, Elizabeth Boulevard, was laid out with a 35-foot roadbed, including planting spaces and sidewalks, that is

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marked at each end by formal stone entrance gates. Deed restrictions specified building types and materials, setback lines, and costs of construction. Lot sales in Ryan Place, which was intended for upper-income families, were sluggish until 1917–1918 profits from the Northwest Texas and Oklahoma oil fields were realized. The finest residences were built along Elizabeth Boulevard between Eighth and College Avenues, similar to Swiss Avenue in Munger Place in Dallas. In 1923, the architect Raphael A. Nicolais designed the asymmetrical, creamcolored brick Italian Renaissance villa for Stella

and Richard Otto Dulaney on Elizabeth Boulevard.8 Dulaney made his fortune in the Oklahoma oil business before moving to Fort Worth in 1919. An ornate terra-cotta entrance porch features green columns with spiral grooves cast to imitate marble. The upper story of the porch is of solid terra-cotta railing cast with Renaissance detailing. The Dulaney House stands as one of the most pretentious houses on the boulevard. Ryan Place is still home to a significant number of large-scale houses designed in a mixture of both traditional and progressive styles.

Fort Worth: River Crest In 1911, three real estate and security investors, David T. Bomar, John W. Broad, and Morris T. Berney, formed the River-Crest Company and purchased a 640-acre tract of land on Fort Worth’s West Side three miles from downtown.9 Their garden suburban community, River Crest, exhibits suburban development patterns directly inspired by Highland Park: a curvilinear road network; large, irregular lots; and suburban houses sited around a country club golf course.10 The Fort Worth architects Sanguinet and Staats designed the Craftsman-style River Crest Country Club in 1911. The original building has been replaced, but the club’s presence stabilized development in River Crest. The Fort Worth civil engineer Brookes Baker laid out the plat map for the residential community and placed smaller lots east of the golf course along Hillcrest Avenue. These measure 50 feet in width and range in depth from 130 to 320 feet. To the west of the golf course, lots along Alta Avenue were platted for estates, ranging in size from 1.2 to 20 acres, and were sited along

the southeast bluff of the Trinity River, giving them a topographic advantage over the flat prairie terrain east of the golf course. The Town of Highland Park differed from River Crest in that, in the Dallas subdivision, only five large-acreage lots were placed on the market for sale, and one of those was later subdivided into smaller lots. In contrast, seventy-six acreage lots, with forty-two of less than an acre, were platted in River Crest. Professionals purchased lots in the eastern half, while some of the wealthiest families in Fort Worth—whose fortunes came from cattle, real estate, banking, mercantile trade, and oil— built country houses in the western half. The private deep lots in the west section are accessible from three cul-de-sacs, Humble, Broad, and Berney Avenues. Restrictive covenants inscribed on the plat map when it was filed state that all houses had to face the streets, with no outhouses or servants’ quarters to be built on the front of any block.11 Utility lines and poles were placed in fifteen-foot rear alleys, setbacks were from twenty-five to forty feet in depth, depend-

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Stella and Richard Otto Dulaney House, Elizabeth Boulevard, Ryan Place, Fort Worth, 1923, Raphael A. Nicolais, architect (author).

ing on lot size and location in the development, with fences permitted only if no more than four feet in height. In 1919, the entrepreneur, oilman, fine arts collector, and publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph, Amon G. Carter, purchased David T. Bomar’s house on Broad Avenue. Built on a 4.21-acre lot, the house was the work of Sanguinet and Staats.12 Bomar, the first president of the River Crest Country Club, lived in the large Craftsman bungalow, of the type often associated with the Pasadena architects Greene and Greene, with his wife Anna and his brother William, secretary of the Bewley Mills and Elevator Company, until David Bomar’s untimely death.13 Houses in River Crest ranged in style from Craftsman and Prairie to Colonial and Tudor Revivals. The houses were mostly designed by local architects, many by Joseph R. Pelich, who was also well known for his local public work, particularly the design of schools prior to World War II. Also located in River Crest are two country houses designed by the noted Chicago architect David Adler, who brought the eclectic suburban “country” house type to Fort Worth in 1915, paralleling Harrie  T. Lindeberg’s contribution to domestic style in Houston in his Shady­ side house designs of the 1920s.14 Designed

Bomar-Carter House, Broad Avenue, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1911, Sanguinet and Staats, architects (author).

in 1915 by Adler and his associate Henry  C. Dangler, the two Italian Renaissance Revival houses were built on side-by-side sites, on a total of sixteen acres, for Flora Anderson and Morris  T. Berney and Mrs. Berney’s mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Anderson. In addition to real estate, Morris  T. Berney was engaged in the oil business and was vice president and secretary of the Alta Vista Creamery Company. It was his cotton merchandising business that led the Berneys to frequent Chicago, where they met members of the Armour and Marshall Field families, who were clients of Adler and introduced him to the Berneys. Designed in the same mode but with different personalities, both houses were sited on the crest of the property facing southeast with the rear of each house facing northwest toward the Trinity River. Mr. and Mrs. Berney’s house, the larger of the two houses on Broad Avenue, is a symmetrical two-story stucco country house flanked by two one-story projecting wings containing sunporches, all topped by red-tiled roofs. The entrance is through a vaulted loggia supported by cast-stone columns. Above it rests a cast-stone dated cartouche trimmed in the same material as the architrave surrounding the double-hung sash windows. The most notable difference in the design of the entrance facades

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Flora Anderson and Morris T. Berney House, Broad Avenue, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1915, David Adler and Henry C. Dangler, architects (author).

Jennie and Carl L. Hoera House, Hillcrest Street, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1922, Carb Building Company (author).

for the two houses is that Adler replaced the loggia of the Berney House with a cast-iron balcony over the main entrance to Mrs. Anderson’s house. Thought to be the work of Carb Building Company, a red brick, one-story house was built in 1922 on the east side of Hillcrest Street across from the River Crest golf course. It was purchased in the following year by Jennie and Carl  L. Hoera, who was a co-owner of the Hoera-Rosenthal Safe Company.15 One of the smaller houses built in River Crest, it has stone ornamentation that highlights the porte cochère, as well as the wraparound front porch, railings, and its spur wall on the south end of the house. This house is an example of the characteristic bungalow type found in Fort Worth suburban communities. Houston and Dallas architects, as well as nationally known landscape architects, worked in Fort Worth during the 1920s and the 1930s. Three houses in River Crest were the work of John F. Staub: two manorial-style houses—the Martha and E. E. Bewley House of 1926–1928 on Western Avenue and the Elizabeth Reynolds and Herman Gartner House of 1929–1930

on Hillcrest Street—and a 1928 Federal–style house designed for Lorena Bain and John  P. King on Crestline Road.16 The success of Staub’s Fort Worth designs has been attributed to his “responsiveness to his clients’ aspirations  .  .  . [in designing] houses that expressed grandeur while remaining manageable as family dwellings.”17 The staging point for his design of grand country houses was Bayou Bend, but, by the time he arrived in Fort Worth, he was becoming the most prolific designer of country houses in Texas during the 1920s and the 1930s. Bewley was vice president and manager of the Bewley Mills and Elevator Company and chairman of both the Fort Worth National Bank and the Texas Mutual Fire Insurance Company. Gartner was a principal in the insurance firm of Mitchell, Gartner, and Walton. The founder of King Candy Company, King was also the co-organizer of the Southern Ice and Cold Storage Company, as well as a director for both the Fort Worth National Bank and the Fort Worth Power and Light Company. Oriented north-south, the Bewley House is considered Staub’s most accomplished house design in Fort Worth. The house is located on

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Martha and E. E. Bewley House, Western Avenue, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1926–1928, John F. Staub, architect. Photograph © Richard Cheek for Texas A&M University Press.

Martha and E. E. Bewley House, floor plans. Reprinted from The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South by Howard Barnstone by permission of the Texas A&M University Press.

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a twenty-acre site that rests on both sides of a ridge above the bank of the West Fork of the Trinity River, and Staub intended to orient the residence away from the river to obtain a southeast breeze. He adapted the scale of the house to its site and views in a manner that is more successful than Adler’s northwest orientation of the Berney and Anderson Houses toward the river. The main entrance to the Bewley House is from the north through an oversized projecting gable, a motif Staub borrowed from the British country house architect, Edwin Lutyens. In his design for the Bewley House, Staub subtly selected historic elements from Lutyens’s picturesque manorial style and combined them with classical ornamentation to create his own unique interpretation of an American country house type.18 The red brick, two-and-a-half-story Bewley House is almost void of decoration, with the exception of the patterned clinker brickwork of red, orange, and black in the entrance bay, the large joined chimney stack rising east of the entrance, and a buttressed three-car garage on the west wing of the house that rises from an exposed base of limestone rubble visible from the south end of the house. The shingle tile hipped rooflines vary in height and help to break up the

Elizabeth Reynolds and Herman Gartner House, Hillcrest Street, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1929–1930, John F. Staub, architect (author).

rectangular block of the house. In keeping with the simple character of the house, the entrance is ornamented by an architrave-framed, deeply inset front door topped by a segmental arch. Above is a large casement window, which lights the main stair and is framed by a brick jack arch accentuated by a keystone in its center. From the reception hall, containing the main stair, there is a view through the library to the south lawn. One room deep in plan on either side of the central core is the living room to the east that opens onto an enclosed oversized loggia on the east side and an outdoor terrace on the north, with the dining room to the west attached to a skewed wing of service rooms blocking the sunny side of the house. Four bedrooms and bathrooms are on the second floor, with the large master room above the library. Laid in Flemish bond, the red brick, two-anda-half-story Gartner House is located in the east section of River Crest, facing due west with a view of the golf course, like the Hoera House. It is a smaller, more compact design than the Bewley House, with a projecting oversized scalloped Flemish gable frontispiece that terminates in a blunt pinnacle. Staub said that he had observed seventeenth-century “Dutch” masonry

Lorena Bain and John P. King House, Crestline Road, River Crest, Fort Worth, 1928, John F. Staub, architect (author).

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Adele and Edward A. Landreth House, River Crest Road, River Crest, Fort Worth, ca. 1929, Fooshee & Cheek, architects. Courtesy of Historic Fort Worth, Inc.

work in Great Britain: “I saw a gable in southern England that fascinated me. That’s why I did that tricky thing.”19 The gable is pierced in its center by an oval-shaped window filled with a pattern of decorative wrought iron. The window sits above the molded sandstone entrance portal, which is adorned by a keystone-centered segmental arch. A large, two-stage broken-out chimney stack rests south of the gable and rises above the shingle tile hipped roof that in scale almost overpowers the gable entrance. The main entrance is away from the street and through the side yard, allowing the reception rooms and the three bedrooms above them to face southeast, escaping the harsh sunlight and heat. The light-colored red brick, five-bay King House, divided by shallow Ionic pilasters, is of

American, rather than English, inspiration and is balanced by a two-story porte cochère, which blocks the sun and visually seems to support the west end of the house, where the entrance is located. Although the front door, with a broken pediment, appears to be in the central bay on the main façade, it turns out to be ornamental and does not function as the main entry to the house. Above the door is a window with its shutters replaced by curvilinear mullions in the sidelights. Fenestration on the second floor is of Georgian inspiration, whereas the first floor’s elongated windows and door are Federal in character and, further emphasizing their verticality, are topped by tall architraves filled with fluted fanlight panels. The house and porte cochère are tied together by a modillion cornice that wraps around

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them, and they are both topped by low-pitched hipped roofs. Because the lot slopes down from Crestline Road, Staub accentuated the verticality of the house so that it has the illusion of rising up to meet street level. Fooshee & Cheek designed one house in River Crest for Adele and Edward A. Landreth on River Crest Road in about 1929.20 Landreth was an oil producer and president of Landreth Production Company and vice president of Landreth Oil Corporation. The orange brick, Tudor two-and-a-half story house is one of the largest in River Crest and is a classic interpretation of the style. Half-timber filled with brick laid in a herringbone pattern appears above the stone entrance arch and the southern end of

the second story. The gables above the secondfloor windows also display half-timbering but here are of stucco. This house is one of Fooshee & Cheek’s best domestic designs from the late 1920s. The Bewley and Landreth houses, larger than those built in The Town of Highland Park in the late 1920s, are indicative of the wealth in Fort Worth. Further cementing the city’s importance in the field of suburban development, Hare & Hare came to Fort Worth and laid out four highly restricted subdivisions west of downtown: Colonial Hills in 1924, Park Hill in 1924–1925, Ridglea in 1928, and Monticello in 1928 in association with the St. Louis firm Bartholomew and Sons.

Fort Worth: Westover Hills Four and one-half miles from Fort Worth’s business center and west of River Crest, Westover Hills was laid out in 1928 by the civil engineer Brookes Baker for the Fort Worth Extension Company in an area of rough hilly terrain, with all streets planned in a curvilinear pattern.21 Intended for estates, some of the lots were sited on river bluffs, providing views to the north and west. According to the restrictions, all house plans had to be approved by the developers at a minimum expenditure, and only masonry construction was allowed. In 1930, the Fort

Worth Extension Company was sold to Byrne & Luther, Inc., which engaged in the practice of selling houses and lots in a package. Because of the impact of the Great Depression, the community did not begin to fill in with houses until the 1930s and 1940s. The Westover Hills country houses, like those in River Crest, were erected in period revival styles. To encourage sales, the company built Westover Manor, a three-story Norman Revival estate in 1930–1931 on Westover Road (formerly Lloyd Drive) as a model house on an

Westover Hills model house, “Westover Manor” (Thelma Brooks and John E. Farrell House), Westover Road, Westover Hills, 1930–1931, Victor Marr Curtis, architect (author).

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irregularly shaped lot with a 400-foot front footage by 566 feet by 500 feet by 300 feet. It was designed by Florida architect Victor Marr Curtis, who remained in Fort Worth and worked for the company for two years. In promotional literature, Westover Manor was described as being erected with “no thought of expense or economy. .  .  . Needless to say, the wood, millwork, hand cut stone, and numerous features of craftsmanship embodied in this home are unobtainable today.”22 Westover Manor featured a room arrangement that could accommodate two families: one for a family with children and one for grandparents, with a guest suite in the south wing for a total of five bedrooms, and two living rooms, one 31 by 18 feet, the other 30 by 20 feet. The house was partially air-conditioned, with such modern conveniences as up-to-date kitchen appliances and bathrooms. The huge master bedroom, 20 by 30 feet, was arranged in

an apartment suite with three exposures, a fireplace, an adjoining sitting room, a connecting dressing room, an oversized closet, and a bathroom. The Fort Worth Star-Telegraph awarded it the “Home Beautiful” in 1931, and Thelma Brooks and John E. Farrell purchased the house in that same year. Farrell was one of the discoverers of the East Texas Oil Field in 1930 and served as president of three oil companies, Farrell and Company, Farrell and Company of Louisiana, and the Farrell Drilling Company. No model houses were built on this scale by the Flippen-Prather Realty Company in Highland Park or the River Oaks Corporation in Houston. In 1937, Westover Hills was incorporated as a town, and Farrell was elected the first mayor. Westover Hills, when first developed, did not have the prestige of its adjacent neighbor River Crest, but over time it became one of the most exclusive addresses in the city.

Wichita Falls: Morningside Park Additions Oil production in the Old Burkburnett and the Burkburnett Township fields by 1918 triggered a boom in Wichita Falls. Families came to the city to seek their fortunes, and residential development soon addressed this growth. One of the city’s leading boosters, Joseph Alexander Kemp came from a small Texas town in 1883 and became prosperous through his chain of wholesale grocery store companies and his Wichita Falls Railway Company, among other investments and companies he established, making him one of the wealthiest men in the city.23 He also served as vice president and was a major shareholder of the Texhoma Oil and Refining Company. In 1909, he developed a small residential neighborhood called the Floral Heights Addi-

tion, which was laid out in a grid. The neighborhood was greatly needed to meet the demands of the city’s rise in population from 5,500 in 1907 to 7,505 in 1908. Inspired, perhaps, by the curvilinear garden suburbs in Fort Worth and Dallas, Kemp formed Morningside Development Company in 1920 with his partners, Harry  S. Baum, of Baum’s Ladies Ready to Wear, and the Wichita Falls architect Jessie F. Lauck, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a draftsman in the Philadelphia office of Paul Philippe Cret.24 The Morningside Park Addition, planned by an unknown designer, is entered from 9th Street onto Tilden Street, which connects to two large curving streets, Morningside Drive and Pem-

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Peyton F. Gwinn House, Pembroke Lane, Morningside Park North Addition, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1924, Voelker & Dixon, architects (author).

broke Lane. The 12.3-acre site was originally divided into 33 lots, but later was trimmed to 22 to allow for a large, oval-shaped park placed in its center. Restrictions required that only singlefamily houses be built at a cost of no less than ten thousand dollars, all architectural plans be approved by the developers, and all outbuildings correspond in style to the main house. The earliest houses were bungalows and American Foursquare types with deep setbacks and large yards. Later houses were designed in the current popular revival styles. The houses in the development were mostly designs by the Oklahoma City architects Sorey & Valberg and the Wichita Falls architects Voelker & Dixon.25 Residents of Morningside Park Addition were all involved in some aspects of the Texas oil exploration and refining business. By 1924, the developers added the Morningside Park North Addition, laid out by the surveyor J. V. Wheeler and consisting of fifteen lots on eleven acres. Pembroke Lane was expanded

north, then east, and then south again, connecting to Sturdevant Place and forming an irregular oval. In this section, Voelker & Dixon designed a house on Pembroke Lane in 1924 for Peyton F. Gwinn, president of the Gwinn-Boyd Drilling Company and vice president of the Iowa Park Producing and Refining Company.26 The austere, two-story, brick Mediterranean house, a style gaining popularity in Wichita Falls, is free of ornamentation, with the exception of the central projecting entrance bay, fronted by triple cast-stone arches of the composite order providing a recessed loggia facing east. The front door and the two flanking windows are all topped by round-arched windows, and on the southern end of the house, an enclosed porch directly faces the street. In 1927, the Dallas architect David  R. Williams designed a Spanish Colonial Revival house for Blanche and Leslie  R. Stringer, manager of the estate of J. W. Stringer, on Crestway Drive.27 The house is hidden from view by vegetation.

Wichita Falls: Country Club Estates The Morningside Park Addition was the most exclusive area in Wichita Falls until the developers William Benjamin Hamilton and his partner Noros H. Martin formed the HamiltonMartin Investment Company and filed a plat on

June 11, 1926, for the restricted six-hundredacre Country Club Estates development. The development was located two miles from downtown and adjacent to the Wichita Falls Golf and Country Club, which had been established

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in 1911. In addition to real estate development, Hamilton was president of Texhoma Oil and Refining Company until 1926, when the company merged with the Continental Oil Company. Between 1926 and 1928, he built the landmark twelve-story Hamilton Office Building, designed by Voelker & Dixon in association with the Dallas architects Bryan & Sharp. Hamilton later served as mayor of Wichita Falls from 1944 to 1948. He was president of the Hamilton-Martin Investment Company and was vice president of the Wichita Falls Building and Loan Association.28 Laid out by Hare & Hare with the local civil engineer J. J. Cook, Country Club Estates was advertised as “Where Life is Worth Living.”29 It encompasses one of the largest sections of the city, with the east border on Hamilton Boulevard, its south border on Ellingham Drive, and north and west borders on Speedway Avenue.30 The company spent one million dollars to place the utilities underground in easements and to install street paving, landscaping, and street lighting. The developers pointed out in a promotional booklet that they had chosen a location oriented north-south to avoid “driving against the west sun in the afternoon, or an east sun in the morning” and “to avoid . . . the hot parching winds over the dry prairies in Mid-Summer . . . and exposed places where one must endure the fury of the cold blasts from the North in Winter.”31 Containing a mixture of curvilinear and rectilinear streets, Country Club Estates was connected to the city by Brook Street, which runs directly through the center of downtown Wichita Falls. In the slightly off-center area to the west, Martin Boulevard, Clarinda Avenue, and Miramar Street intersect in a traffic circle. The company office was located at 2601 Harrison Boulevard at the northern section of the de-

velopment, across from the triangular Bridwell Park that contains a circular pond and a fountain, creating a grand entrance. Harrison Street, an existing city street, becomes a 120-foot-wide boulevard at this point, with a planted median that ends in Martin Plaza Park at the intersection of Harrison, Ellingham, and Miramar. The park once had bridle paths for horseback riding. For landscaping alone, the developers spent seventy-five thousand dollars, planting evergreen shrubbery and thousands of shade trees in their fertile sandy loam soil. Some of the trees were pin oaks purchased in Louisiana. A castiron irrigation system was installed to keep the landscaping from perishing in the oppressive dry summer heat. More than one hundred acres were reserved for parks and playgrounds. From the beginning, the developers created a maintenance fund to ensure community upkeep, which included the purchase of street lamps placed along each street. Deed restrictions were to run for a period of ten years and could be renewed for seven tenyear periods or a period of twenty-five years, unless there was a legally written agreement acknowledged by the County Clerk’s office.32 The company held the right to enforce the restrictions on present and subsequent owners of the properties. To prevent fire and reduce insurance costs, only masonry construction was permitted. Each house had to face the front street and not the side street, a directive discussed at length in the restrictions. All house plans and specifications had to be approved in writing by the company, including those for outbuildings, fences, walls, or any type of additions, with the exception of greenhouses. Unenclosed porches, balconies, and porte cochères could not extend more than twelve feet from the front of the houses or ten feet from their sides. Such

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projecting features as windows, other than twostory windows, or staircase landings, vestibules, cornices, or chimneys were not permitted to be more than four feet from the building lines. No above-ground oil or gas tanks; no poultry or livestock, including horses; no signs of more than five-feet square or in diameter were permitted on the property; and no pergola or any detached structure in front of the houses could be erected without the company’s written permission. The plat map shows that all lots, regardless of size, had a building line for the placement of residences that ranged from thirty-five to two hundred feet, depending on the size and location of the property, with a small site along the rear lot line set for outbuildings. Of the total 301 lots in the community, six blocks that form the western side of the development were set aside for small single-family houses, with lot sizes beginning at 60 by 145 feet, and duplexes, with lot sizes 60 by 174 feet and 70 by 241 feet. All had minimum construction costs from $5,000 to $6,000. Twenty-one other blocks were restricted for single-family residences only, with house construction costs to range from $6,000 to $12,000, depending on the size of the lot. Twelve estate lots were sited on five blocks facing east onto the one-hundred-foot-wide Hamilton Boulevard, ranging in size from 144.5 to 322 feet in front footage by 304 to 656 feet in depth. The company required that minimum construction costs for houses on six of them be at least $20,000; for the remaining six, at least $25,000. Outbuildings were to be placed at the rear of the lots with building lines measuring 60 by 125 feet. Across the street from the estate-sized lots is the thirtyacre Country Club Estates Park (now Hamilton Park), with municipal tennis courts, which lies just north of the grounds of the Wichita Falls Golf and Country Club.

Commissioned in 1927, Fooshee & Cheek designed the country house of Landon H. Collum of Perkins and Collum, oil producers, on Hamilton Boulevard.33 What is striking about this house is its enormous scale, much larger than anything Fooshee & Cheek designed in Dallas. It is composed of a series of projecting and recessed bays laid out in an elongated asymmetrical pattern. Faced with stucco with a redtiled roof, the two-story Mediterranean-style house has round-arched openings, and the front entry, with a dark brown double wooden front door, has a decorative cast-stone voussoired arch. Above the door are two small sash windows flanked by pale blue shutters that mark the main entrance to the house. The color of the shutters matches two second-story wooden balconies, with a third between built of cast iron. Facing east, another double wooden door at the north end of the house has a less elaborate stone arch and opens onto the dining room. To the south is a smaller door and window set in a stone loggia that appears to be the entrance to a sunroom. Another version of the Mediterranean style was built for the family of William P. Ferguson of W. P. Ferguson & Sons, Loans.34 The house, designed by Sorey & Valberg in 1927, is located in the next block of Hamilton Boulevard. Although the two-story brick house has more ornamentation, it bears some resemblance to the Gwinn House in the Morningside Park North Addition. Large bracketed eaves support the steeply pitched, hipped tile roof, here of a neutral gray color. A triple-arched, cast-stone loggia, composed of Tuscan columns with a high spandrel above them, leads to the main entrance of the house. However, the entrance is more recessed between the two flanking projecting bays than that of the Gwinn House. A one-story, en-

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Plat of Country Club Estates, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1926, Hare & Hare, landscape architects, J. J. Cook, civil engineer.

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Landon H. Collum House, Hamilton Boulevard, Country Club Estates, Wichita Falls, 1927, Fooshee & Cheek, architects (author).

William P. Ferguson House, Hamilton Boulevard, Country Club Estates, 1927, Sorey & Valberg, architects (author).

closed porch is recessed at the south end of the house. Its balustraded roofline encloses an outdoor second-story porch. The largest house in Country Club Estates, also on Hamilton Boulevard, was built in 1926 for Ella and Walter P. Cline, an oil operator.35 Designed by Voelker & Dixon, the Cline House

Ella and Walter P. Cline House, Hamilton Boulevard, Country Club Estates, 1926, Voelker & Dixon, architects (author).

is a limestone version of the south elevation of the White House, which was designed by the architect Benjamin Latrobe and built from 1804 to 1812. However, the majority of the houses in the subdivision are much smaller in scale, and the neighborhood did not fill up until after World

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War II. In the northwest tip of the subdivision, next to the former Hamilton-Martin Investment Company offices at 2120 Speedway, is the Woman’s Forum, a Mediterranean design by T. L. Sorey built in 1927, and the Ben Franklin Elementary School at 2112 Speedway, a 1927 English Renaissance style designed by Voelker

& Dixon. Land was donated across the street for two churches, but only one was built. The 1948 Gothic-style Fain Memorial Presbyterian Church at 2201 Speedway was designed by the Dallas architects Bennett & Crittenden. The other property was divided up into lots for houses.

Amarillo: Wolflin Place and Wolflin Estates Amarillo’s history of oil, prosperity, and sudden growth parallels that of Wichita Falls. In 1921, the Amarillo Oil Company struck oil in the Panhandle Oil Field, approximately forty-five miles northeast of Amarillo in Borger, Texas, a small town in Hutchinson County. What had started as a depot for the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway in 1887, Amarillo began to boom by the second decade in the twentieth century. The Phillips, Shamrock, and Magnolia petroleum companies opened offices there, creating a demand for workers and professionals in all trades. Population statistics reveal that in 1920 the population was 15,494 and by 1930, it had risen to 43,132. Real estate developers scrambled to meet the need for family housing. Building permit records from 1928 show that Amarillo ranked third in the state, behind Houston and San Antonio and ahead of Dallas.36 On May 4, 1923, a plat map was filed with the Potter County Clerk’s office for Wolflin Place, an eighty-acre subdivision platted in a grid pattern running north-south from Wolflin Avenue to West 26th Street and east-west from South Washington to the alley that separates South Ong and South Lipscomb Streets.37 Described as an “Exclusive Residential Addition” in the Amarillo Daily News on January 13, 1923, Wolflin Place was established when Alpha Eunice Wolflin and her husband Charles

Oldham Wolflin, a cattleman and businessman who owned a successful grocery store and an automobile dealership, sold a section of their Daylight Dairy and Farm to the real estate agents Colonel Will A. Miller and R. J. Wagner of Will A. Miller & Sons, and their wives Nell and Nellie B., respectively, as listed on the deed. Will Miller controlled the finances and R. J. Wagner was the manager and salesman. Restrictions in the deed were to run for a period of twenty-five years and stated that no business houses or public garages could be erected on the property. The developers planned in the beginning for automobile traffic by paving all streets sixty feet wide in willemite, some faced in brick, and room was provided for garages at the rear of each lot. For shade throughout the barren subdivision, they planted rows of Chinese elms between the curbs and sidewalks. After spending more than sixty thousand dollars on infrastructure, the developers placed lots on the market, and the restrictions and covenants in the deeds were revised to permit only masonry construction and a minimum expenditure of no fewer than five thousand dollars for each house, and only Dutch Colonial– or Tudor-style houses were allowed to be built.38 Amarillo public schools in the early 1920s were so overcrowded that two class sessions were being held each day. The Wolflins had planned

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to build a new residence on a 300- by 300-foot lot along South Washington, South Hughes, and Wolflin, but this plan was abandoned after C. O. Wolflin’s death in 1924, and the property was sold by his widow to the Amarillo school district. In 1925, Amarillo’s first architect, Emmett R. Rittenbury and his partner Macon Cader designed the two-story brick Spanish Renaissance Revival school, which opened in 1926 at 2026 South Hughes. With twenty-two rooms for classes, it became a major asset to the development. Business was so brisk in Wolflin Place that the Wolflin Place Addition was platted in a grid expanding the suburb south to West 30th and west to an alley between South Lipscomb and South Parker. By 1927, nearly every lot had sold and houses had been erected on them. As Alpha Eunice Wolflin witnessed the profitable sale of property in the two Wolflin subdivisions, she decided to develop the remainder of her approximately 450 acres of farmland into a subdivision that lies on both sides of the Potter and Randall County lines. On April 3, 1926, she filed an amended plat for Wolflin Place with covenants, conditions, and restrictions signed by herself and Nell and Will  A. Miller, along with Nellie  B. and R.  J. Wagner.39 Her son, Charles A. Wolflin, a recent agriculture graduate of the University of California at Davis, had returned to Amarillo to run the dairy farm. Instead, probably due to his mother’s wishes, he took charge of developing the property for her.40 On the recommendation of Theodore Cox of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Wolflin contacted Hare & Hare on July 31, 1926, about the planning and landscaping of the property.41 S.  Herbert Hare wrote that he could devise a comprehensive general plan, a dimension plan, profiles, cross sections, restrictions for the entire district, suggestions for an entrance gate, and a plant-

ing plan. He also recommended that the subdivision be developed forty acres at a time. On October 8, 1926, Hare visited the property and early in January 1927, he sent a “Schedule for the First Unit, Subdivision of Land for Mrs. A. E. Wolflin” for a 59.29-acre plat divided into 43.59 acres for lots, or 132 lots, 13.7 acres for streets, 0.8 acres for parks, and 1.2 acres for a shopping center. Unfortunately, the remaining 433.71 acres planned for future development were never improved until after 1945 because of the onset of the Great Depression. Numbered Blocks 31 to 40, the first unit was platted in curvilinear and straight streets with South Washington to its east, West 30th to its north, West 34th to its south, and South Parker to its west. West 32nd, West 33rd, and South Hughes intersect at a triangular park, becoming West 32nd leading west. From there, West 32nd connects to two large curvilinear streets, South Lipscomb and South Parker, then to Oldham Circle, with a park in the center in the manner of the traffic circle at the Country Club Estates in Wichita Falls.42 The streets are 60 feet wide, with the majority surfaced in brick, and half streets are only 30 feet in width. Lot sizes varied from 60 to 300 feet in front frontage and from 130 to 200 feet in depth, the largest lots being platted around Oldham Circle. On January 7, 1927, Wolflin wrote Hare to inform him they had decided on the name Wolflin Estates. He was also organizing a “Homes Association” to pay for the upkeep of parks and parkways, with plans to purchase cast-iron lamp posts to be placed at each intersection. He decided to place entrance gates at West 33rd to separate the neighborhood from a shopping center that was to be designed to resemble an English village. (The gates were built, but the shopping center was not realized.) Hare sent

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Plat of Wolflin Estates, Amarillo, Texas, 1927, Hare & Hare, landscape architects.

Wolflin a maintenance agreement that had been written for one of the districts in the Kansas City Country Club District to use as a model for the Wolflin Estates agreement, as well as a draft of restrictions for the first unit that bear many similarities to those written for Country Club Estates in Wichita Falls. Signed by Mrs. A. E. Wolflin, the restrictions and a plat map for Wolflin Estates were recorded on March 28, 1927, in Potter County and on May 9, 1927, in Randall County to run for a period of twenty years, and after that, for a period of ten years.43 These stipulated that all houses had to be set back at least fifty feet, all were to be of masonry construction, all designs had to be approved by a design review board, and no previously built houses could be moved into the development. Any type of outbuildings had to be in the same architectural style as the main house, and porches, balconies, porte cochères,

and terraces could not extend from the houses more than twelve feet from the front elevation or ten feet from the side elevations. House prices were set to range from $6,000 for the smaller lots to $25,000 each for the most expensive lots, the four terraced sites around Oldham Circle. On March 19, 1927, Wolflin Estates was open to the public, with prices at $25–$35 per front foot, including all improvements. It was advertised as “Amarillo’s Crowning Achievement in Residential Development.”44 However, the improvements were not finished until the fall of 1927, under the direction of the Amarillo civil engineer J. C. French, who later became Amarillo’s city landscape engineer.45 The total bill for the services for Hare & Hare was $2,906.90 and was paid in full on August 17, 1927. By this time, Hare & Hare had started work on the Houston subdivision, Braeswood. Emmett R. Rittenberry designed the Alpha

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Alpha E. Wolflin House, South Hughes, Wolflin Estates, 1928, Emmett R. Rittenberry, architect (author).

E. Wolflin House on South Hughes in 1928 in the Tudor style, and, as stated in the development’s promotional booklet, “English architecture predominates; and this type of construction will be encouraged in Wolflin Estates.”46 The large two-and-a-half-story residence faces east and was built of red brick accented by a white cast-stone frame around the front door, with ornamental white half-timbering on the second floor and a small gable rising from the west side of the house. Sales were so slow in Wolflin

Estates that the one hundred thousand dollars that Wolflin had borrowed from the Amarillo National Bank to complete its infrastructure had increased to two hundred thousand dollars in 1949, when he was finally able to pay off the loan.47 Hare & Hare’s general plan for the entirety of Wolflin Estates was found in Wolflin’s filing cabinet after his death in 1991. The plan shows all the streets laid out in a curvilinear pattern lined with trees and shrubbery, but the land was never platted in this manner.48

Corsicana: Mills Place Fifty-eight miles southeast of Dallas is the Navarro County seat, Corsicana, a town originally developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a trading post for area cotton farmers. In the 1890s, drought conditions led to a search for artesian water, and, like William T. Waggoner in Wichita County, the Corsicana Water Development Company drilled for water and found oil instead. It was not until a second and larger oil discovery in 1923 that a need for housing became critical, as hotels and boarding houses were full.49 In 1924, Mills Place was platted from land purchased from the nineteenth-century homestead of U.S. Senator Robert Q. Mills.50 His son, Charles H. Mills, after inheriting his father’s estate in 1911, began selling off parcels

of land. The Corsicana banker J. Elmer Butler and the lumberman J. Ruben Neece developed the small subdivision, laying out 38 lots on 24.5 acres of land north of West 2nd Avenue along two streets, Mills Place Drive and West Park Avenue, which ends in a circular cul-du-sac. Butler and his wife built an Italian Renaissance Revival house on Mills Place Drive in 1926, with Neece and his family building their Mediterranean residence on West Park Avenue in the same year. To stabilize the status of the community, minimum construction costs for houses were set at ten thousand dollars, and by 1935, only four lots were left unsold. Among the residents were prominent oil operators, bankers, doctors, and retailers.

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Most importantly, the suburb is where three houses designed by the Dallas architect David R. Williams were built: the Bessie and William C. Stroube House on West Park Avenue of 1927, the Katherine and Francis B. McKie House on Mills Place Drive of 1929, and the Lila and Lowry Martin House on West Park Avenue of 1931.51 The Stroube House stands out as the most innovative of Williams’s work in Mills Place. His plan was based on a Mexican hacienda to accommodate comfortable indoor and outdoor living spaces divided from the working areas of the property. Facing northwest, the front elevation of the residence is an off-white, twostory stucco Spanish Colonial Revival structure with a low-pitched tile hipped roof. Native limestone veneer surrounds the front doorway and the window to the right of it. Sash windows opening into the living room to the left of the front door are all ornamented by flat limestone arches. Above the front door is a second-story wooden balcony that opens off the second-story staircase landing and provides natural light. A detached one-story porte cochère on the west side of the main house blocks the sun from the

study and half-bath. Upon entering the house, there is an entry hall with a winding stair; east of it is the living room, and north of it is the dining room. Both rooms open via French doors onto terraces facing southeast, providing ample cool breezes and views of the gardens and the small stream that meanders behind the property. Attached to the living room to the east is a covered terrace. A breakfast room west of the dining room also opens via French doors onto a long, sheltered terrace that is placed in front of the three-car garage, which faces west, blocking the sun. West of the breakfast room is the kitchen and service passage. The caretaker quarters are set beyond the garage, leaving an open courtyard also facing west. Above the three main rooms of the four-bedroom house is the master suite, with a balcony overlooking the gardens, and a bathroom, a dressing room, and ample closets. W. C. Stroube was an oil field driller and producer and a partner, with his brother Henry, in the firm of Stroube and Stroube. Henry  M. Stroube lived across the street in a larger, picturesque manorial fieldstone country house built at the same time and designed by Fooshee & Cheek.

San Antonio: Olmos Park Between 1900 and 1930, San Antonio was the largest city in Texas, a center for ranching, mercantile trade, wholesale distribution, banking, and military bases. By 1900, five railroads crisscrossed the city, bringing Mexican, Anglo, and German settlers to the city.52 Beginning in the 1870s, the neighborhoods lined with fashionable residences were built south of downtown in the King William District. In the 1890s, streetcar lines ascended to Tobin Hill, Laurel Heights, Summit Heights, to Monte Vista north

of downtown, and ran even farther north to Alamo Heights.53 Herman Charles Thorman, who came to San Antonio from Toledo, Ohio, in 1907 began to develop subdivisions, including Highland Park, Country Club Place, and Tobin Hill.54 Thorman became one of the most successful residential builders in San Antonio, building more than 750 houses in fourteen years, on average twenty to forty houses each year.55 By 1925, he was president of the San Antonio Real Estate

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Bessie and William C. Stroube House, West Park Avenue, Mills Place, Corsicana, 1927, David R. Williams, architect (author).

Bessie and William C. Stroube House, first-floor plan. Courtesy of Judy and Wayne C. Nelson and Cole Smith, FAIA, of Smith Ekblad, Architects.

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Board and later became president of the Texas Real Estate Board and the San Antonio Home Builders Association. In newspaper advertisements from that time, he claimed, “You Can’t Go Wrong with Thorman.” In 1921, San Antonio suffered from a devastating flood when the creek beds rose in the Olmos Valley and the San Antonio River flooded downtown. As a result, the Olmos Dam was constructed in the valley. Completed in 1925, the dam has a span of 1,940 feet in length and a 24-foot-wide roadway on top of it, connecting the Olmos Basin to Alamo Heights on the east. Real estate development soon began north of the dam, including what would be called initially Park Hill Estates, later Olmos Park, situated four miles from downtown on land with a high elevation and filled with native trees. In 1926, Thorman spent $150,000 on infrastructure and landscaping improvements in a 50-acre portion of the 242 acres of land he purchased that was located adjacent to a 27-acre city park at the corner of Devine Road and Hildebrand Avenue, and to the south and west of the 1,100-acre Olmos Basin Park, which serves as a buffer for Olmos Park and Alamo Heights.56 Described as an “outstanding project” in the San Antonio Express, the first plat map for the Park Hill Estates section of Olmos Park, by an unknown designer, shows it is located west of Devine Road, east of Shook Avenue, and north of Hildebrand Avenue, with the city park to its north and west. Thorman, through his Northside Investment Company, constructed sixtyfoot-wide curving streets among the rolling hills, making Park Hill Estates San Antonio’s first subdivision dependent on automobiles, rather than on streetcar lines. The development’s main entrance was through Robinson Road (now Olmos Drive) at the entrance to the dam, where

Thorman’s real estate office was located on the corner of Devine Road. Advertised in the San Antonio Express on November 28, 1926, Park Hills Estates was marketed as “Exclusively For Fine Homes,” initially with 186 lots, ranging in size from 75 feet to 260 feet front footage with depths from 150 to 300 feet. Prices for the lots were expensive, ranging from $30-$80 per front foot at a time when average prices for lots in San Antonio were around $40.57 Restrictions required that only one singlefamily house could be erected on each lot with a minimum construction cost from $7,500 to $10,000. All of the houses had to face their main streets, including those on corner lots. Building lines for setbacks for houses and outbuildings were drawn on the plat map, outbuildings had to match the materials of the main house, and no businesses, hotels, boarding houses, duplexes, or apartment buildings could be built in Park Hills Estates. Surprisingly, Thorman stipulated that only Olmos Drive houses had to be constructed of masonry, as most Texas suburban developments usually made this a requirement for the whole community. In 1923, the Alamo Heights Independent School District was established on a 9.4-squareacre campus, and students from Olmos Park and another community, Terrell Hills, were admitted.58 Founded in 1922, the Alamo Country Club (now the Oak Hills Country Club), was built on 200 acres of land just west of Callaghan Road in an area now next to the South Texas Medical Center, with a golf course laid out by a noted golf course architect, A. W. Tillinghast.59 Thorman joined the club, and since memberships were no longer available in the San Antonio Country Club, the Alamo Country Club served as the alternative.60 Therefore, Thorman had two lucky advantages, a new school dis-

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trict and a country club to attract buyers to his development. By 1927, Thorman had hired Hare & Hare to plat the entire remaining tract of land, which he named Olmos Park Estates (now Olmos Park), expanding the subdivision north to Contour Drive and west to McCullough Avenue.61 Olmos Park totals 0.61 square miles, or 390 acres. Thorman by then was both president of the Northside Investment Company and the Olmos Development Company. Thorman revised the restrictions to have all house plans, specifications, and locations approved by the company prior to construction. No fences were allowed other than three-foot-high ornamental iron fences, and commercial and apartment buildings were permitted to be erected along McCullough Avenue, but there was no formal shopping center. He and his wife Lula resided on East Olmos Drive in a Colonial Revival house designed in 1927 by the company’s architect Bartlett Cocke.62 City directories from 1934-1935 show that, despite the Depression, the neighborhood remained the home of numerous professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, oilmen, bankers, and other businessmen.63 Olmos Park Estates was incorporated as a city in 1939 to avoid San Antonio city taxes, which led to further interest in the development. In 1928, the architects Atlee  B. and Robert M. Ayres designed one of the earliest houses in Olmos Park on East Olmos Drive for Carrie and Carl Newton, vice president of the City Central Bank and Trust and the owner of three Fox Shops, local outlets for Kodak, in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.64 Notably, Ayres & Ayres had previously designed three important San Antonio houses in the Monte Vista district, the Hogg House in 1924, the Mannen House in 1926, and the Atkinson House (now the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum) at 6000

North New Braunfels Avenue in 1929. Sited on top of a gently sloping lot, the main entrance to the Newton House is due north through a twostory rectangular entrance tower. The tower is framed by an elaborate serpentine sculptural molding, adding a three-dimensional touch to the otherwise flat, white stucco wall surfaces, which are punctuated by random fenestration. Curiously, another door to the west is set into a lower round-arched tower that leads to a side hall, separating the reception hall from the dining room that faces southeast onto a loggia attached to the breakfast room. The plan of the house is somewhat reminiscent of the Stroube House in Corsicana, with its service areas oriented west to block the sun from the main rooms of the house. The plan is hinged, with the living room, den, and sunporch opening onto the south and east, while the remainder of the house is skewed at an angle to the west. The kitchen is behind the dining room and adjacent to the detached garage with the servants’ rooms to its rear. Drawn on the plan is the direction of the southern prevailing breeze heading to the main rooms of the house. San Antonio architect Robert H.  H. Hugman’s best-known work was as the project architect for his 1938–1941 designs of the San Antonio River Walk. Hugman also designed a house in Olmos Park on Park Hill Drive for William A. Turner and his family in 1928. Turner was president and manager of the Turner Roofing and Supply Company.65 Hugman’s approach to the Spanish Revival for the Turner House differed from that of the Ayres mainly in its massing and layout in a rectangular plan. The two-story white stucco and red-tile-roofed house, smaller in scale that the Newton House, borrowed an interesting motif for a small room at its west end. Topped by a dome resting on scrolled brackets, the exterior design of the room is a scaled-down

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Carrie and Carl Newton House, East Olmos Drive, Olmos Park, San Antonio, Texas, 1928, Atlee B. & Robert M. Ayres, architects. Photograph courtesy of Killis Almond, FAIA.

Carrie and Carl Newton House, first-floor plan. Architectural Record 66, no. 11 (November 1929): 467.

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William A. Turner House, Park Hill Drive, Olmos Park, San Antonio, 1928, H. H. Hugman, architect. Photograph courtesy of Killis Almond, FAIA.

version of the bell towers of the mission church, San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson. Another Olmos Park house, designed by the New York architect William McKnight Bowman, was a copy of an Italian villa. The Devine Road house was built in 1930 for Julie and John B. Robertson, vice president of the Luthy Battery Equipment Company.66 Bowman placed a

Julie and John B. Robertson House, Devine Road, Olmos Park, San Antonio, 1930, William McKnight Bowman, architect. Architectural Forum 52, no. 4 (April 1930): 541.

drawing room on the second floor of the house fronted on the exterior by a triple round-arched loggia, which has a low balustrade supported by large brackets. On top of the center projecting gable of the loggia are three symmetrically placed urns. Importantly, these houses helped to set the high standard for future residences in Olmos Park.

Conclusion In reviewing the impact that Highland Park and River Oaks made in Texas on suburban development prior to the Great Depression, three important facts stand out. First of all, Texan suburban developers and homeowners were introduced to more advanced domestic architectural styles and plans and, from this period forward in Texas, would be in touch nationally with the most progressive and scientific methods of house planning and construction. In the beginning, Texas architects usually learned as apprentices to those with academic training. A case in point is Fooshee & Cheek’s tutelage under H. B. Thomson, who had studied at the oldest architectural school in the country, MIT.67 Later, a demand for more academically trained Texas

architects was met initially by the establishment of academic programs at Texas universities, and these ensured the presence of capable architects statewide. Texas A&M University (formerly the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas) offered courses in architectural engineering in 1905, and in the following year, the first three students received formal degrees in what was called their “architectural education program.” But it was not until 1927 that the Department of Architecture became a separate entity. The University of Texas at Austin offered a bachelor degree in architecture beginning in 1910, and, resembling Harvard University’s approach, it was based on a fine arts curriculum with an emphasis on drawing and watercolor, despite the

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fact that it was part of the College of Engineering until 1950. Rice University (formerly Rice Institute) offered a curriculum in architecture when the school first opened in 1912. Texas Tech University (formerly Texas Technological College) established a Department of Architectural Engineering in 1927, which, by 1933, offered a Bachelor of Architecture degree.68 Importantly, Staub, Thomson, and Fooshee & Cheek in the 1920s and 1930s designed houses outside of their home cities, bringing sophisticated ideas to their wealthy clients in other Texan suburban communities. Second, landscaping would become a paramount factor in the layout and development of restricted residential subdivisions because the barren Texas prairie terrain required attention. In terms of landscape architecture and suburban planning, George Kessler’s work in Dallas and Houston profoundly influenced the developers of River Crest, and their decision to plan more spacious sites than those at Highland Park has resulted in the development’s continuing stability and desirability. Undoubtedly, Hare & Hare were the most active figures in the history of Texas subdivision planning and development, as exemplified by their professional skills in giving advice and handling practically every detail for the developers of the Country Club Estates in Wichita Falls, Wolflin Estates, and Olmos Park. An examination of their project list at the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City reveals that their presence is still visible today through their work in approximately thirty Texas cities, where they designed landscaping for parks, churches, cemeteries, schools, universities, institutional buildings, country clubs, golf courses, shopping centers, office buildings, airports, levee systems, hospitals, courthouses, and zoos.69 Following S. Herbert Hare’s death in 1960, the firm con-

tinued to receive commissions in Texas and is still in business today in Kansas City under the name of Ochsner, Hare & Hare. An American landscape architecture curriculum was first offered at Harvard University in 1900, and it was not until 1925 that the first degree program was offered at the University of Pennsylvania.70 Texas universities did not offer degrees in landscape architecture until the 1960s, the first at Texas A&M University.71 Finally, deed restrictions became the norm for all upscale Texan suburban developments, whether or not they were incorporated as a separate entity from a municipality. In November 1912, J.  C. Nichol, in a speech to the American Civic Association, told the audience, “In the early time I was afraid to suggest building restrictions; now I cannot sell a lot without them.”72 By the 1920s, this was evident in Texas, which had a small number of restricted subdivisions ranging in size from the large 1,400 acres of land in the Town of Highland Park down to the 24.5-acre Mills Place, and has become probably the most important planning element in use today. More than 90 percent of all Texas subdivision developers in the state rely on some form of control over their developments, and the usual scenario is that the developer who plats the subdivision files the restrictions with the county clerk at the time the subdivision is recorded.73 Once the majority of the property has been sold off and built on, the developer turns over the enforcement of the restrictions to the homeowners association, which then regulates the development of the subdivision. This method ensures continued enforcement after the developer has left the process. In Harris County alone there were at least six thousand to seven thousand deed-restricted suburban developments, based on the twice-annual listing of subdivisions in the county published in 2010 in the

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Houston Chronicle.74 Even in the case of small, rural subdivisions and pre-built or trailer parks, the use of restrictions prevent such commercial encroachment as gas stations and convenience stores. What started as a basic contract between a developer and a resident of a garden suburban development has now grown, in some cases, to be a strongly worded legal document that places restrictions on the property that Flippen, Prather, Hogg, and Potter likely would have never imagined.75 Texas garden suburban communities have evolved, in some respects, into highly con-

trolled environments, where the community as a whole is regulated as a profit-oriented system that almost limits individual rights for the sake of maintaining high property values. However, credit must be given to the aesthetic outcome of these three basic values instilled into the planning and architecture of suburban development in Texas. Upon viewing Texas neighborhoods, it is apparent which developers and homeowners have valued issues of architectural control, landscape design, and self-imposed restrictions, as their neighborhoods stand out as “beauty spots” in their respective cities.

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E P I L O G U E

Evaluating the history of planned garden suburban community development in Texas clarifies the circumstances that have given Highland Park and River Oaks—as well as River Crest, Westover Hills, Country Club Estates in Wichita Falls, Wolflin Estates, Mills Place, and Olmos Park—their long-term durability in their respective cities, a durability that is remarkable by Texas residential real estate standards. The historical experiences of the first generation of large-scale planned community development in Texas were crucial in teaching developers what not to do. The “heights” communities of the 1890s—exemplified by Oak Cliff, Houston Heights, Arlington Heights, and Alamo Heights—made it clear that developers had to calculate how rapidly their expenditures on land acquisition and infrastructure improvements could be amortized through real estate sales. Because capital for real estate investments of this magnitude was most readily available during expansionary phases of a market cycle, developers had to calculate the consequences of the rapid onset of a market contraction if they were not going to be driven into bankruptcy. As J. C. Nichols concluded, the most effective balancing mechanism was to develop large-scale communities in phased installments rather than attempting to develop and improve an entire community in one campaign, thereby letting sales pay down the carrying costs on the property and the improvement expenses for the next phase. The ability of Highland Park and River Oaks to ride out the Great Depression and profit

from it by becoming the undisputed leaders of stable, enduring restricted community development in Dallas and Houston attested to the cautionary lessons astute community planners absorbed from previous failures. Another lesson that could be deduced from the crippling effects of the Panic of 1893 on the heights communities was market focus. For big-scaled communities requiring extensive infrastructure improvements, it made more economic sense to concentrate on the upper end of the market, despite the fact that the middle to lower-middle segments were the more populous segments. This focus was tempered in Highland Park and River Oaks by expanding into uppermiddle and middle economic strata to support economies of scale that, even in the largest, richest, and fastest growing Texas cities in the early twentieth century, would not have justified an exclusively upper-income market focus for communities as big as Highland Park and River Oaks. Edgar L. Flippen, Hugh E. Prather, Will Hogg, and Hugh Potter’s successful management of the economic mix of their communities demonstrates their skill in approaching largescale and long-term community development with flexible strategies to expand their bases economically, ride out cyclical contractions, and imbue these communities with a socially superior identity. Although Highland Park dates the inception of the Dallas community to the tail end of the heights era, Houston’s unsuccessful Forest Hill and Fort Worth’s River Crest mark the shift

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during the 1910s toward nomenclature that resonated with the anti-urban, country place aspirations of these neighborhoods, differentiating them from the comparatively urban-sounding nomenclature of Courtlandt Place, Munger Place, and Fort Worth’s counterpart neighborhood, Ryan Place. River Oaks likewise drew on romantic associations with the landscape and flora of the coastal bayou country. The developers of Texas garden suburban communities purposefully used nomenclature with non-urban associations to distinguish their projects from competitors and to invest them with a romantic appeal that most of these communities lacked until their planted vegetation had matured. In order to sustain non-urban associations spatially, developers and their civil engineers and landscape architects inscribed curvilinear street networks that broke free of the orthogonal street and block pattern of nineteenth-century cities and their early twentieth-century “additions.” This was a strategy that Herbert A. Kipp had followed in laying out River Oaks as a wavy grid. Hare & Hare did likewise in Wolflin Estates, although, in the Wichita Falls Country Club Estates, they superimposed a radial street diagram on an orthogonal diagram, overlaying long arcing curved streets, as they did with Armstrong Parkway in Highland Park West and in Braeswood in Houston. Hare & Hare used traffic circles to generate radial street patterns in Amarillo, Wichita Falls, and Olmos Park. Had Braeswood been completed according to their plan, its streets would also have radiated from a central traffic circle. River Crest, Olmos Park, and the elite Austin neighborhood of Pemberton Heights, planned in 1926–1927 by the Dallas civil engineers Koch & Fowler, possessed natural topographic variation because parts of each were laid out on bluffs that stepped down to streambeds.1 Westover Hills is the Texas garden

suburb with the most picturesque natural setting. It occupies a rolling landscape of bluffs and valleys. In River Oaks and Highland Park West, slopes are much more gradual, flatness prevails, and the curving suburban street became the instrument for constructing pastoral scenery. Garden suburban communities in Texas capitalized on a natural feature that earlier generations of city dwellers had tended to avoid: frontage on bodies of water. Flippen and Prather dammed streams to construct lakes in Highland Park as a backdrop for the largest, most architecturally imposing country houses built there. Sidney J. Hare planned Forest Hill in Houston with the largest lots abutting Brays Bayou. The bayou parkway drive and linear park that Hare & Hare laid out to connect downtown Houston to River Oaks in 1925–1926 veered away from Buffalo Bayou once it passed between the gate piers of River Oaks so that real estate with bayou frontage in River Oaks could be developed for large house sites. Alamo Heights and Olmos Park frame the east and west edges of the Olmos Basin, where the San Antonio River has its source. In Austin, the Enfield addition and Pemberton Heights overlook the deep valley of Shoal Creek, separating them from Austin’s nineteenth-century downtown core. Whether set in rolling terrain or flat ground, bodies of water tended to produce the most dramatic topographical variations. With the imaginative intervention of developers, landscape architects, and architects, these conditions could be translated into picturesque scenery and increased real estate value, further distinguishing garden suburban neighborhoods from their more conventional, landlocked city competitors. Plantings, topography, and, where available, water were the essential building blocks of the planned garden suburb, followed by more obviously constructed infrastructure installations

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and buildings. During the 1930s, the professional emergence of landscape architects in Texas cities can be correlated with an embrace of broadleaf, evergreen, and woodland vegetation as the background for flowering plants, of which the azalea was most popular. Landscape architects, working from this planting palette, gave Highland Park, River Oaks, Olmos Park, and other garden suburban neighborhoods that could climatically sustain such plantings their distinctive identity. Sweeping lawns, whether flat or sloped, constituted a common ground that framed plantings and spatially unified perceptions of wholeness, beauty, and superiority. Will Hogg and Ima Hogg stand out for the enthusiasm and imagination with which they used topography, plantings, and landscape architects to formulate a new cultural identity for Houston, using River Oaks as their staging ground for reinventing Houston as a Southern garden city.2 Impressive plantings were not absent from older city neighborhoods in Texas. There, however, plantings were set in a matrix of streets, sidewalks, and blocks that was visually dominant. In the garden suburb, public infrastructure was designed to be systematically integrated with the landscape, enhancing the construction of suburban real estate as pastoral scenery. Because River Oaks was on the edge of Houston through the mid-1940s, it was possible to think of it as “country.” Located alongside the River Oaks Country Club golf course, the Clayton Summer House, with its stable, tennis court, swimming pool, and outdoor sitting room, fleetingly performed this country-suburban house role. What distinguished Texas garden suburban communities from the country place and resort communities associated with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco is that Texas families who lived in suburban communities did so full time. Their neighborhoods

were not weekend or seasonal communities for families who lived in townhouses in downtown Texas cities during the week or for the winter. Although developers stressed country place imagery and rhetoric in their advertising, they produced communities that were intended to fulfill the expectations of affluent families for modern, highly serviced urban homesteads with state-of-the-art infrastructure improvements (paved streets, sanitary and storm sewers, electricity and telephone connections, and natural gas service after it became available), urban public services (police, fire, garbage collection, and public transportation to facilitate access by servants), and legal instruments in the form of deed restrictions to ensure the “harmony” of the community and the maintenance of property values. Systematically integrating community infrastructure improvements with those of the larger city demonstrated that garden suburban communities were not merely refuges for the rich but rather models for how U.S. cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized. Garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city: the mythical “good” city of U.S. city planning practices of the 1920s. In Highland Park and River Oaks, community shopping centers were developed on, or just across from, the edge of the community, as were public schools and churches. In Houston, Will Hogg was aware that Green Pond, a small African American settlement just east of River Oaks, was not consistent with his ambitions for River Oaks. Green Pond was an outlier of the larger San Felipe district in Fourth Ward, which had existed before the Hogg family came to Houston. In May 1929, Will Hogg, as chairman of Houston’s City Planning Commission, instructed Herbert Hare, the commission’s planning consultant, to explore

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legal mechanisms for regulating the racial occupation of space in Houston.3 The Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston, published later that year at Will Hogg’s expense, contained a proposal for “race restriction areas” because, as the report stated, “[N]egroes are a necessary and useful element in the population and suitable areas with proper living and recreation facilities should be set aside for them.”4 The report further noted that since racial exclusion through zoning ordinances had been declared unconstitutional, racial exclusion could occur only by mutual agreements, although the identities of the negotiating parties were not specified. Restrictive subdivision covenants in Houston and Dallas as early as 1907 routinely contained a racial exclusionary clause restricting ownership of property within the community to non–African Americans and restricting occupancy by African Americans to domestic servants only. The Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston observed that Mexican immigrants, who during the 1920s composed less than 10 percent of Houston’s population, “should have equally careful attention” paid to their whereabouts should their numbers increase.5 From San Antonio south and west to the Mexican border during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, new Texas subdivision deed restrictions typically extended the proscription against African American ownership and occupancy to “Mexicans” as well.6 Racial and ethnic exclusion highlights the contradictions with which the suburban garden community project was associated. The attractiveness of the planned garden suburb was contingent on prohibition and segregation.7 The performance of work was excluded or repressed because it did not support the garden suburb’s claims to being a privileged site of superior beauty, leisure, and refinement. Most of

the modern infrastructure that made it possible to live with urban convenience outside the city was suppressed. Pipes and transmission lines were buried underground. Cars were admitted but they were housed in secondary buildings, represented architecturally as reiterations of the material composition and stylistic theme of the country house. These secondary buildings were also where servants were quartered. Servants (predominantly African American throughout the South, except in the borderland, where they were apt to be Mexican American or Mexican immigrants) were welcome in the garden suburb on condition of their servitude and their subordination to the spacious reception rooms, gardens, and lawns of the country house. Uniforms coded servants as functionaries, subordinating personal identity to occupational classification. Prohibition and segregation were the modern techniques, legally sanctioned through restrictive covenants, employed to police the garden suburb and preserve its harmony, homogeneity, exclusivity, and property values. Planning the long-term management of social life within garden suburbs through the legal instruments of restrictive covenants and property owners associations systematically integrated the maintenance of community identity with U.S. legal procedures. As with other crucial infrastructure improvements, deed restrictions were not part of the perceptible landscape of the garden suburban community. Along with the real estate practice of the “gentlemen’s agreement” (an unwritten agreement not to show or sell real estate to parties who might threaten a community’s harmony, homogeneity, and exclusivity), the legal infrastructure of the garden suburb represents the tenacity and cleverness with which stability, predictability, management of conflict, and consensus on what constituted gentry space were pursued to ensure

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what had proved so elusive in earlier generations of affluent United States urban neighborhoods: the long-term maintenance of identity and spatial control.8 By preserving the spatial integrity of single-family residential communities against multi-unit housing and institutional and commercial incursion, restrictive covenants and property owners associations invisibly restrained temptations to capitalize on the attractiveness and desirability of these communities and regulate, if not entirely immobilize, the capitalist real estate dynamics that had undermined formerly fashionable city neighborhoods.9 Levying annual assessments on property owners to finance community maintenance and defend community integrity was yet another clever mechanism to conserve the pastoral charm of the garden suburb. Planned garden suburbs were portrayed as refuges from the market. But they also took form through market processes. The expansion of population and wealth-producing activity generated the urban growth and instability to which the garden suburb was an antidote but of which it was also a beneficiary. For affluent newcomers who had no local connections in a city, garden suburbs offered a way to establish their respectability and gentility through conformance to a spatial consensus on what constituted the good community. The suburban country house contributed to this social process by framing its occupants as refined and stylish. The suburban country house of the 1920s and 1930s was positioned as the patrician alternative to middle-­ income house types (the Craftsman bungalow and the Foursquare) of the Progressive Era and as the restrained alternative to such pretentious, overstated upper-income house types as the big-columned Colonial Revival of the 1900s. Despite stylistic eclecticism, the country house balanced figuration and environmental respon-

siveness to populate garden suburban communities with a diversity of architectural detail and an equally powerful if unstressed consensus on spatial disposition. Underlying different historical models were spatial diagrams that adroitly balanced formality and livability. Two-story configurations enabled country houses to shape space with authority even though they were dispersed in settings dominated by vegetation. The finely tuned equilibrium between figure and ground in the garden suburb—between the country house and its planted garden and between country houses and their continuous, lawn-landscaped, tree-studded block fronts— meant that this house type, although positioned as the antithesis of a city house, exercised spatial authority through the systematic integration of architecture, landscape architecture, and community planning, as well as through the imaginative management of service spaces (kitchens, laundry rooms, back stairs, and porches) and secondary buildings (garage/­ servants’ apartments) to subtly enhance the ceremonial nature of a house’s reception spaces. An architectural phenomenon that stands out in Highland Park, River Oaks, and other garden suburban communities in the 1920s and early 1930s was the resonance of Spanish-style architecture, whether in its Mediterranean or Colonial versions or, in River Oaks, its Latin Colonial version. What seems unusual about this phenomenon is that none of these communities used restrictive covenants or design review committees to enforce use of Spanish-style architecture. Stylistic eclecticism, a distinct characteristic of twentieth-century American domestic architecture of the interwar period, prevailed in all these communities. Arguments were made for the relevance of Spanish-style architecture in San Antonio based on its Mexican cultural associations. When cultural arguments for the

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propriety of this style were advanced in Dallas or Houston, however, the place reference shifted from local to regional: it was the Spanish past of Texas that was invoked. In the historical context of the state (if not of Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Amarillo, or Corsicana specifically), Spanish-style architecture materialized place identity as it was commonly represented in American architectural discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: through the adaptation of historical models. Unlike developers in Southern California, where Palos Verdes Estates and Rancho Santa Fe adopted Spanish-style architecture as their identifying theme, the developers of Texan garden suburbs displayed ambivalence about enforcing architectural consistency through stylistic conformity. More subtle architectural strategies, embedded in the planning of country houses and their site relationships, were relied upon to construct a collective spatial identity. The country house and the garden suburb offered their occupants spaces and landscapes that were coded visually to symbolize emotional consolation, tranquility, and stability. Harmony—the consonance of potentially dissonant multiplicity—and beauty were anchored in the politics of social consensus, represented not only by restrictive covenants and the legal remedies they authorized a property owners association to pursue against violators, but also by the social pressure neighbors could exert against one of their own who threatened the community’s consistency and property values. The garden suburb internalized a contradiction: it sought to provide some measure of relief from the volatility and unpredictability of the market while being a creature of markets. Flippen and Prather developed a duplex subdivision within Highland Park. And Potter built two apartment complexes (no longer extant): one, the River

Oaks Gardens, coordinated with the development of the first phase of the River Oaks Shopping Center, and the other complex, the San Felipe Apartments, was built on San Felipe at the corner of Spann. However, Potter built his multi-unit housing across the street from, rather than in, River Oaks, which was restricted exclusively to single-family houses. Because Highland Park was an incorporated municipality, as well as a real estate development, it could adopt a zoning ordinance to reinforce the authority of deed restrictions and regulate various types of residential, commercial, and institutional land use. Even in Highland Park, River Oaks, and other Texas garden suburban communities that have maintained their ascendancy, community conservation does not automatically translate into historic preservation. The Town of Highland Park has never adopted a historic preservation ordinance and the City of Houston’s preservation ordinance relies on property owners to seek historic designation voluntarily. Because living standards for affluent Americans in the early twenty-first century are much more expansive than was the case through the 1970s, houses considered large when they were built now seem inadequate, especially when real estate values have appreciated. In Highland Park, the demolition of H. B. Thomson’s own house in the 1980s, and in River Oaks, the demolition of Birdsall P. Briscoe’s Dogwoods, the ProctorHogg House next door to Bayou Bend, in 2005 demonstrate that, without legal protection, even the most architecturally and historically significant houses in a community will be judged expendable by those with sufficient means to replace them. When compared to Victorian-era towered villas of the end of the nineteenth century, as well as their architecturally uninhibited coun-

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terparts at the turn of the twenty-first century, what stands out about the country houses of Highland Park, River Oaks, and other Texan garden suburban communities of the 1920s and 1930s is the spatial economy and architectural sophistication with which they still materialize a mythic world of success, beauty, grace, and charm. The fact that even with these widely admired models in place, it seems impossible to duplicate the skilled design (and awe-inspiring moderation) of upscale community development of the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century helps isolate what makes this domestic

architecture so captivating and the communities where it was built so appealing. Age has improved rather than tarnished the country house and garden suburb of the interwar period. They were designed to mature. Time has made them better now than when new. These communities were equipped with conservation mechanisms that have made it possible to adjust flexibly to changing attitudes and practices (outlawing racial and ethnic segregation, for instance) to preserve community identity founded on civic planning, natural beauty, architectural excellence, and managerial foresight.

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N O T E S

Abbreviations Collections BHPLHC Beverly Hills Public Library Historical Collection, Beverly Hills, California DBCAH Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Texas DHS Dallas Historical Society, Dallas, Texas DPL Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library, Dallas, Texas FHGCR Forest Hills Gardens Company Records, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York FLSMU Fondren Library, Special Collections, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas GBDP George Bannerman Dealey Papers, Dallas Historical Society, Dallas, Texas HMRC Texas and Local History Division of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas HPPL Highland Park Public Library, General Clippings File, Highland Park, Texas IHP Ima Hogg Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas JCNCR J. C. Nichols Company Records, State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City PFAC “Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property,” meeting at Kansas City, Missouri, May 10–12, 1917. Microfilm of transcript, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York PSAC  “Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference

of Developers of High-Class Residential Property,” meeting at Baltimore, Maryland, February 25–27, 1918. Microfilm of transcript, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York PTAC “Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property,” meeting at Birmingham, Alabama, February 20–22, 1919. Microfilm of transcript, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York PVPL Special Collections, Palos Verdes Public Library, Palos Verdes, California ROPO River Oaks Property Owners, Inc., Houston, Texas SHSMO-KC State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–Kansas City WCHP William Clifford Hogg Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas

Journals ACM American City Magazine AF Architectural Forum AR Architectural Record JSAH  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (U.S.) NREJ  National Real Estate Journal

Newsletters HP  Highland Park

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Chapter 1 1. Will Hogg (1875–1930), his younger brother Mike Hogg (1885–1941), and their sister Ima Hogg (1882–1975) were all born in Quitman, Texas, but the family moved to Austin after their father, James S. Hogg, was elected state attorney general in 1886. Will and Mike Hogg both received law degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in 1897 and 1911, respectively. Will Hogg practiced law for several years in San Antonio, joined his father’s Austin law firm of Hogg, Robertson, and Hogg, and worked in St. Louis for the Mercantile Trust Company. After Governor Hogg’s death in 1906, Will Hogg relocated to Houston to handle his father’s business affairs. His sister Ima, who trained as a pianist for two years in Berlin, made her residence in Houston in 1909. Will Hogg became an assistant to the oilman Joseph Cullinan, the head of the Texas Company (Texaco), and in 1913 he, Cullinan, and Judge James Autry founded Farmer’s Petroleum Company, Fidelity Trust Company, and American Republics Corporation. A year earlier, Mike joined his brother and sister in Houston and was associated with the law firm of Gill, Jones, and Stone. In 1914, Mike and Will Hogg, along with their friend Raymond Dickson, formed the cotton factor firm of Hogg, Dickson, and Hogg, which closed during World War I, when Mike Hogg joined the army. All were involved with Houston charitable and philanthropic causes. Will Hogg was one of the foremost proponents of city planning in Houston in the 1920s. He served on the boards of welfare organizations, notably the Houston Social Service Board and the Houston Foundation, and he donated generously to the Community Chest; Young Women’s Christian Association; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Girl Scouts; Boy Scouts; and Emma R. Newsboys Home for disadvantaged boys. As a strong supporter of higher education, he paid the tuition for one hundred World War I veterans at the University of Texas and founded the Ex-Students Association. For a biography of Will Hogg, see WCHP; Arthur Lefevre Jr., “Hogg, William Clifford,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles /fho20; Lomax, Will Hogg, Texan; Weber, “Will Hogg and the Business of Reform”; Weber and Cook, “Will Hogg and Civic Consciousness: Houston Style,” 21–36; and Wright, “Tender Tempest—A Tardy Tribute to Will C. Hogg,” 6, 22–23. After Mike Hogg served in the Texas House of Representatives (1927–1931), he continued with his real estate and oil businesses, efforts for city

planning, and his support for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, along with various charities until his death. See “Mike Hogg, Noted Houston Business Man, Dies at 56,” Houston Post, Oct. 11, 1941; and Acheson et al., Texian Who’s Who: A Biographical Dictionary of the State of Texas, 214–215. A philanthropist and city leader, Ima Hogg formed the Houston Symphony Society in 1913 and became its second president in 1917. She endowed the Hogg Foundation for Mental Hygiene (now known as the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health) in 1940 and was elected to the Houston School Board in 1943. She served as one of the leaders of the Community Chest, founded the Child Guidance Center for children with learning disabilities, and remained active in public affairs. See IHP; Bernhard, Ima Hogg: The Governor’s Daughter; and “Hogg, Ima,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fho16. Their brother Thomas Elisha Hogg (1887–1949) did not participate in the family business. For more information on the Hogg family, see Neff, Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Kirkland, The Hogg Family and Houston: Philanthropy and the Civic Ideal. Born in Gainesville, Texas, Hugh Morris Potter (1888– 1968) attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he met Mike Hogg. Potter received his law degrees from the University of Texas and Harvard University. After completing his education in 1913, he joined the Houston law firm of Gill, Jones, Tyler, and Potter. In 1924, he withdrew from the firm to become the president of the River Oaks Corporation. He also was a co-founder, president, and trustee of the Urban Land Institute (ULI); president of the United Chamber of Commerce, of the Houston Board of Realtors, and of the National Association of Real Estate Boards; chairman of both the Houston City Planning Commission and the Gulf District of the U.S. Committee of Economic Development; and a director of the executive committee of the Bank of the Southwest. See “Resolution, Hugh Morris Potter, 1888–1968,” by the Board of Directors of Bank of the Southwest National Association, Houston, June 11, 1968, Joan Hazelhurst Collection; and “Developer H. Potter Dead at 79,” Houston Post, Mar. 30, 1968. 2. Peden, “Presentations: Hugh Potter,” 10–11. 3. Potter, “Concepts of Post-War Planning,” 8. 4. Ibid.

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N ot es to pag es 3–5 5. George Bannerman Dealey (1859–1946) was born in Manchester, England, and in 1870, his family emigrated to Galveston, Texas. With no formal education, the fifteenyear-old Dealey took an entry-level position at the Galveston News. From 1882 to 1884, he served as a staff representative for the newspaper in Waco, Dallas, and Houston. He was placed in charge of finding a North Texas location for the expansion of the newspaper and upon his advice in 1885, Dallas was selected. Dealey became business manager of the Dallas Morning News, working his way up through several positions before becoming president in 1919. He purchased the newspaper in 1926 from the family of the late Alfred H. Belo. Dealey served on the board of governors of the American City Planning Institute (1920–1921). He was vice president of the National Municipal League (1923–1924), a member of the advisory council of the American Planning and Civic Association, and on the board of the National Committee of the Commission on Interracial Corporation. He received honorary doctoral degrees from Southern Methodist University in 1921, Austin College in 1924, and the University of Missouri in 1925. President of the Philosophical Society of Texas, he was also an honorary life member of the Texas State Historical Association, a member of the Texas Press Association, and the founder of the Dallas Historical Society in 1922. Dealey supported many charitable and philanthropic organizations: notably, he was president of the Dallas Family Welfare Bureau from its inception in 1908, organized the building of Texas Children’s Hospital in 1940, and raised money for the beautification of the Southern Methodist University campus. For biographical information on Dealey, see GBDP; Sharpe, G. B. Dealey of the Dallas News; Acheson, 35,000 Days in Texas: A History of the Dallas News and Its Forbears; and Joan Jenkins Perez, “Dealey, George Bannerman,” www.tshaonline.org /handbook/online/articles/fde21. 6. Greene, Dallas: The Deciding Years—A Historical Portrait, 22, noted that Dallas was chosen over Fort Worth for a rail center, which led to Dallas becoming the largest city in the Metroplex. 7. McDonald, Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion, 1870–1925, 26. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Greene, 21. 10. “Dallas: City of Art and Commerce,” 67. 11. McComb, Houston: A History, 46. 12. Ibid., 94. 13. Ibid., 82.

14. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890–1920, 13. 15. Ibid., 30. 16. Hubbard and Hubbard, Our Cities To-day and Tomorrow, 308. For Dallas, see Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900–1965, 38, and Hill, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City, xxiii. For Houston, see McComb, 7, and Johnston, Houston: The Unknown City, 1836–1946, 294. 17. J. C. Nichols, letter to the ed., “Well Known City Builder Praises Highland Park,” HP, 1, 3, 4, FLSMU. Born on a farm near Olathe, Kansas, Jesse Clyde Nichols (1880–1950) graduated with honors from the University of Kansas in 1902 and was awarded a one-year scholarship at Harvard. After earning his second BA degree, he moved to Kansas City in 1903 to begin his land development and home construction businesses and soon became a nationally recognized real estate figure. In the 1920s, he served as a member and chairman of the Kansas City Planning Commission, chairman of the National Council of Real Estate Subdividers, vice president of the American Civic Association, founder and chairman of the Community Builders Council (CBC), trustee of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), and he was a founding member of the Urban Land Institute (ULI). The American City Plan Conference named him one of the outstanding community builders in the country. President Calvin Coolidge appointed Nichols one of the leading developers to the 4th International Conference of the Building Industry held in Paris and to serve on the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, to which he was reappointed by Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman. He resigned from the Commission in 1948 due to his serious health condition. For biographies on Nichols, see Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities; Pearson and Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man, His Company, and His Legacy, 1880–1994; and Rose, “There Is Less Smoke in the District: J. C. Nichols, Urban Change, and Technological Systems,” 44–54. 18. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 41. See also Part III, Chapter 12, “The Survival of the City Beautiful Movements in Dallas,” 254–278. 19. Dealey quoted in Sharpe, 149. 20. Fairbanks, 24. The Plan of Chicago was also known as the “Burnham Plan,” named after the architect and city planner Daniel H. Burnham, who coauthored the plan with his assistant, the architect and city planner Edward

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N ot es to pag es 5–9 H. Bennett. The Plan of Chicago was significant as the first comprehensive plan to control growth of an American city; however, only parts of it were realized. 21. Hubbard and Hubbard, 290. 22. Mayer and Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, 312; Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners, 139–140. 23. Cary, “Dallas Enlists the ‘Young Ideas’ to Make Scientific City Planning,” 504. 24. Sharpe, 121; Acheson, 223. It was known as the “Reardon Plan,” named after the chairman of the committee, E. M. Reardon. See Holmes and Saxon, eds., The WPA Dallas Guide and History, 320. 25. George Edward Kessler (1862–1923) was one of a dozen nationally recognized and formally educated U.S. landscape architects/city planners at the close of the nineteenth century. Born in Frankenhausen, Germany, Kessler at a young age emigrated with his family to the United States, where they invested in a cotton plantation near Dallas. For his extensive formal education, he went to Germany in 1878 and began instruction in forestry, botany, and landscape design at the Grand Ducal Gardens in Weimar. He then trained at Potsdam and at the Charlottenburg Polytechnicum, which was followed by courses in civil engineering at the University of Jena. Accompanied by a tutor, Kessler spent a year studying civic design, traveling and observing cities from Paris to Moscow. In 1881, Kessler returned to the United States, and within a few months, he accepted a position in Kansas City as superintendent of parks for the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Gulf Railroad. His first job was to design and supervise the completion of Merrian Park, ten miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. In 1887, he received a commission to landscape a residential park and boulevard for the wealthy residents of the Kansas City suburb, Hyde Park. This captured the attention of the Kansas City Star publisher William Rockhill Nelson, who had initiated the City Beautiful Movement in Kansas City. In 1892, Kessler was hired as Kansas City’s landscape architect by the newly founded park board. In 1910, he left Kansas City to reside in St. Louis for the remainder of his life. For biographies on Kessler, see Culbertson, “George Edward Kessler: Landscape Architect of the American Renaissance,” 99–116, and Wilson, 40–42, 132–133. 26. Wilson, 210. 27. Fairbanks, 25–26.

28. Dealey, “Getting Into Action for a City Plan,” 6, GBDP. 29. Kessler, A City Plan for Dallas, 9–25, DHS. All of the following information and quotations are from this same source. 30. Hazel, Dallas: A History of “Big D,” 33. 31. Kessler, 31. 32. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, ca. 1910, 9, DPL. 33. Kessler, 31. 34. Wilson, 270–271. 35. Fairbanks, 51–52, 263. 36. In the 1921 case of Spann vs. the City of Dallas, the Texas State Supreme Court ruled against a piecemeal plan for zoning in Dallas. See Fairbanks, 47. 37. Hill, 7–8. 38. Johnston, 240. 39. Lomax, 31. 40. Will Hogg to S. Herbert Hare, May 30, 1925, Box 2J301, WCHP. The Texas State Legislature never approved of a Regional Plan. For Regional Planning, see Scott, 198–204. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Sidney J. Hare (1860–1938) had no formal training in landscape architecture. His family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, when he was eight years old. In 1881, he was employed by the city engineer’s office, where he met Kessler, who was then working as the city’s landscape engineer. During his five-year tenure for the city, Hare developed a close friendship with Kessler and became interested in landscape design. From 1886 to 1902, he served as superintendent of Kansas City’s Forest Hill Cemetery, a project in which he imposed the landscape ideals of naturalistic parks on the modern cemetery. His 1887 article, “The Influence of Surroundings,” published in the journal Park and Cemetery and Landscape Gardening, coupled with his work at the cemetery, led him to open his own professional office in 1902. He had completed almost twenty-five major commissions in six states before he and his son S. Herbert Hare formed a partnership in 1910. See Millstein, “Sidney J. Hare,” 163–168. S. Herbert Hare (1888–1960) studied landscape architecture at Harvard University with Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., focusing on community planning and design. After graduating, he worked for Olmsted Brothers, platting subdivisions at Roland Park, before returning to Kansas City. The developer J. C. Nichols hired Hare & Hare in 1913

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N ot es to pag e 9 to design a master plan for his subdivisions in the Country Club District in Kansas City, which ultimately became approximately twenty-five hundred acres of land, including the Country Club Plaza shopping center. After Kessler’s death in 1923, Hare & Hare were appointed to finish a number of his projects, including Highland Park West in Dallas. During the 1920s and 1930s, they achieved a national reputation and designed numerous subdivisions, parks, cemeteries, military camps, and campuses in twenty-eight states, including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston, and the University of Kansas Medical School. Both men were elected fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects; S. Herbert served as vice president in 1940 and as president in 1944. He was also a fellow of the American Institute of Park Executives and was the director of the American Institute of Planners. See Millstein, “S. Herbert Hare,” 163. 41. Forum of Civics, 1. 42. Hogg quoted in Weber, 187. 43. Scott, “The Forum Weaves into the Future, The Shuttle Moves Across the Threads of the City,” 5, DBCAH. John Fanz Staub (1892–1981) was a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, and received his MA from MIT in 1915. The following year, he joined the office of the New York City architect Harrie T. Lindeberg as a draftsman for six years. In 1917, his apprenticeship was interrupted while he served the United States as a Navy aviator in England for two years. Lindeberg sent Staub to Houston in 1921 to supervise the construction of three (eventually four) houses designed by Lindeberg in the upscale Shady­side subdivision. In 1923, Staub established his own private architectural practice, specializing in the design of single-family homes. His first commission was for the Country Club Estates Company to design the River Oaks Country Club in 1924 (demolished). After the Hogg Brothers purchased the subdivision, including the country club, Staub was retained to design two model houses for their company, the River Oaks Corporation, and he enlarged the River Oaks Country Club. Between 1924 and 1958, Staub designed thirty-one houses in River Oaks, including Bayou Bend (1926–1928) for the Hogg family and his own house in the Country Club Estates section of River Oaks (1926), and he worked on a number of alterations and extensions of existing houses. He also designed country houses in other suburban communities—most notably, Broadacres in Houston and River Crest in Fort Worth—in addition to houses in Beaumont, Texas, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Some of these houses have been opened to the public as museums; the best known is Bayou Bend. In 1930, Staub was commissioned to design the Junior League Building and the parish house of Palmer Memorial Church, and in 1940, the Bayou Club. In 1942, the architect John Thomas Rather became a partner in his firm, and in 1952, the architect Albert Howze joined the firm, which became known as Staub, Rather, and Howze. Staub retired in 1963, and, after Rather’s death in 1968, he and Howze dissolved the firm. Staub was the co-founder and second president of the South Texas chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and was elected a fellow in 1941. From 1928–1938, he was twice appointed to the City Planning Commission. He also served on the Advisory Committee of the Bayou Bend Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For more on Staub, see Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub; Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South; Acheson et al., 439–440, DBCAH. Birdsall Parmenas Briscoe (1876–1971) attended Texas A&M University and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where he was a classmate of Will Hogg’s. Because a degree in architecture was not offered at UT at the time, Briscoe received his architectural training in the office of the Houston architect C. Lewis just after the turn of the twentieth century. From 1904 to 1908, he was employed by Lewis Sterling Green, a local commercial architect, and they formed a partnership in 1909 that lasted for three years. He then left to pursue his own practice. He formed another architectural practice with Sam Haynie Dixon Jr. from 1922–1926. In 1924, he helped organize the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and served as its first president. Briscoe principally designed single-family residences in the Houston neighborhoods of Courtlandt Place, Shadyside, Broadacres, and River Oaks. See Fox, “The Splendid Houses of Birdsall Briscoe,” 36–46; and Susman, “The Architecture of Birdsall Parmenas Briscoe.” A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Joseph Walter Northrop Jr. (1886–1968), architect and engineer, received his BS in architecture from MIT. In 1910, he was employed as a draftsman by the Boston architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue, & Ferguson, which sent him to Houston in 1911 to serve as clerk of the works for the construction of the initial buildings of the Rice Institute (Rice University). In 1919, he established his own practice in Houston. He is best known for his single-family houses, especially those

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N ot es to pag es 9–14 in the Colonial Revival style in River Oaks and the South End neighborhoods. He served two terms as president of the Houston chapter of the AIA, 1927–1929. In 1935, he was employed for one year as the chief architect for the Federal Housing Administration in Houston. Houston Architectural Survey, III: 555; Acheson et al., 324. 44. “Forum Library Open to Members,” 16. 45. “Editorial Notes,” 9. 46. Johnston, 235. Ima Hogg donated the book’s copyright in 1944 to the River Oaks Garden Club, which has kept it in print up to the present; see Kirkland, 284. 47. Lubove, “Housing Reform and City Planning in Progressive America,” 346. 48. Fox, “Planning in Houston: A Historic Overview,” 13. 49. Ford, “The Better Homes Movement: How National Attention was Directed to Better Homes,” 37–51. 50. Ibid. 51. Fox, “Planning in Houston,” 13. 52. Johnston, 258. 53. McComb, 97. 54. Ibid. 55. Weber and Cook, 22–23; Johnston, 258. 56. McComb, 97. 57. Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston, 122. 58. Ibid., 100–101. 59. McComb, 97; Fox, “Planning in Houston,” 13. 60. William Clifford Hogg Diaries, Box 2J399, WCHP. 61. See Stephen Fox, “Finger, Joseph,” www.tshaonline .org/handbook/online/articles/ffi37. 62. Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 212. 63. David G. McComb, “Houston, Texas,” The Handbook of Texas, ed. Ron Tyler et al., III, 723. 64. Houston Post, Aug. 24, 1946. 65. Houston Post, Jan. 28, 31, 1948. 66. For all of this, see McComb, Houston: A History, 156–160. 67. Ibid., 9. 68. For more information see Stern, ed., with Massengale, The Anglo-American Suburb; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; and Binford, The First Suburbs: Residential Communities in the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860. 69. Potter, “Concepts of Post-War Planning,” 8. 70. Ibid.

71. J. C. Nichols letter to the ed., 3. 72. At the 1917 annual meeting of the National Conference of City Planners (NCCP) in Kansas City, a group of developers decided to hold their own meeting in conjunction with that of the NCCP to share ideas and discuss mutual problems. See Worley, 91–92. Hugh  E. Prather (1879–1959), a native of Dallas, attended Baylor University and the University of Texas at Austin. Before entering the real estate business in 1900, he had been a railroad clerk and a courthouse worker. In 1906, he married Johnetta Armstrong. Prather served as secretary-treasurer and later vice president of the Armstrong Packing Company, which his father-in-law John Armstrong sold in 1906 in order to purchase the land for the Highland Park subdivision. Prather was the first president of the Dallas Real Estate Board, president of the Community Welfare Association, president of the Dallas Baby Camp (later Bradford Hospital), general chairman of the American Red Cross drive during World War I, and president of the Flippen-Prather Stores, Inc. for the Highland Park Village Shopping Center. “Hugh E. Prather, Dallas Realtor, Dies,” Dallas Morning News, Jan. 13, 1959; Davis and Grobe, comps. and eds., The New Encyclopedia of Texas, Vol. 1, 279 (1925). 73. PFAC, 191–192. 74. “Highland Park, A Beauty Spot of the Southwest, Dallas Suburban Town Realizes Ideal of Early Builders,” Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1928. Born in Bryan, Texas, Edgar L. Flippen (1876–1958) graduated president of his class at St. Paul’s College in Garden City, New York, in 1893. After graduation, he moved to Dallas and began his career in the wholesale and retail shoe business. Then he entered into banking with his father, who had co-founded a private bank called Flippen, Adoue, and Lobit. After his marriage to Minnie May Armstrong in 1900, he became secretary-treasurer and then president of the Armstrong Packing Company. In 1932, he was elected president of the Gulf Insurance Company and the Atlantic Insurance Company, and in 1944, he became president of the First National Bank of Dallas. In 1950, he served as chairman of the board of the bank until his retirement in 1955. He was co-organizer of the City State Bank of Dallas, chairman of the board of governors of the Dallas Foundation, and a director of the National Bank of Commerce, Republic Fire Insurance Company, Great Southern Life Insurance Company, Dallas Chamber of Commerce, State Fair of Texas, Hillcrest State Bank, Texas Pacific Railroad Company, and Dallas Power & Light

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N ot es to pag es 15–23 Company, among other businesses and organizations. See “E. L. Flippen, City Leader, Dies at 82,” Dallas Morning News, Mar. 27, 1958; Davis and Grobe, comps. and eds., Vol. 1, 294. 75. PFAC, 16. 76. Ibid. For a history of streetcar suburbs, see Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900. 77. By 1903, Bouton had organized a Baltimore syndicate to purchase the company and he became president of a new development corporation. Moudry, “Gardens, Houses, and People: The Planning of Roland Park, Baltimore,” 50–53. Moudry’s MA thesis was a major source for the discussion of Roland Park. 78. Ibid., 82. 79. Ibid. 80. Hyde, Roland Park-Guilford, 26–29. 81. Phenis, “The Romance of Roland Park,” 2. 82. Roland Park Company of Baltimore City Deed to Catherine B. Turner, Baltimore, Maryland, Apr. 13, 1893; Baltimore County, Maryland, Deeds, 2393, 197: 198–201; Roland Park Road & Maintenance Corporation. 83. Worley, 33–34. 84. Moudry, 174–176, 262. 85. Ibid., 272. 86. Waesche, Crowning the Gravelly Hill: A History of the Roland Park–Guilford–Homeland District, 67–69. 87. Quoted in Worley, 269. 88. Moudry, 277–280. 89. The information in this paragraph is from the same source, ibid., 164, 277–280, 299–300. 90. See Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1739–1950, 97–100. 91. Moudry, 166. 92. Worley, 185. 93. Born in Staten Island, New York, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870–1957) spent the summer of 1891 assisting the Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham in his preparations for the World’s Columbian Exhibition. Three years later, he graduated from Harvard with training in scientific and technical methods of landscape management and horticulture. He joined his father at George Vanderbilt’s estate, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, and became the principal landscape architect for the project in 1895, after his father’s health problems prevented him from working. In 1897, Olmsted Jr. and his half brother John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920), who received a PhD

from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, formed a landscape architectural firm, Olmsted Brothers, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Olmsted Jr. founded the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, inaugurated the first formal curriculum in the country on landscape architecture at Harvard University in 1900, and was appointed a member of the U.S. Senate Park Commission (the McMillan Plan) for municipal improvements to Washington, D.C., in 1901. He became a leader in the American Planning Movement (now the American Institute of Planners) and served as chairman of the National Conference on City Planning. In 1910, upon the request of the American Civic Association, he created a new bureau for the maintenance of national parks, resulting in the Congressional Act of 1916 that formed the National Park Service. For a biography of Olmsted Jr., see Peterson, “Frederick Law Olm­ sted, Sr. and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.: The Visionary and the Professional,” 37–54, and Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government, 36. 94. Quoted in Schalck, “Planning Roland Park, 1891– 1918,” 288. 95. Quoted in Moudry, 352. 96. PFAC, 16. 97. Country Club Estates, Inc., advertising booklet, River Oaks: A Domain of Beautiful Homes, 9, with an introduction by Hugh Potter (1926). 98. Wilson, 41. 99. Fiske Kimball quoted in Hewitt, The Architect & the American Country House, 1890–1940, 13. 100. Modern architecture first appeared in River Oaks in the late 1930s and in Highland Park in the late 1940s. 101. Hewitt, 21. Born in New York City, Charles A. Platt (1861–1933) was never formally trained as an architect. His best-known designs were for the Francis T. Maxwell House, or Maxwell Court, 1901–1903, Rockville, Connecticut; W. Hinckle Smith House, or Timberline, 1907, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; and the Russell Alger House, or The Moorings, 1908–1910, Grosse Pointe, Michigan. For a biography of his career, see ibid., 280, and Morgan, Charles A. Platt: The Artist as Architect. 102. Hewitt, 64. 103. Ibid. 104. Harrie Thomas Lindeberg (1880–1959) was born in Bergen Point, New Jersey, and may have studied architecture in New York City at the National Academy of Design from 1898 to 1901. He then was employed by ­McKim, Mead, and White until 1906. During that time, he was an assistant to Stanford White in the design of the

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N ot es to pag es 23–33 James L. Breese House, or “The Orchard.” In 1906, he and a fellow draftsman with the firm, Lewis Colt Albro (1876– 1924), formed a partnership that lasted nine years. Lindeberg served as the designer, and Albro handled the business end of the partnership. His most famous works were for wealthy businessmen such as the stockbroker Michael Van Beuren, whose country house, Glencraig, near Newport, Rhode Island (1926), was one of his best. He also designed country houses for the Du Ponts, Pillsburys, Farrishes, and Armours on the East Coast and in the Midwest. 105. In The Promise of American Life, Croly “anticipated the transition from competitive to corporate capitalism and from limited government to the welfare state.” His work would influence President Theodore Roosevelt in his

theory of New Nationalism, President Woodrow Wilson in his intellectual content for New Freedom, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his New Deal. “Herbert Croly,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Croly. 106. Croly, Houses for Town or Country, 89–90. He also published works using the pseudonyms Arthur C. David and A. C. David (Hewitt, 15). 107. Hewitt, 66. 108. Ibid., 21, 278. 109. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000, 253. 110. Smith quoted in ibid., 259. The original article was published in Outlook 148, no. 14 (Apr. 4, 1928): 543. 111. Potter, “When You Buy Real Estate,” 126A.

Chapter 2 1. Greene, Dallas: The Deciding Years—A Historical Portrait, 23–26. 2. McDonald, Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion, 1870–1925, 107, 109, 118. 3. Flanders in ibid., 35. Born in Chicago, James E. Flanders (1849–?) had no formal education and probably learned his trade as an apprentice. At the age of twentyseven, he moved to Dallas, where he received a variety of commissions. He designed fifteen county courthouses in North Texas, including Dallas County’s fifth; the Grand-Windsor Hotel; and one hundred and twenty-five churches, his masterpiece being Dallas’s Trinity Methodist Church. His residential projects were for such prominent men as Dr. L.  W. Locke, Jules E. Schneider, John Bookout, Charles Ott, C. A. Keating, George Atkins, and W. H. Flippen, the father of the Highland Park developer, Edgar L. Flippen. He was also the architect for the 1887 original State Fair Exposition Building, the 1904 entrance gate and Administrative Building, the 1906 General Exhibits Building, and the 1910 Coliseum, as well as numerous commercial buildings and schools (ibid., 35–39, 243). 4. Ibid., 35. 5. Holmes and Saxon, eds., The WPA Dallas Guide and History, 200–201; McDonald, 18. 6. Baron, Houston Electric: The Street Railways of Houston, Texas, 3–4. 7. Ibid., 6–8. 8. Houghton, “Domestic Life,” 302. 9. See McComb, Houston: A History, 73. 10. Ibid., 77, 89–95.

11. Scardino, “The Development of Domestic Architecture,” 70. 12. Houghton, 126. 13. Ibid., 129. Illustrations of other early Houston houses can also be found in Culbertson, Texas Houses Built by the Book: The Use of Published Designs, 1850–1925. Born in New York City, Eugene T. Heiner (1852–1901) trained as an architect in Chicago and moved to Texas in 1877. He designed Texas county courthouses in the Second Empire, Italianate, and Romanesque styles, among them the Fall County Courthouse in Marlin (1886–1888), the Austin County Courthouse in Bellville (1888), the Walker County Courthouse in Huntsville (1888), the Jefferson County Courthouse in Beaumont (1892), the Brazos Country Courthouse in Bryan (1892), and the Lavaca County Courthouse in Hallettsville (1897). See Robinson, The People’s Architecture: Texas Courthouses, Jails, and Municipal Buildings, 134–135, 157, 176; Stephen Fox, “Heiner, Eugene T.,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook /online/articles/fhe48. 14. McDonald, 187. 15. Daniel Hardy and Terri Myers, “Peak’s Suburban Addition Historic District,” assistant W. Dwayne Jones, National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1994; Dallas City Plat Books, 45:56. 16. Hill, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City, 6. 17. Hardy and Myers, 19–20. 18. Fuller, ed., The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture with Regional Highlights, 44.

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N ot es to pag es 33–35 19. Ibid. 20. Mathew Hayes Nall, “Oak Cliff, Texas,” www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hvo43; Minutaglio and Williams, The Hidden City: Oak Cliff, Texas; Daniel Hardy, “Historic and Architectural Resources of Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas,” assistant W. Dwayne Jones, National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1994; and McDonald, 212. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, John S. Armstrong (18?–1908) moved with his family to Louisville, Kentucky, during the Civil War. In 1884, he moved to Dallas to work in the cattle business, but instead he entered into a partnership with the successful wholesale grocer Thomas L. Marsalis. By 1887, Marsalis & Armstrong, Wholesale Grocers, were grossing more than twenty million dollars annually. In 1899, Armstrong purchased the Dallas Dressed Beef and Packing Company, which became the Armstrong Packing Company. Armstrong also served as president of the Fourth National Bank (later City National Bank). See Acheson, Dallas Yesterday, 52–53; McDonald, 123; and Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park West, ca. 1924, 1–2, DPL. Born in Mississippi, Thomas L. Marsalis (1852–1919) came to Texas in 1871 and became a co-owner of a wholesale grocery business in Corsicana. By the next year, he had moved to Dallas and opened his own wholesale grocery operation, expanding it to be one of the most lucrative in the region. He built four grocery warehouses, one of which was a one-acre building with a railroad track running through it. After going bankrupt in the Panic of 1893, Marsalis left for New York City to seek employment, and in 1894 he became president of the American Grocery Company, which failed in 1897. From then on he was involved in several businesses and commuted between New York and Dallas. In 1903 he finally made New York his permanent residence. He died of pneumonia in 1919. Sharon Rylee Marsalis and James D. Barnes, “Marsalis, Thomas L.,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/fmaag. 21. Minutaglio and Williams, 54–64. The rest of the information and quotes in this paragraph are from the same source. 22. McDonald, 212–213. The blocks contained lots of various sizes and, at that point, only existed on paper. It appears that the persons bidding on lots were able to negotiate their size and location. See Hardy, 4, who referred to the sale of lots as land parcels.

23. Hardy, 4. 24. Minutaglio and Williams, 62. 25. Hardy, 4–11. 26. Minutaglio and Williams, 68. 27. Nall. The building was destroyed in 1945; for a photograph, see McDonald, 217. 28. Minutaglio and Williams, 68. 29. Hardy, 10. 30. McDonald, 214. 31. Ibid., 225. 32. For a list of the partners in this project, see Minutaglio and Williams, 118–119. 33. Ibid., 127. 34. Hardy, 12–13. 35. Daniel Hardy, “Kessler Park Historic District,” assistant W. Dwayne Jones, National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1994. 36. Bob Wise, ed. “Oak Lawn, 1880–1976: An Historical Study,” 16. This is a 1976 research project written by graduate students at the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of Texas at Arlington. 37. Ibid., 22–26. 38. By 1942, other smaller Hispanic communities in Dallas were spread out in West Dallas, Oak Cliff, and South Dallas (Holmes and Saxon, eds., 306–308). 39. Ibid., 84. 40. Presently, the character of Oak Lawn has been drastically altered by late twentieth- and early twent-firstcentury redevelopment, which has permitted commercial building and multi-story residential construction. Wise, ed., 53–54. 41. “Foresight of Col. Henry Exall Helped Develop Highland Park,” Dallas Times Herald, Aug. 28, 1949, HPPL. See also “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 1, 1935, HPPL. 42. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 43. See Pierce Allman, “The Park Cities Heritage House,” 1, HPPL, an undated brochure published by the Allie Beth Allman Real Estate Company, and Acheson, 52. 44. Allman, 1. 45. Quoted in McDonald, 202. 46. Quoted in Allman, 1. 47. Hugh Prather Sr., “Highland Park Builders Planned City of Homes,” Dallas Morning News, Mar. 27, 1955.

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N ot es to pag es 36–41 48. Ibid. 49. “Highland Park: A Beauty Spot of Southwest,” Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1928, HPPL. 50. Prather Sr.; The Philadelphia capitalist Anthony J. Drexel and the New York capitalist J. Pierpont Morgan merged in 1871 to form Drexel, Morgan & Company. See Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class, 91. 51. Armstrong asked Colonel Exall to accompany him to Philadelphia to arrange for the purchase of the land, see “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 52. Omaha & South Texas Land Company, advertising booklet, Information Regarding Houston Heights Issued by the Omaha & South Texas Land Company, ca. 1893, n.p., HMRC. 53. Love, “Suburbs of Houston,” 213, DBCAH. 54. Ibid. 55. The hotel and the opera house are no longer extant (Omaha & South Texas Land Company, advertising booklet, Houston Heights, ca. 1892, n.p., Houston Subdivision Collection, MSS 118, no. 35, HMRC). See also Diana J. Kleiner, “Houston Heights, Texas,” www.tshaonline.org /handbook/online/articles/hvhab; Baron, 108–115. 56. Information Regarding Houston Heights. 57. Ibid. 58. “Houston Heights, Texas.” 59. Ibid. 60. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide: American Institute of Architects, 189. 61. Love, 207–220. All the information in this paragraph is from the same source. 62. Savage, “Vandeventer Place, St. Louis, Missouri,” 232. 63. For a history of grand avenues, see Cigliano and Landau, eds., introduction to The Grand American Avenue, 1850–1920. 64. Savage, 236. 65. Westmoreland Civic Organization, “Westmoreland Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1994. 66. Ibid. 67. Federation of Women’s Clubs, The Key to the City of Houston, 40. 68. Westmoreland Civic Organization, 39. 69. Advertising booklet, Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, ca. 1910, 2, DPL, was published by an unknown author,

with a revised edition published in Dallas by Douglas Newby in 1983; Continental Gin Company, advertising booklet, Munger Place, ca. 1908, 29, DHS. Neither of these promotional booklets carries an exact publication date. They have been dated on the basis of comparisons to Dallas city directories and by the construction dates of the houses illustrated in them. Although Munger claimed that his suburban community’s design was based on a residential park, it was really a private place. Robert Sylvester Munger (1854–1923) was born in Reutersville, Texas, and attended Trinity University at Tehuacana, Texas. At his father’s request, he left the university before graduating to help supervise his father’s cotton gin business in Mexia, Texas, where he invented improvements on ginning machinery that conveyed cotton seed to the gin. In 1879, he patented saw cleaners for the ginning machinery, and in 1882 he patented a saw sharpening tool. He and his brother Stephen Ingram Munger, who worked with him in Mexia, moved to Dallas in 1885 and organized their highly successful Munger Improved Cotton Machine Company. In 1889, Robert moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to expand his business, opening up manufacturing plants there and in Avondale and Prattville, Alabama, and in Atlanta, Memphis, and Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and he went on to invent many other ginning manufacturing devices. In 1902, he sold his interest in his plants and began to invest in real estate. He studied private place subdivisions in Birmingham, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Kansas City for his subdivisions in Dallas and Birmingham. See McDonald, 161; “Robert Sylvester Munger,” www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmu04; and “R. S. Munger to be Buried Saturday,” Dallas Morning News, Apr. 20, 1923. 70. Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, 9. 71. Munger Place advertisement, Dallas Morning News, Apr. 14, 1907. 72. Fitzgerald, Beau Monde, 1. She also praised the developers of Highland Park: “Highland Park was improved and beautified at the expense of its owners and Beau Monde discovered it moons and moons ago.” In the mid-1890s, with a background in society reporting, Mrs. Fitzgerald launched her society weekly magazine in Dallas to chronicle the activities of the Dallas socially elite (Rogers, The Lusty Texans of Dallas, 178–180). 73. Fitzgerald, 1. 74. Munger Place, 16. 75. Ibid, 15. Also see McDonald, 242: “The surge of

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N ot es to pag es 41–47 civic interest in the Fair grounds grew steadily and the construction of new buildings was continued by many diverse organizations, climaxing in a frenzy of activity for the 1936 Texas Centennial.” 76. Munger Place, 16–17. 77. Collett Munger was not listed in the Dallas city directories until 1906. He built his house in Munger Place in 1911 at 5400 Swiss Avenue. 1906 and 1911 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 564, 698, respectively. 78. Dallas City Plat Books, 1:138. 79. “Munger Featured by Wide Streets: Open Stretches and Parkways Add to Imposing Beauty of Homes,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 20, 1921. 80. Munger Place, 17, 9-22. All the quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 81. PFAC, 16–17. 82. Munger Place advertisement, Dallas Morning News, Apr. 14, 1914. All quotations in this paragraph are from this source. 83. Of German descent, C. D. Hill (1876–1928) was born in Edwardsville, Illinois, studied architecture at Valparaiso University in Indiana and at the Chicago Art Institute. Hill came to Texas in 1903 and was hired as a draftsman in the prestigious Fort Worth architectural firm of Sanguinet and Staats. The firm sent him to Dallas in 1905 to establish a branch office. In 1907, he founded his own firm, C. D. Hill & Company, which rose quickly to prominence, and he designed numerous important buildings in the Dallas area. Among his projects were the 1910 Minnie May and Edgar Flippen House (demolished); the 1910 Hall of Administration Building at Fair Park (renovated in 2000 for the Women’s Museum); the 1912 downtown First Presbyterian Church; the 1912 H. L. Edwards House in Highland Park; the 1913 Oak Lawn United Methodist Church; the 1914 Dallas City Hall (now the Dallas Police and Municipal Courts Building); the 1915 City Temple of the Central Presbyterian Church (demolished); the 1924 beautifully restored and still operational Melrose Hotel in Oak Lawn; and the 1926 twenty-story Davis Building, originally the headquarters for the Republic Bank. For Hill’s work see Fuller, ed., 23, 27, 34, 67; McDonald, 99, 161–164, 205, 207; “Our Illustrations of the Work of C.  D. Hill & Company,” 249–273; and “Dallas: City of Art and Commerce,” 83–84. 84. Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, 13. 85. Munger Place, 22, 24. 86. Ibid., 24.

87. McDonald, 161. 88. Dallas City Plat Books, May 24, 1914, 1:524. 89. Holmes and Saxon, eds., 376–378. 90. Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, 9. 91. Kessler, A City Plan for Dallas, 37–38. 92. 1908 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 843. 93. 1910 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 674. The Olmsteads resided in the house until 1926, when they moved to a grand residence in Highland Park West on Armstrong Parkway. 94. See Beasley, The Alleys and Back Buildings of Galveston: An Architectural and Social History. 95. Munger Place, 9. 96. Men of Texas, 229. 97. A native of Conway, Arkansas, Charles Erwin Barglebaugh (1881–?) received his education at the University of Illinois. He apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago from 1901–1903, Walter Burley Griffin in Chicago from 1903–1904, Glenn Allen in Houston from 1905– 1906, and Lang & Witchell in Dallas from 1907–1917, except in 1914 when he worked for the firm of Griffiths and Barglebaugh in Paris, Dallas, and Wichita Falls, Texas. After his military service in World War I, he moved to El Paso and set up his practice with Lloyd R. Whitson under the name of Barglebaugh & Whitson. The outline for Barglebaugh’s biography was generously provided courtesy of Stephen Fox. 98. Fuller, ed., 90; Henry, Architecture in Texas, 1895–1945, 54; and Brooks, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries, 85. 99. According to Henry, 54, the relationship of the dining room to the conservatory could also be found at Wright’s 1892 Blossom House in Chicago. The plans are virtually reproductions of Wright’s 1905 design for the W.  R. Heath House in Buffalo, New York. See Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Work, 79. 100. Ibid., 18, 33. 101. Born in Austin, Texas, Henry Bowers Thomson (1882–1973) received a BS degree from the University of Texas in 1902 and then attended MIT, where he received another BS in 1906 and an MS in 1907. Following graduation, he traveled extensively in Europe and England. He returned to the United States and set up his Dallas architecture practice in 1908. Between 1911 and 1917, Marion Fresenius Fooshee was a draftsman in Thomson’s firm, and later Frank T. Swaine became an associate of his firm. Although Thomson was the architect for the Southwest-

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N ot es to pag es 47–53 ern Life Building (1920), he is best known for his designs for many of the finest residences in Munger Place, Highland Park, Volk Estates, and Oak Cliff. Thomson moved to Highland Park in 1915 and to Highland Park West in 1926. In 1921, he served as president of the Dallas Society of Architects, and he was a member of the Texas Association of Architects Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1952, he was inducted as a member emeritus into the Dallas chapter of the AIA. See American Architects Directory, 558; Davis and Grobe, comps. and eds., The New Encyclopedia of Texas, Vol. 2, 308–309 (1930); David Dillon, “Dream Houses: Rediscovering Hal Thomson’s Legacy of Architectural Eclecticism,” Dallas Morning News, Jan. 25, 1988; David Hurlbut, “Designer of Dreams: Architect’s Work Lives on in Grand Mansion,” Dallas Times Herald, Oct. 30, 1983. The two newspaper articles were found at Preservation Dallas. 102. 1916 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 134. 103. 1916 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 135. 104. 1921 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 136. In 1973, the Aldredge family donated the house to the Dallas County Medical Society Alliance Foundation. 105. Munger Place: Dallas, Texas, 15. 106. Ibid., 14. 107. Munger Place, 29. 108. Dallas County Deed Record, no. 44277, 785:531. 109. City of Dallas Department of Urban Planning, “Munger Place: Report of Nomination for Landmark Designation as a City Historic District,” 3, published on Mar. 26, 1980. See also Historic Preservation League’s “Munger Place Survey,” in a booklet titled A Guide to the Older Neighborhoods of Dallas, ca. 1986, 2–3. Both are located at Preservation Dallas. 110. The Historic Preservation League first focused on Swiss Avenue and then all of East Dallas with the aid of the Swiss Avenue Historic District, the East Dallas Interim Comprehensive Plan, the East Dallas Community Design Commission (originally established by the City Planning Commission), and the East Dallas Demonstration Project. (City of Dallas Department of Urban Planning, 3, 6). The Swiss Avenue Historic District was established in 1974, and the Munger Place Historic District in 1978. 111. Marie D. Landon, “Courtlandt Place Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1979. 112. Love, 213.

113. This was one year after J. C. Nichols had introduced self-perpetuating deed restrictions in his Country Club District. It is unknown whether or not the developers of Courtlandt Place were aware of his actions in Kansas City. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities, 129. 114. After attending Washington University in St. Louis, Marshall R. Sanguinet (1859–1936) worked as draftsman for the St. Louis architect Thomas Walsh. Sanguinet arrived in Fort Worth in 1883 and was a partner in a number of Fort Worth firms. In 1903, he formed a partnership with the architect Carl G. Staats (1871–1928), who had moved from New York City in 1891 to work for the San Antonio architect James Reily Gordon, known for his design of Texas County courthouses. Over a twenty-threeyear partnership, Sanguinet and Staats became one of the most important architectural firms in the state, establishing branch offices in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Waco, and Wichita Falls. They are well known for their steelframe office buildings, notably the First National Bank Building in Houston (1905), the Flatiron Building in Fort Worth (1907), the twenty-story Amicable Insurance Company Building in Waco (1911), and the Neil P. Anderson Building in Fort Worth (1920). For more information on their work, refer to Fox, “Sanguinet and Staats in Houston, 1903–1926,” 2–11; Christopher Long, “Sanguinet and Staats,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles /cms01; and 1913 Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 274. 115. The firm of Whitney Warren (1864–1943) and Charles Wetmore (1866–1941) usually did not produce designs for suburban houses. The majority of their commissions were for clubs, hotels, private estates, and terminal buildings, the most important of which is Grand Central Terminal in New York City, completed in 1913 in association with Reed & Stern. See Roth, American Architecture: A History, 298–299, 396–397, and Fox, American Institute of Architects: Houston Architectural Guide, 84. 116. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 80–81. 117. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places: Shadyside,” 41. For Cullinan’s career, see Tommy Stringer, “Cullinan, Joseph Stephen,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/fcu07. Herbert A. Kipp (1883–1968) was born in Indianapolis and graduated from Purdue University. A drainage specialist, Kipp came to Houston in 1913 to advise the U.S. government on land reclamation, was

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N ot es to pag es 53–62 employed as a city civil engineer for two years, and then worked on several suburban developments, among them, Broadacres, Edgemont, and Southampton. He became chief civil engineer for the River Oaks Corporation and was named vice president of the corporation in 1925, retiring in 1954. “Herbert Kipp Rites To Be at 3 Today,” Houston Post, Sept. 16, 1968. 118. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 501. 119. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places: Shadyside,” 37–55. 120. Ibid., 45. 121. Ibid., 46, 48. 122. Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, 5–6. In 1919, a co-founder of the Humble Oil & Refining Company, William S. Farish, purchased lot Q (Fox, “Public Art and Private Places,” 46, 49). 123. “Agreement Creating Shadyside,” Houston, July 1, 1919, HMRC. 124. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places,” 42. 125. “Agreement Creating Shadyside.” 126. Burchard and Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History, 366. 127. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places,” 49. 128. 1924, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 1541; Fox, Spanish-Mediterranean Houses in Houston, 15–16. 129. The property had been owned by Captain Baker since 1908. Ann Bohnn, “Broadacres Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of Interior, Washington, D.C., 1980. 130. Ibid. One lot was divided into half to increase the size of two other lots. All information from this paragraph is from the same source. Born on January 21, 1886, in Boston, Massachusetts, William Ward Watkin (1886–1952) received a BS degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908, where he had the opportunity to study with Paul Philippe Cret. In 1909 he joined the Boston firm Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson. The following year, Cram sent Watkin to Houston to supervise the construction of buildings at Rice Institute. Edgar Odell Lovett, president of the Rice Institute, asked Watkin in 1912 to remain in Houston and become an instructor in architectural engineering. In 1915, he was promoted to professor of ar-

chitecture, and in 1922, he became the head of the department, a position he held for the remainder of his life. His best-known designs at Rice were the Chemistry building of 1925 and the Cohen House of 1927, the Institute’s faculty club built in honor of Agnes Lord and Robert I. Cohen of Galveston. Broadacres was one of two subdivisions he laid out. In 1922, he designed the Houston neighborhood Southampton, which was adjacent to Rice Institute. He designed some single-family residences for private clients, including the 1915 Houston residence for Allene (Gano) and Howard R. Hughes Sr., which has now been incorporated into St. Thomas University. Watkin held memberships in the Rice Institute Faculty Club, the Houston Philosophical Society, the Philosophical Society of Texas, and the Houston chapter of the American Institute of of Architects (AIA). In 1949, he was awarded a fellowship by the AIA. See Fox, The General Plan of the William M. Rice Institute and Its Architectural Department, and Fox, “Watkin, William Ward,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook /online/articles/fwa91. 131. Barnstone, 90. 132. Weaver, Houses and Gardens by E.  L. Lutyens, 53–61; Barnstone, 340. 133. Johnston, 126. 134. Barnstone, 94; Warren, Bayou Bend Gardens: A Southern Oasis, 3. 135. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places,” 50. 136. Giordano, A Chronicle of River Oaks Country Club, 1. 137. Ibid., 3; on this page, a copy of an original invitation to join the club is illustrated. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, Mar. 2, 1925, 1. This was among Hugh Potter’s papers that he left to his daughter Joan Hazelhurst. 138. Giordano, 1. 139. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 1. 140. “Original Covenants and Restrictions in the Country Club Estates Additions: River Oaks Section Adjoining River Oaks Country Club, Houston, Texas,” 4, Box 2J303, WCHP. 141. Ibid., 23. 142. Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 352, no. 30.

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Chapter 3 1. Hugh Prather Sr., “Highland Park Builders Planned City of Homes,” Dallas Morning News, Mar. 27, 1955, HPPL. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. PFAC, 191–192. 5. Diane Caylor Galloway, “Letter Reveals Details about HP Founders,” Dallas Morning News, Feb. 4, 1998, HPPL. 6. Ibid. 7. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants, Fine Residence City is Formed out of Prairie,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 1, 1935. 8. Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era, 64. 9. Acheson, 35,000 Days in Texas: A History of the Dallas News and its Forbears, 93–94. 10. Prather Sr. 11. Widespread circulation of journal articles on Southern California appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Lippincott’s, Atlantic Monthly, House and Garden, The House Beautiful, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Craftsman, Overland Monthly, and Land of Sunshine/Out West. See ­Weitze, California’s Mission Revival, x–xi. 12. Otis put together a journalistic staff who wrote articles on the ideological merits of living in Southern California (Starr, 72–76). 13. Ibid., 70. By 1923, the boom peaked with 714 subdivision projects registered, encompassing 17,000 acres that were divided into more than 86,000 separate lots. Many of these lots were sold to speculative buyers (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, 162). 14. Benedict, History of Beverly Hills, BHPLHC. See also Davis, Beverly Hills: An Illustrated History; Lockwood and Hyland, The Estates of Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, and Beverly Park; and Johnson Heumann Research Associates, Beverly Hills Historic Resources Survey, 1985–1986, Final Report Prepared for the City of Beverly Hills and Office of Historic Preservation States of California, Beverly Hills City Hall. 15. Wilbur David Cook Jr. had assisted in the design of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and in improvements to the White House grounds in 1902 in association with the Olmsted firm. In 1905, Cook moved to Oakland,

California, where he planned parks for the city. Cook’s Southern California projects include his 1911 design of the grounds for Exposition Park in Los Angeles; his proposed 1923 plan, with his partner George Hall, for the Los Angeles Civic Center that was partially implemented; portions of Griffith Park; and contributions to Palos Verdes Estates. He later became a member of the prestigious Los Angeles landscape architectural firm of Cook, Hall & Cornell. Gebhard and Winter, A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California, 165, 221, 241; George D. Hall, “Beverly Hills, California: A Subdivision that Grew into a City,” 21–26, BHPLHC; Ralph D. Cornell Papers, 1925–1972, Department of Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, UCLA Library, Los Angeles, California. For Myron Hunt, see the exhibition catalogue, Myron Hunt, 1868–1952: The Search for a Regional Architecture, 3 October–9 December, 1984, Baxter Art Gallery, California Institute of Technology. 16. Hall, 21. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Ibid. 19. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park Country Club District: The Pasadena of the South, ca. 1910, 11, DPL. 20. Starr, 102. 21. Ibid. 22. “Although Modernly Developed, Highland Park History Dates from Time When Dallas Began,” Dallas Morning News, Feb. 24, 1935, HPPL. Prather Sr. noted that Nils Werenskiold was a native of Norway, was educated in Germany, and had served in the German army. “His text books were in German, he figured and dreamed in calculus in all his calculation, and was one of the great engineering figures of the early railroad builders from 1880 to 1910.” 23. Prather Sr. 24. Highland Park’s First Installment opened to the public in 1907, but the plan was not filed until Apr. 1, 1909, and recorded four days later with the city (Dallas City Plat Book, 1:209). 25. Ibid. 26. Note that at some point St. John Drive on the original plat map was changed to St. John’s Drive and hereinafter will be referred to as St. John’s Drive. “St. John’s drive derives its [name] in part from Mr. Armstrong’s Christian

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N ot es to pag es 71–77 name and Alice Circle was named for his wife, one of the great benefactors of Southern Methodist University.” See “S. W. Marshall Sees Highland Park Grow Around Own Home, First in Suburb,” Dallas Morning News, Mar. 9, 1936, HPPL. As for the origins of the other street names: Abbott Avenue was named in honor of the classical historian Dr. Frank Abbott, Byron after the prominent English poet, Euclid after the famous Greek mathematician, and Cowper after the eighteenth-century English poet, William Cowper. Galloway and Matthews, The Park Cities: A Walker’s Guide and Brief History, 52. 27. PFAC, 17. 28. Prather Jr. quoted in Bobbi Miller, “Blueprint for the Good Life,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 25, 1988, HPPL. 29. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, Highland Park Country Club District, 3. The next five quotations in this paragraph are from the same source, 4–11. 30. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 31. Morgan, Charles A. Platt: The Artist as Architect, 79. 32. PFAC, 88. 33. Champley’s first name is not legible in the advertisement. He is not listed in the Dallas city directories. 34. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, Highland Park Country Club District, 5. 35. Ibid., 5–13. All the quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 36. See 1908, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 542. 37. “S. W. Marshall Family Sees Highland Park Grow.” The next two quotations are from the same source. 38. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park West, ca. 1924, 11, DPL. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Prather Sr. 42. Lee M. Jenney and his partner Earl T. Jenney first appeared in Cleveland city directories in 1914 and were listed as Jenney and Jenney at the Hippodrome Building until 1917. After that, both men’s names disappear from the Cleveland city directories. Christopher Wood of the Cleveland Public Library provided this information in an e-mail on June 26, 2003. Between 1918 and 1928, Lee M. Jenney lived in Mississippi, according to “L.  M. Jenney of Rose Acres, Miss., widely known landscape architect,” Dallas Morning News, May 2, 1926. Jenney appeared in the Dallas city directories in 1928 at the address 3516 Uni-

versity Boulevard in University Park (Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1169). 43. PFAC, 16–17. 44. Ibid. 45. PTAC, 553–563. The next four quotations are from the same source. 46. Sanborn Map Company, 1921, 2:291–293, 295– 299A, 229C, DBCAH. 47. U.S. Census, 1930, Dallas County, Texas State Archives, Austin, Texas. With the virtual disappearance of live-in servants, many of these outbuildings have been remodeled to serve new uses, among them offices, guest quarters, and pool cabanas. 48. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 49. Acheson, 261–262. 50. Ibid., 262. Their first university, Southwestern University, had been built in Georgetown, Texas, and this would be the second one they would establish. 51. For more information on the history of Southern Methodist University, see Maddox, Building SMU, 1914–1957: A Warm and Personal Look at the People Who Started Southern Methodist University, and Wheeler, The Block Book. 52. Maddox, 59. 53. Fuller, ed., The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture with Regional Highlights, 126. 54. PFAC, 646. 55. Schwartz, “Evolution of the Suburbs,” 10. 56. The members must have been desperate for more land, as they had just completed a new clubhouse in 1908 at the Oak Lawn location in the Craftsmen idiom. For a history of the Dallas Golf and Country Club, see Galloway, Dallas Country Club: The First Hundred Years, 1–25. 57. The Blue Book of Dallas: A Social and Club Directory, 1909, 235. 58. Galloway, Dallas Country Club, 33. 59. Ibid., 25. 60. Prather quoted in Schwartz, 27. 61. Colonel William Green Sterett quoted in Galloway, Dallas Country Club, 28. 62. Prather quoted in ibid., 41. 63. Galloway, Dallas Country Club, 30–35; FlippenPrather Realty Company, Highland Park Country Club District, 7. 64. “Our Illustrations of the Work of C.  D. Hill & Company,” 249. This article was written when the coun-

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N ot es to pag es 77–87 try club was under construction and was illustrated by an idyllic rendering, complete with people and automobiles on its grounds. 65. Galloway, Dallas Country Club, 35. 66. Galloway, “Letter Reveals Details About HP Founders.” 67. The Flippen property stood on Preston Road between two large acreage lots, one intended for the Armstrongs, the other for the Prathers. Their names were written on a plat map for the Second Installment, which was filed on Jan. 28, 1910 (Dallas City Plat Book, 1:253). 68. The Blue Book of Dallas, 1909, 235. 69. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939, 290. 70. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg, 216. 71. Hewitt, The Architect & the American Country House, 1890–1940, 93–94. 72. Betsky, “Inside the Past: The Interior and the Colonial Revival American Art and Literature, 1860–1914,” 241. 73. Marsh, Suburban Lives, 68–69. 74. Croly quoted in Hewitt, 15. 75. Croly, Houses for Town or Country, 114. 76. 1908, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 682. 77. Stickley, Craftsman Homes, 9. The Craftsman style was popular in the United States from 1905 to 1930. 78. For a description of bungalow floor plans, see Winter, The California Bungalow, 37–38; Lancaster, The American Bungalow, 1880–1930. 79. Galloway, “Letter Reveals Details about HP Founders.” 80. “Highland Park, A Beauty Spot of Southwest: Dallas Suburban Town Realizes Ideal of Early Builders,” Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1928, HPPL. 81. Nichols, “Home Owners’ Associations Protect Country Club District Values,” 74–75, JCNCR. 82. For information on how Nichols acquired all this land, see Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities, 77–80. 83. Ibid., 127–128. 84. Ibid., 94. 85. Nichols, “Real Estate Subdivisions: The Best Manner of Handling Them,” 11, JCNCR. 86. Longstreth, “J. C. Nichols, the Country Club Plaza, and Notions of Modernity,” 121. Although there were

only 391 automobiles registered in Kansas City in 1908, the number had doubled by 1918. Nichols was aware that a high percentage of those who owned automobiles resided in the Country Club District. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 103. 87. Nichols, “Real Estate Subdivisions,” 8. 88. Nichols, “The Lessons of a Lifetime of Land Developing,” 31, JCNCR. 89. Ibid. 90. Quoted in Worley, “Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Missouri,” 287. 91. Worley, J.  C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 35. 92. Hyde, Roland Park-Guildford, 17–18. 93. Worley, J.  C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 124. 94. Ibid., 127. 95. Nichols, “Real Estate Subdivisions,” 13. For a summary of his deed restrictions, see Nichols, “Restrictions Create Values in Country Club District,” 37–39, JCNCR. 96. Worley, J.  C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 129. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., xv. 99. Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America, 202. 100. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 169. 101. Ibid., 108–111. 102. Ibid. 103. Pearson and Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man, His Company, and His Legacy, 1880–1994, 51; and Weiss, “The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning,” 65–66. 104. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept During the Interwar Decades,” 270. 105. Wright, 202. 106. Nichols, “The Nichols Organization and Its Activities,” 71, JCNCR; Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 184–185, did not specify what plan books Nichols used, noting that there were many available at that time. Edward W. Tanner, a graduate of the University of Kansas, became a director of the J. C. Nichols Company in 1938 and vice president after Nichols’s death in 1950. He won two awards from the Architectural League of Kansas City: in 1927, for his Knabe Building and in

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N ot es to pag es 87–94 1929, for the Plaza Theater. He also served as president of the local chapter of the AIA. For Tanner, see Nichols, “The Nichols Organization and Its Activities,” 71. 107. Nichols, “Home Building Department Operations of the Nichols Company,” 61, JCNCR. 108. Nichols, “The Nichols Organization and Its Activities,” 70. 109. For a discussion of domestic architectural styles in the 1920s, see Burchard and Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History, 292, 364–373. 110. Nichols, “Portrait of a Salesman: Jesse Clyde Nichols,” 22, JCNCR. 111. The high-rise apartments were to be rented “only to the city’s most exclusive families” and were to serve as buffers between the central shopping district and the areas for single-family homes (ibid., 20). 112. For an entire list of departments and a description of them, see Nichols, “The Nichols Organization and Its Activities,” 70. 113. The plat was filed on Jan. 28, 1910 (Dallas City Plat Book, 1:253). Part of the original Exall Lake was filled in to provide more land in this section, particularly along Lakeside Drive (Fuller, ed., 119). 114. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, Highland Park Country Club District, 7–11. The following two quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 115. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, Highland Park West, 13. The following five quotations are from the same source, 6–28. 116. “Highland Park: A Beauty Spot of Southwest,” Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1928. 117. Dallas County Deed Records, no. 13909, 443: 191–192. 118. PTAC, 704. 119. Highland Park West, 28. 120. The plat map was filed on June 15, 1912 (Dallas City Plat Book, 1:387). 121. Highland Park West, 12. 122. Dallas City Plat Book, 1:398. There is no date on this plat map. 123. Highland Park West, 20. 124. Ibid., 2. 125. According to the Highland Park Permit Book, permit no. 391, the construction cost of the church was estimated at $325,000, Highland Park Department of Building Inspection. The church has now been significantly enlarged.

126. For information about Dallas city planning, see Black, “Empire of Consensus: City Planning, Zoning, and Annexation in Dallas, 1900–1960.” 127. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 128. Quoted in Miller, “Blueprint for the Good Life.” 129. Proposed Charter for the Town of Highland Park, Texas, 1913, 2. 130. Phil Stephens, “A Proud Community Looks Back,” Park Cities People, Jan. 15, 1987, HPPL. 131. Greene, Dallas: The Deciding Years—A Historical Portrait, 39. 132. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, 152. 133. PFAC, 84–87. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 16–17. 137. Nichols, “Restrictions Create Values in Country Club District,” 37. 138. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 129. 139. Dallas County Deed Record, no. 6879, 863:610– 612. Le Roy Munger was the son of Stephen Ingram Munger and the first cousin of Collett Munger, the manager of Munger Place. Interview, L. P. Munger Jr., May 4, 2002. 140. Dallas County Deed Record, no. 6879, 863:611. 141. Ibid. 142. Dallas County Deed Record, no. 13909, 443:191–192. 143. PFAC, b11. 144. Ibid., and b82. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid., b50–b51. All the information in the remainder of this paragraph is from the same source. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., 68–69. 149. Ibid. 150. PTAC, 704. Those who attended this meeting were the same as the PFAC with the addition of J. T. Harwood, associate with the Roland Park Company, and the following were absent: Lee J. Ninde, J. E. George, and Duncan McDuffie, who only attended the PSAC. 151. Kessler’s plan for the Highland Park Acreage Addition was filed on Nov. 24, 1917 (Dallas City Plat Book, 2:58). The design was a re-plat of two previous plans. In 1909, the first plat, the “West Half Highland Park Acreage

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N ot es to pag es 94–102 Addition,” was filed, followed in 1910 by the second, “East Half Highland Park Acreage Addition” (ibid., 1:n.p.). 152. J. C. Nichols to Hugh Prather, Mar. 27, 1923, Hare & Hare Company Records, no. KC-0206, SHSMO-KC. 153. Dallas City Plat Book, 2:374. 154. “Dallas: City of Art and Commerce,” 65–84. All of the quotations in these two paragraphs are from the same source. 155. It is noteworthy that of the various styles chosen for American country houses around 1910, Tudor was second only to the Colonial Revival in popularity. For more about the suitability of the Tudor style for American country houses, see Hewitt, 77–80. 156. Dallas Newspaper Artists’ Association, Makers of Dallas, n.p. 157. A 1921 Sanborn map reveals that some of the servants lived in a two-story stucco dwelling attached to a garage (Sanborn Map Company, 2:291). 158. Croly, 84. 159. 1914, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 300; 1921, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 602; “Dallas: A City of Art and Commerce,” 74–75. 160. Croly, 206. 161. “Highland Park Has Extensive Program,” Dallas Morning News, November 20, 1921. 162. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertisement, Dallas Morning News. 163. See Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900– 1965, 39. 164. “Highland Park to have New Fire and Police Station,” HP 5, no. 7 (June 1927), 4, FLSMU. Otto H. Lang (1864–1947) was born in Freiburg, Germany, and received his professional education in architecture and civil engineering at the Polytechnic University in Karlsruhe, Germany. He came to Dallas in 1888, where he assumed a position in the engineer’s office of the Texas & Pacific Railroad. He opened his own architectural practice in Dallas in 1903 and formed a partnership with Frank O. Witchell in 1905. Witchell (1879–1958) was born in Wales, and when he was two years old, his family moved to San Antonio, where he attended public schools. Although Witchell had no formal training in architecture, he took a position at Lang & Witchell as a designer. The firm was one of the most renowned in Dallas, and their partnership lasted until 1938. Among their best designs were the 1907 YMCA building, the ca. 1912 Hippodrome Theater, the 1913 Southwestern Life Building, and the 1918 American Exchange National

Bank Building—all of which have now been torn down. The Fair Park Music Hall (General Motors Building), designed in 1925, and both the Dallas Power & Light and the Lone Star Gas Company buildings of 1931 are still standing. Lang donated his technical library to Texas A&M University; the firm’s architectural drawing collection is housed in the Alexander Architectural Archive at the University of Texas at Austin. See Hill, ed. A History of Greater Dallas and Vicinity, II: 5–6; Freedman, “Otto Lang: Dean of Texas Architects,” 7–9; McDonald, Dallas Rediscovered: A Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion, 1870–1925, 73, 87–89, 92, 94, 116, 165; and “Lang and Witchell Papers: An Inventory of their Collection,” www.lib.utexas.edu/ taro/utaaa/00066/aaa-00066.html. 165. For a description of Goodhue’s work at the Exposition see Oliver, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, 109–119. 166. “Highland Park Lands Originally Texas Republic Grants.” 167. Ibid. 168. “Highland Park’s New Art Center as it Will Appear When Finished,” HP 7, no. 8 (Dec. 1929), cover, FLSMU; Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1930, no. 16. 169. Highland Park West, 11. 170. Ibid. 171. Highland Park Views, ca. 1923, DPL, 4–33. The following three quotations are from the same source. 172. Ibid., 31. 173. Ibid., 33. 174. Ibid., 6. 175. Born in Huntington, Pennsylvania, Herbert Miller Greene (1871–1932) graduated from the University of Illinois with a BS degree in architecture in 1893. He set up his own architectural practice in Peoria, and four years later he moved to Dallas, working on his own for the 1897 design of the Dallas News building. In 1900, he established a partnership with James P. Hubbell, and their first commission was for the renovation of the Belo House that same year. Among their other projects were the 1902 Elm Place Warehouse, the 1913 Scottish Rite Cathedral, the 1913 Old Parkland Hospital, and the 1917 Temple Emanu-­El. In 1918, Greene formed his own architectural firm, Herbert M. Greene Company. Notable among his designs from this period are the 1921 Lincoln Hall, the boarding house for the YWCA, and Greene’s own Tudor residence in Highland Park on Highland Drive (now demolished). In 1922, the University of Texas at Austin’s Board of Regents chose Greene to succeed Cass Gilbert as their university architect. Greene designed buildings

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N ot es to pag es 104–112 for the university in a so-called Mediterranean-influenced Beaux-Arts style, including the Gregory Gymnasium, Garrison Hall, Littlefield Dormitory, Waggener Hall, and both the Biology and Chemistry buildings. In 1923, he formed a partnership with the Cornell-trained Edwin Bruce LaRoche, and they added another partner in 1926, the Minnesota native George Leighton Dahl. Greene, LaRoche, & Dahl designed the E.  L. DeGolyer residence at 6701 Turtle Creek Boulevard in 1928. In the 1930s, Greene collaborated in the design of numerous buildings at the University of Texas campus, including the Administration Building and Tower. Greene was a fellow and later president of the Texas chapter of the AIA and was a long-time member of the Masons. Fuller, ed., 20, 33–34, 43, 69, 127, 175; and Christopher Long, “Greene, Herbert Miller,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgr94. 176. 1920, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1522. 177. Highland Park Views, 11. 178. Morgan, 112. 179. Ibid., 246–247. 180. According to Dallas city directories, Prather moved to his second Highland Park house at 4001 Beverly Drive in 1914, and his third Highland Park house at 3709 Gillon in 1917. In 1918, he briefly lived at 3715 Lexington, and, in 1919, he is listed as residing at 4405 Lakeside Drive. See 1914, 1917, 1918, and 1919, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 742, 746, 765, 1248. Anton Franz Korn Jr. (1886–1942) was born near Marienbad, Germany, and emigrated with his widowed father to New York City, when he was ten years old. He developed an interest in architecture during his high school years that led him to

work for some of New York City’s most prominent architects. After graduating from high school, he won a partial scholarship at the Cornell School of Architecture. In 1914, he moved to Galveston, Texas, where he designed the John Sealy Hospital and Nurses’ Home. Two years later, he set up an architectural practice in Dallas and served as both architect and contractor for numerous Dallas residences, building his own in 1924 at 3318 Beverly Drive in Highland Park. He was also the first architect for the Hilton Hotels of Texas, and he designed the 1928 courthouse in San Angelo, Texas. In ca. 1938, he designed his most famous project, the Hillcrest Mausoleum, which became his final resting place. Fuller, ed., 94, 118, 119, 122, 131, 138; and “Anton Franz Korn,” a memorial biography by an unknown author, which was probably printed for his funeral. 181. “Highland Park Home of Hugh Prather is Sold for $200,000,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 28, 1919. 182. Highland Park Views, 30. 183. 1923, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1542. 184. Sanborn Map Company, 1921, 2:291. 185. Highland Park Views, 27. 186. See Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530– 1830, 105. 187. Highland Park Views, 7. Before residing in Highland Park, the Mungers lived at 4309 Gaston Avenue in Munger Place. See 1908, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 632. Le Roy Munger served as president of the Dallas Country Club from 1923 to 1925. Galloway, Dallas Country Club, 336. 188. Highland Park Views, 29. 189. This was in vol. 1, no. 5.

Chapter 4 1. The tree was designated as a historical landmark in 1986. 2. According to local legend, the son of one of the area’s original settlers, Dr. John Cole, planted the pecan tree around 1868. Galloway and Matthews, The Park Cities: A Walker’s Guide and Brief History, 89–95. 3. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertising booklet, Highland Park West, ca. 1924, 7, DPL. 4. Ibid., 22. 5. “New Features in Development of Real Estate are Evident in Highland Park, West,” HP (Jan. 1922): 7, FLSMU.

6. Highland Park West, 22. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Dunn, “The Development of Automobile Roads in Dallas County, 1905–1926,” 13. 9. Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners, 163–169. 10. For Forest Hills Gardens, see Klaus, A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens, and Coleman, “Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. the Garden City Movement, and the Design of Forest Hills Gardens,” 8–14, FHGCR.

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N ot es to pag es 113–116 11. “Pamphlet No. 1. Forest Hills Gardens, Preliminary Information for Buyers.” Long Island and New York: Sage Foundation Homes Company, 1911, 5, FHGCR. 12. PFAC, 57–71. All the quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 13. Dallas City Plat Book, 2:361. 14. “Home Locations Are Now Being Sold In Highland Park West,” HP 1, no. 7 (May 1923): 1, FLSMU. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertisement, “There is No Better Place in which to Live: Highland Park West,” Dallas Morning News, May 13, 1923. 15. Nichols, “The Lessons of a Lifetime of Land Developing,” 32, JCNCR. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., and “New Features in Development of Real Estate are Evident in Highland Park, West.” 18. Dallas City Plat Book, 3:30, and see Phil Stephens, “A Proud Community Looks Back,” Park Cities People, Jan. 15, 1987, HPPL. 19. Stephens, “A Proud Community Looks Back.” 20. “Home Locations Are Now Being Sold In Highland Park West.” 21. By 1928, the maintenance fund was 1 percent for ten square feet, amounting to ten to fifteen dollars per year for the majority of the houses. See “Highland Park: A Beauty Spot of Southwest,” Dallas Morning News, May 8, 1928, HPPL. 22. PTAC, 629–630, 633. Bouton had begun a Roland Park newsletter in 1906. 23. Ibid., 624. 24. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities, 169. 25. “Highland Park To Form Celebrations Association,” HP 1, no. 6 (Apr. 1923): 8, FLSMU. 26. “Old-Fashioned Fourth Of July Celebration Will Be Held In Highland Park West,” HP 1, no. 7 (May 1923): 1, FLSMU. 27. Highland Park West, 30. 28. “New General Sales Office Of The Flippen-Prather Realty Company,” HP 2, no. 6 (May 1924): 8, FLSMU. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. PFAC, 143. 32. Dallas City Plat Book, 3:155. 33. “Opening Sale Of Country Club Section Of Highland Park, On Preston Road, Excites Interest In Scores of People,” HP 2, no. 7 (June 1924): 7, FLSMU.

34. Dallas City Plat Map, 3:155. 35. “Opening Sale Of Country Club District Section Of Highland Park.” John S. Bradfield served as president of the Highland Park School District from 1917 to 1933. Interview, Jeannie Peoples, May 2, 2003. 36. The school has since then been greatly expanded. Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1930, no. 64. Marion Fresenius Fooshee (1888–1956) was born in Weatherford, Texas, and spent his early years in Corpus Christi. Three years after his father’s death in 1895, he and his mother relocated to Dallas, where he studied technical drawing at Bryan High School but did not attend college. In 1911, Fooshee was hired in the office of the Dallas architect H. B. Thomson, where he trained as a draftsman and worked with Thomson on the Greer and the Lewis-Aldredge Houses in Munger Place and on the Thorpe House in Highland Park. In 1914, Fooshee met Cheek, also a draftsman in Thomson’s office. Both left Thomson’s office to serve in the military during World War I. Four years later, Fooshee opened his own architectural practice in Dallas, and shortly after Cheek joined his office. Around 1920, Fooshee & Cheek formerly entered into a partnership. Born in Hillsboro, Texas, James Bruce Cheek (1895– 1970) studied architecture in 1913 for one year at the University of Texas at Austin. Among Fooshee & Cheek’s Dallas projects were the design of numerous private commissions for houses in Highland Park and University Park, and model houses, apartments, and duplexes for the Flippen-Prather Realty Company. They also designed houses in other Texas cities: Corsicana, Terrell, Tyler, and Wichita Falls. Their notable commercial buildings were the remodeling of their office building in 1930 at 1901½ Harwood, the ca. 1931 Grand Tourist Lodge, and the ca. 1935 Bon Aire Courts. But their most important commission was for the Highland Park Shopping Village from 1928–1953, built by the Flippen-Prather Realty Company. Both designed their own residences in Highland Park: Cheek in 1930 at 4417 Westway Drive and Fooshee in 1931 at 4443 Westway Drive. They were members of the Texas chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). For more about their firm, refer to Duncan T. Fulton III, “Fooshee, Marion Fresenius,” www.tshaonline .org/handbook/online/articles/ffo39; Duncan T. Fulton III, “Cheek, James Bruce,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook /online/articles/fchvs; Toews, “Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture in Dallas: The Work of Fooshee & Cheek,” 9–15; and W. Dwayne Jones, “Highland Park Shopping

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N ot es to pag es 117–125 Village, Highland Park, Dallas County, Texas,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1997. 37. Dallas City Plat Book, 3:347. 38. “Highland Park Goes Horseback Riding,” HP (Nov. 1922): 8, FLSMU. The newsletter did not adopt vol. nos. until Dec. 1922. 39. PSAC, 704–707. 40. “Saddle And Bridle Club Plans New Club House,” HP 3, no. 5 (Apr. 1925): 1, 5, FLSMU. 41. PTAC, 344. 42. “Five Cash Prizes Offered In Grounds Beautiful Award,” HP 3, no. 4 (Mar. 1925): 1, FLSMU. 43. Ibid. 44. “Awards Made In Grounds Beautiful Contest,” HP 3, no. 11 (Oct. 1925): 1, FLSMU. 45. Hugh Prather, “A Personal Word About The Home Grounds Contest,” HP 4, no. 5 (Apr. 1926): 3, FLSMU. 46. Dallas City Plat Book, 3:341. 47. Ibid., 4:129. An attached letter from the FlippenPrather Realty Company, dated Nov. 23, 1926, stated that they had made some typographical errors on the original plat that had to be corrected. 48. Dallas City Plat Book, 4:247. 49. “Section West Of Armstrong Parkway Developing Rapidly,” HP 6, no. 5 (Apr. 1928): 6, FLSMU. 50. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertisement, Dallas Morning News, May 11, 1928. 51. Nichols, “The Lessons of a Lifetime,” 29. 52. Fuller, ed. The American Institute of Architects Guide to Dallas Architecture with Regional Highlights, 124. 53. Dallas City Plat Book, 4:253, and “Highland Park: A Beauty Spot of Southwest.” 54. Olmsted [Jr.], “Palos Verdes Estates,” 276–279, PVPL. 55. “Planning Conference Schedule,” Dallas Morning News, May 6, 1928. 56. “Planners Talk Traffic Needs of Big Cities, Factor of Beauty,” Dallas Morning News, May 9, 1928. See Allison, “Seven Years of Architectural Control in Palos Verdes.” 57. Planning Conference Schedule; and “Planning Conference Ends,” Dallas Morning News, May 11, 1928. 58. “Committee Appointed To Study Zoning Problems In Highland Park,” HP 6, No. 12 (Nov. 1928): 3, FLSMU. 59. “New Zoning Ordinance Now In Effect,” HP 7, no. 4 (Aug. 1929): 3, FLSMU.

60. Highland Park Community League, promotional booklet, The Saga of Highland Park, ca. 1963, 6. 61. Zoning Ordinance, The Town of Highland Park, Texas, July 3, 1929. 62. HP 2, no. 4 (Mar. 1924): 2, FLSMU. 63. “Record Building Year In Highland Park Indicated by Permits Issued,” HP 3, no. 1 (Dec. 1924): 1, FLSMU. 64. “Highland Park West Is Fulfilling Expectations,” HP 3, no. 10 (Sept. 1925): 3, FLSMU. 65. Highland Park Building Permit Books, 1925–1930. 66. Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1925, nos. 16, 18, 82, 83. 67. 1927, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 552. 68. Frank Truman Swaine became an associate in Thomson’s firm in 1919. By 1924, Thomson and Swaine formed a partnership, which lasted until 1927 or 1928. Swaine remained in Dallas in 1928 and set up his own practice, but he left the city sometime before 1932. Swaine and his wife Ruth lived in Highland Park at 3922 Mockingbird Road. 1919–1928, 1932, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1016, 1321, 1415, 1352, 1572, 1736, 1779. 69. Thomson & Swaine, Architects, “Exquisitely Rendered Architectural Types in Highland Park West, The Harry A. Olmstead Residence, 4237 Armstrong Parkway,” Highland Park West, HP 4, no. 12 (Nov. 1926): 1, FLSMU. At this point, Flippen and Prather began an aggressive advertising campaign in the newsletters by featuring houses in this series. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 70. “Lily Pond In Parkway At Beverly Drive And Preston Road Is Unique Feature in Development of Country Club Section,” HP 2, no. 12 (Nov. 1924): 1, FLSMU. Sir Alfred Charles Bossom (1881–1965) was born near London, England, and was trained as an architect at Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy schools. In 1903, he accepted a commission from the Carnegie Steel Mills in Pittsburgh to design a housing project in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. He then set up his practice in New York City and had a number of East Coast and Texas clients. His work in Dallas included the American Exchange National Bank (1918), with Lang & Witchell as associate architects; the Magnolia-Mobil Petroleum Building (1922); and the Maple Terrace Apartments (1924–1925). He collaborated with Thomson & Swaine in their alterations and expansions to the Adolphus Hotel. In Houston, he designed the Petroleum Building (1925–1926) in association with the architects Briscoe, Dixon, and Sullivan. In 1926, he and

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N ot es to pag es 125–128 his family moved to England, where he spent twenty-eight years serving in Parliament. See Fuller, ed., 24 and 94; Mary Carolyn Hollers George, “Bossom, Alfred Charles,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbozl. 71. “Lily Pond In Parkway At Beverly Drive And Preston Road,” 1. 72. See Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California (1895–1930),” 131–147. 73. Weitze, California’s Mission Revival, 38–43. 74. Hewitt, The Architect & the American Country House, 1890–1940, 90. 75. In the 1920s and 1930s, the journals and books that appealed to both architect and client were Architect & Engineer, Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, American Architect, Western Architect, House and Garden, and House Beautiful. Two of the most well-known monographs were The Spanish House for America by Rexford Newcomb, published in 1927, and Provincial Houses in Spain by Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley Byne, published in 1925. As Newcomb commented (quoted in Thomson & Swaine, Architects, “The Small House in the Spanish Style,” Southern Architect, 49): “The many divisions of this great Spanish domain present a variety of characteristics that must be taken into consideration by the architect who proposes to design work in the Spanish manner. . . . [T]he architect may find a grammar sufficiently broad to mirror every phase of life as it expresses itself in these various states and climates.” 76. George Washington Smith’s house is illustrated in Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California (1895–1930),” 139. Smith (1876–1930) was born in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at Harvard but never graduated with a degree in architecture. He toured Europe in 1912, where he studied painting in Paris and stayed until the beginning of World War I. Upon returning, Smith and his family settled in Montecito, California (Hewitt, 282). 77. Lutah Maria Riggs (1896–1986) was one of the first women to receive an architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She became a licensed architect in 1928. 78. In 1905 Arthur Byne (1888–1935) received a Certificate of Proficiency in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, but instead of practicing architecture, he became a watercolorist, delineator, and photographer. From 1911 to 1920, he drew Spanish buildings for fifteen covers of Architectural Record. He was also the curator of the

Museum of the Hispanic Society of American in New York City and was recognized as a world authority on Spanish art. He and his wife Mildred Stapley Byne (1875–1941), a Spanish historian, artist, and writer, made Madrid their permanent residence in 1920 and opened an antiquarian business specializing in Spanish antiques and decorative arts. Their most important client was William Randolph Hearst, for whom they supplied decorative materials for his estate, La Cuesta Encantada at San Simeon, California. See “Arthur Byne and Mildred Stapley Byne,” research .frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action-browser-recid=7121, and Molly Barker, Susan Chamberlin, and Robert Sweeney, “Steedman Estate/Casa del Herrero,” National Historic Landmarks Program, Feb. 25, 2009. 79. Some of tiles were new and purchased in Tunis. 80. AR 60, no. 11: 471–474. 81. Hewitt, 221. Born in La Miranda, California, Wallace Neff (1895–1982) enrolled at MIT in 1915, but World War I interrupted his education. After the war, he did not resume his coursework but instead went to Santa Barbara around 1919, where he briefly apprenticed to George Washington Smith. Neff later opened up an architectural practice in Pasadena, where he specialized in designing expensive houses. He received many AIA awards throughout his long career. Neff retired in 1975. See Clark, Wallace Neff: Architect of California’s Golden Age, and “Wallace Neff and the Culture of Los Angeles.” 82. Hewitt, 221. 83. Lockwood and Hyland, The Estates of Beverly Hills: Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, and Beverly Park, 72–75. 84. Clark, “Wallace Neff and the Culture of Los Angeles,” 23. 85. Atlee Bernard Ayres (1873–1969) was born in Hillsboro, Ohio. His family moved to Texas, first residing in Houston, then San Antonio. He went to New York City in 1890 to study architecture at the Metropolitan School of Architecture, a branch of Columbia University, where he won first prize in the school’s annual design competition. Following graduation in 1894, Ayres returned to San Antonio, where he worked for several architects and briefly practiced architecture in Mexico. He returned to San Antonio in 1900 and established a partnership with Charles A. Coughlin, which lasted until Coughlin’s death in 1905. Ayres’s specialty was the design of residences, and his work includes a number of houses in the Tobin Hill section, as well as a large villa for the prominent San Antonio banker George Washington Brackenridge, which no longer stands. In the 1920s, Ayres began to specialize in the de-

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N ot es to pag es 129–138 sign of Spanish Colonial Revival-style residences, among them the Mannen House (1926) and the hilltop residence for the Atkinson family (1928), which is now the central building of the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum. These and other designs were published in major architectural journals of the time. His most noted public buildings are the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium (1926) and the Administration Building for Randolph Air Force Base, known as the “Taj Mahal” (1931). He continued to practice architecture until shortly before his death. Ferguson, “The Country Houses of Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres,” 18–20, and “Ayres, Atlee Bernard,” www.tshaonline.org /handbook/online/articles/fay03. 86. Thomson & Swaine, Architects, “Exquisitely Rendered Architectural Types in Highland Park West, The Gus W. Pharr Residence, 4211 Arcady Drive,” Highland Park West, HP 4, no. 10 (Sept. 1926): 1, FLSMU. 87. 1928, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1038; “Attractive and Spacious New Home, of Spanish Type, Being Erected in Highland Park West,” HP 3, no. 1 (Dec. 1924): 1. 88. “Attractive And Spacious New Home, Of Spanish Type, Being Erected In Highland Park West.” 89. Ibid. 90. Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1926, no. 78. 91. Thomson & Swaine, Architects, “The Small House in Spanish Style,” 43–44. 92. “Two Views Of The Beautiful Home Of Dr. H. Leslie Moore, 4204 Beverly Drive,” HP 6, no. 11 (Oct. 1928): 7, FLSMU. 93. Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1930, no. 50; 1930, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 625, 1480. 94. 1932, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 410, 1072, 4416. 95. University Park began as a residential adjunct to the university and served as an additional source of revenue. Wheeler, The Block Book, 4, DPL; Maxwell, “University Park, Texas,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/ articles/heu02, and Building SMU, 1915–1957: A Warm and Personal Look at the People Who Started Southern Methodist University. 96. Wheeler, 5. 97. Ibid., 12. 98. Ibid., 10–11. 99. Maxwell, “University Park, Texas”; City of University Park, The Story of the City of University Park, Texas, 5. 100. “Contract Met for Grade School To Cost $150,000,” HP 4, no. 3 (Feb. 1928): 1, FLSMU.

101. Maxwell, Building SMU, 1915–1957, 8. 102. Zoning Ordinance for the City of University Park, Texas, 426–435. 103. Diane Galloway, “Snider Plaza Began in ’27 with 1 Firm,” Dallas Morning News, Jan. 15, 1987, Park Cities Historic and Preservation Society. 104. David Reichard Williams (1890–1962) was born near Childress, Texas, where he was educated at home and through correspondence courses. At the age of fifteen, he was employed by the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad as a construction worker. Later, as an assistant to the automobile manufacturer Walter Chrysler, Williams acquired skills as a mechanical engineer. In 1912, he entered the architecture program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as an artist for the Daily Texan newspaper and for the Cactus yearbook. He left in 1916 before receiving his degree and later that year moved to Tampico, Mexico, and worked as a civil engineer for oil companies. From 1922 to 1923, he traveled throughout Europe, briefly attending some architectural schools. In 1924, he established an architectural practice in Dallas, and one of his first commissions was for the design of the Spanish-style ornamental gateways for the Loma Linda subdivision in University Park. As an associate editor of Southwest Review in 1927, he wrote articles, illustrated by O’Neil Ford, that expressed their interest in adapting features from Texas-European houses for contemporary house designs in Dallas and Corsicana. Between 1933 and 1948, he held various positions in the U.S. government. In 1939, he participated in the restoration and reconstruction of La Villita in San Antonio. His papers and drawings are housed in the archives of the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette; his photographs of early Texas houses are stored in the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin. Copies of his photographs are in the Library of Congress. See McCarthy, David R. Williams, Pioneer Architect, and Wayne Gard, “Williams, David Reichard,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/fwi19. 105. 1933–1934, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1512, 1786. 106. McCarthy, 162. 107. Holmes and Saxon, eds., 201. 108. Fuller, ed., 128. For Ford, see Dillon, The Architecture of O’Neil Ford: Celebrating Place. 109. Charles Stevens Dilbeck (1907–1990) was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas. At the age of eight, his family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he studied drawing with

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N ot es to pag es 138–144 his father, who was a professional draftsman and builder. Beginning in 1927, he spent two years as a student at Oklahoma A&M, before opening a private architectural practice in Tulsa. In 1932, he relocated his practice to Dallas and worked with George Marble, who had been employed by the Dines & Kraft Building Company, for a brief period. Dilbeck mainly worked in the Park Cities and in Preston Hollow, but many of his houses have been replaced by larger ones. Along with hundreds of house designs, he also designed churches, hotels, apartment buildings, country clubs, shopping centers, and restaurants. See Mulford, “The Unmistakable Architecture of Charles Dilbeck,” 110–114; Walton, One Hundred Historic Tulsa Homes and One Hundred More Historic Tulsa Homes; and “Charles Stevens Dilbeck drawings, 1929–1969,” Texas Archival Resource Online, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utaaa/00110/aaa-00110 .html. 110. Fuller, ed., 130. 111. 1936, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1050, 1730. 112. “Park is Built for Exclusive Home Estates, Leonard W. Volk Spends Two Years Improving District,” Dallas Morning News, May 2, 1926. 113. Diane Galloway, “Volk Estates Got its Start from Shoe Store Owner, Son,” Dallas Morning News, n.d., HPPL. 114. “Park is Built for Exclusive Home Estates.” All the information and quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 115. Ibid. All the information and quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 116. John Scudder Adkins (1872–1931) was born in St. Louis and was trained there in the Beaux-Arts tradition. He worked for the St. Louis branches for two Boston firms: Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, and Peabody & Stearns. He moved to Cincinnati in 1893, where he designed many houses in the area, along with houses in Texas, Indiana, and New Orleans. See Walter E. Langsam, “Adkins, J. S.,” Biographical Dictionary of Cincinnati Architects, 1788– 1940 www.architecturecincy.org/?page_id=199. Gordon Dysart, interview with Mrs. Alvin M. Owsley, Jan. 6, 1984, Park Cities Historic and Preservation Society; 1930, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1534. 117. Butler, “From Water Supply to Urban Oasis: White Rock Lake Park, Part 1,” 52–67. 118. Many of the architectural drawings for the Dines

& Kraft Building Company that have survived are unlabeled. See the Dines, Kraft and Hexter Collection, DPL. 119. 1928–1929, Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 1237. 120. Clifford Dorris Hutsell (1893–1952) was born in Grapevine, Texas. Having no formal architectural training, he was employed as a carpenter. He moved to Dallas in 1917, where he continued in that profession during World War I. He did not serve in the military because he was deaf in one ear. In 1921, he became a designer and builder of speculative housing, mostly cottages and bungalows, on Park Row in South Dallas. Around 1925, he and his family moved to 5831 Mercedes Avenue in East Dallas north of Lakewood Heights, where for the next two years he built mostly Tudor-style houses in the 5800 and 6000 blocks of Mercedes Avenue. During the 1920s and 1930s, he designed and built numerous houses in Lakewood in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. His last designs, consisting of one-story ranch houses with stone exteriors and tile roofs, were a distinct departure from his earlier work in the neighborhood. During his career, Hutsell also built duplexes, small business buildings, and small shopping centers in the Dallas area. Many of the drawings and photographs of his work are now owned by his daughter, Madeline Hutsell Boedeker. See Madeline Hutsell Boedeker, “Biography of Clifford Dorris Hutsell,” n.d., n.p., and Winters, The Lakewood Houses of Clifford D. Hutsell. 121. The author was unable to locate the name of the architect or builder of the Mix House. 122. Boedeker, n.p. 123. See Gebhard’s foreword to Clark, Wallace Neff: Architect of California’s Golden Age, 11–13; and Clark’s “Wallace Neff and the Culture of Los Angeles,” 27. 124. “Tour to Offer a Look at Lakewood,” White Rocker, from a file at the Lakewood Public Library, n.d. 125. Winters, n.p., states that it cost Hutsell ten thousand dollars to build his second home in Lakewood. His first house was erected in 1926 at 7103 Lakewood Boulevard. 126. Clark, Wallace Neff: Architect of California’s Golden Age, 42. 127. Many unknown artisans worked on Hutsell houses. The metal worker Henry Potter remains known today, however, probably because his grandson still operates Potter Art Metal Studios. Potter fashioned gates, fences, doors, lanterns, light fixtures, grills, stair rails, andirons, and other decorative items from iron, steel, aluminum, brass, bronze, and copper for Hutsell, as well as for the builders Dines &

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N ot es to pag es 145–152 Kraft and the architects Charles Stevens Dilbeck, Roscoe DeWitt, Charles Dilbert, and Fooshee & Cheek. For all this, see Chloie Clements, “Iron Man: Mr. Henry Left His Mark on Our Railings and Doors,” Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate (Dallas, 1999), n.p. According to Mrs. Boedeker’s biography of her father, the Potter studio supplied all of the metal work for her father’s designs. 128. “Tour to Offer a Look at Lakewood.” 129. PTAC, 600–614. 130. Ibid., 605, 613. 131. Longstreth, “The Neighborhood Shopping Center in Washington, D.C., 1930–1941,” 9. 132. For Market Square, see Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950, 150–152. 133. For Lake Forest’s country houses and Market Square, see Coventry, Meyer, and Miller, Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest: Architecture and Landscape Design, 1856–1940. 134. PFAC, 602. 135. Pearson and Pearson, The J. C. Nichols Chronicle: The Authorized Story of the Man, His Company, and His Legacy, 1880–1994, 19–20, 65–66. 136. Ibid. 137. For Nichols’s description of his Country Club Plaza, see “Country Club Plaza—Forty-seventh Street and Mill Creek Parkway,” 1, JCNCR; Nichols, “Planning and Management of Nichols Shopping Centers,” 48–55, JCNCR; and “Country Club Plaza to be a General Shopping Center,” Country Club Bulletin 5, no. 8 (Dec. 1923): 1–6, JCNCR. Edward Buehler Delk graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and received training in London. Nichols convinced him to move to Kansas City after World War I, promising Delk enough work until he could build a private clientele (Pearson and Pearson, 97). 138. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 247–248. 139. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept During the Interwar Decades,” 277. 140. Nichols, “Planning and Management of Nichols Shopping Centers,” 49, JCNCR. 141. Baker and Funaro, Shopping Centers: Design and Operation, 84; Longstreth, “J.  C. Nichols, the Country Club Plaza, and Notions of Modernity,” 120–135. 142. Longstreth, “J.  C. Nichols, the Country Club Plaza, and Notions of Modernity,” 120–135.

143. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept.” 272. 144. For Shaker Square, see Campen, Distinguished Homes of Shaker Heights: An Architectural Overview, 12–14, and Smith, “The Glory of Shaker Village.” 145. Dallas City Plat Book, 3:155. 146. Jones, “Highland Park Shopping Village, Highland Park, Dallas County, Texas.” 147. Flippen and Prather quoted in Toews, 10. 148. Gail Stein, Archivist—Historical Collection, located the two buildings illustrated in the Beverly Hills Citizen, “Proposed New Block at Beverly and Brighton,” Apr. 25, 1924, and “You Are Cordially Invited to Attend on Saturday, May 1st, 1926 the Formal Opening of the Arcade Building,” Apr. 29, 1926, BHPLHC. 149. Gebhard, Santa Barbara—The Creation of a New Spain in America, 19–22, and Staats, Californian Architecture in Santa Barbara, ix–xii. 150. Taylor quoted in Gebhard, Santa Barbara—The Creation of a New Spain, 10. 151. For Palos Verdes Estates, see Hunt, “Palos Verdes—Where Bad Architecture is Eliminated,” 9–34, and Morgan, The Palos Verdes Story. 152. “New York Exhibit Opens in Los Angeles,” Palos Verdes Bulletin 1, no. 7 (June 1925): 1–2. 153. “Dedication of First Plaza Building,” Palos Verdes Bulletin 1, no. 8 (July 1925): 1. 154. “Fall Building Activity,” Palos Verdes Bulletin 5, no. 12 (Dec. 1929): 1–2. 155. Shippey, “An Exceptionally Planned Rural Community,” 232–234, and Davis, “A Little Texas City Votes Bonds for a Combined Municipal Building and Community House,” 575–576. Another publication, written by Rancho Santa Fe’s architect, Lilian J. Rice, may have been known to them: “Architecture: A Community Assets Superior Architectural Design, Rancho Santa Fe,” 43–46. See also, Paul, ed., Historic Homes & Buildings in Rancho Santa Fe. 156. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept,” 273–274. 157. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 167–171. 158. Ibid., 167. 159. “Westwood Village, Los Angeles, California, America’s Most Unique Shopping Center, ‘A Village within a City,’” ca. 1940, Charles E. Young Research Library, University Archives, University of California at Los Angeles.

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N ot es to pag es 152–166 160. For information on the Exposition, see Woodward, The Buildings of Europe: Barcelona, 100; Paris, “The Barcelona Exposition: Splendid but Costly Effort of the Catalan People,” 481–496. 161. Diane Galloway, interview with Hugh Prather Jr. and Ralph Pearson, May 13, 1989, 6, Park Cities Historic and Preservation Society. 162. Ibid. 163. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept,” 272. 164. Prather Sr., “Highland Park Builders Planned City of Homes,” Dallas Morning News, Mar. 27, 1955. 165. This type of plan was also loosely based on market days held in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century around the Texas courthouse squares. See Robinson, The People’s Architecture: Texas Courthouses, Jails, and Municipal Buildings, 203. 166. McKeever, The Community Builder’s Handbook, 271, praised the plan as a prototype for modern shopping centers. According to Baker and Funaro, 91, the plan was widely copied, notably at the Bellevue Shopping Center outside Seattle, Washington. 167. Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center Concept,” 271–272. 168. Baker and Funaro, 93. 169. Dealey quoted in Prather Sr. 170. “Shop Village Going Up for Highland Park,” Dallas Morning News, Oct. 12, 1930. Little is known about Guy Foraythe Cahoon, except that he came to Dallas in 1916, worked with the Dallas Allied Artists, producing artwork of historic Dallas buildings and locations, and in the 1930s, he held solo exhibitions at the Joseph Sartor Galleries. He also entered etchings for the State Fair competitions. http://bosquecrossinggallery.com/guy_f_ cahoon_bio.htm. 171. Diane Galloway, “Village Development was Slow but Steady,” Park Cities People, Oct. 2, 1991, HPPL. 172. In 1990, architectural drawings for the Village were donated by Mrs. James Cheek, the widow of the

architect, to the Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas Libraries, at the University of Texas in Austin. The analysis of the various buildings of the Village will be mainly based upon these surviving drawings, which although extensive, are incomplete with respect to some parts of the complex. They are identified as the Fooshee & Cheek Collection. Other observations will be based on photographs taken around 1948, which are housed in the offices of the HP Village Management, LLC. 173. According to the Highland Park Building Permit Book, 1930, nos. 65 and 66, the South Filling Station cost fifteen thousand dollars to build and the Texas Company Station cost seventeen thousand dollars to build. 174. “Second Unit Begun in Highland Park Shopping Village,” Sept. 27, 1931. When Group B Stores was announced, it was anticipated to cost approximately one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars to build (ibid.). 175. Ibid. 176. “Modernistic Beauty to Mark New Theater,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 15, 1935. 177. Flippen-Prather Realty Company, advertisement, “Interstate’s Newest and Most Beautiful Theater,” Dallas Morning News, Nov. 15, 1935. 178. Prather Sr. 179. Mackintosh, “Who Ruined Highland Park?” 64. 180. E-mail from Kirk Smith, Development Services Manager, Town of Highland Park, Oct. 18, 2010. The last amendment to the detailed fifty-eight page zoning ordinance was in March 2009 and can be accessed online: “Highland Park Zoning Ordinance,” www.HPtx.org. 181. Mackintosh, 58. She is referring to the Costello House. 182. Quoted in ibid., 64. 183. For the history of Preston Hollow, see Maxson, “Early Preston Hollow,” 26–35, and Morgan, Preston Hollow: A Documentary History, 1850–1950. 184. “U.S. Census Bureau Delivers Texas’ 2010 Census Population Totals,” http://2010.census.gov/news /releases/operations/cb11-cn37.html.

Chapter 5 1. “1000 Acre Home Section Planned, Country Club Estates Company to Open Tract Along Bayou,” Box 2J363, WCHP. 2. Although Mike Hogg was involved with the purchase of Country Club Estates, Will Hogg and Hugh

Potter were principally responsible for the planning and development of the River Oaks Corporation. 3. “1000 Acre Home Section Planned.” 4. Ibid. 5. Hugh Potter, “Modern Residential Development:

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N ot es to pag es 166–173 Its Relation to City Planning,” 20-21, Box 2J363, WCHP. This is a reprint of Potter’s public address in Hogg Brothers, advertising booklet, Our Story of River Oaks, Chapter II, 1926, 20-21, Box 2J363, WCHP. 6. Our Story of River Oaks, Chapter II, 11. 7. Potter, 17-18, 25. 8. “Living in River Oaks,” 8. 9. Hogg Brothers, advertisement, Our Story of River Oaks, 1925, Subdivisions—River Oaks, HMRC. 10. “1000 Acre Home Section Planned.” 11. Weber, “Will Hogg and the Business of Reform,” 7. 12. Bernhard, Ima Hogg: The Governor’s Daughter, 56. 13. Warren, Bayou Bend Gardens: A Southern Oasis, 10. 14. Cullinan had formerly served with Will Hogg on the Texas Company (Texaco) board of directors. Both resigned in 1913 after the headquarters was relocated to New York. Cullinan had organized the Fidelity Trust Company in which Will Hogg served as vice president. Will Hogg, with Cullinan and Judge James Autry, formed the Farmer’s Petroleum Company to purchase oil leases in the lucrative Humble Field. Neff, with Phelan, Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 17–18. 15. Fox, “Public Art and Private Places: Shadyside,” 37–55. 16. Ibid., 49. 17. Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 69. 18. Warren, 10–11. 19. Lomax, Will Hogg, Texan, 6. 20. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 52. 21. Will Hogg also collected Remington bronzes, antique American glass, metalwork, and banjo clocks as well as Native American pottery. He and Ima studied books on period furniture, particularly those by Wallace Nutting, who wrote the States Book series in the 1920s. See Neff, with Phelan, 16–17. 22. Hoskins, “American Furniture of Early Date,” 7. 23. In 1943, thirteen years after Will Hogg’s death, Ima and Mike Hogg donated some of his Remington collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, including the bronze statue titled Bronco Buster, fifty-three paintings and ten watercolors. Bernhard, 91. 24. Neff, with Phelan, 14–15. 25. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 105. 26. Peden, “Presentations: Hugh Potter,” 10–11. 27. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, Mar. 2, 1925, 1–3, Joan Hazelhurst Collection.

28. Thomas Ball to the Country Club Estates charter members, Apr. 8, 1924, Box 2J303, WCHP. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. “1000 Acre Home Section Planned.” 32. This was according to John F. Staub, who had purchased a lot from the original developers and had become a member of the River Oaks Country Club. Wendy Meyer, unpublished interview with John F. Staub, Dec. 5, 1975, HMRC. 33. William Clifford Hogg Diaries, 1923-1930, DBCAH. 34. Ibid. 35. “Development Now in Progress in Houston, Plan Estates Improvements, Local Men Obtain New Ideas for Use in Addition,” Houston Chronicle, Aug. 17, 1924. River Oaks Corporation Scrapbooks, Vol. 1, HMRC. 36. Worley, J.  C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities, 175–176. 37. Nichols, “Real Estate Subdivisions: The Best Manner of Handling Them,” 3–15, JCNCR. 38. Hugh Potter’s daughter, Joan Hazelhurst, said that her father often traveled to Kansas City to meet with Nichols and that Nichols had made several trips to Houston to assist her father in the planning of River Oaks. Interview, Joan Hazelhurst, Aug. 16, 1997. 39. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 3–4. “Expert to Beautify Country Club Estates,” Houston PostDispatch, Aug. 25, 1924. 40. “Views of Country Club Estates, Inc.,” Houston Chronicle, Aug. 10, 1924. “Street Plan of Walk Arrangement Pattern for River Oaks Boulevard,” drawing dated Sept. 9, 1924, Hare & Hare Collection, HMRC. 41. “Study for Development of Oval at Sleepy Hollow Court,” drawing dated Dec. 24, 1924, Hare & Hare Collection, HMRC. 42. “Country Club Estates Company Improvements— River Oaks Section,” interoffice memo, Dec. 15, 1924, Box 2J363, WCHP. “River Oaks to Spend $175,000 before Spring,” Houston Chronicle, Dec. 21, 1924. 43. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 4. 44. “Construction Work Already Under Way Gives City Boost,” Houston Post-Dispatch, Apr. 5, 1925. 45. “Country Club Estates Will Be Popular, New Section Already Has One of the Most Beautiful Homes to be Built in Houston,” Houston Post, Oct. 5, 1924. 46. The complete title is “Country Club Estates—

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N ot es to pag es 173–180 River Oaks, HOMESITES, NOT LOTS,” advertisement, Houston Post-Dispatch, Oct. 12, 1924, Box 2J303, WCHP. 47. Ibid. 48. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 9. 49. Ibid. 50. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 13, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 51. Ibid. 52. Will Hogg to Charles Seiler, Dec. 13, 1924, Box 2J303, WCHP. 53. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 13, 1925. 54. Kaplan and Cook, “Civic Elites and Urban Planning: Houston’s River Oaks,” 28. 55. “Country Club Estates Will be Popular.” Samuel Haynie Dixon Jr. (1886–1948) was born in Hays County, Texas, and in 1900, his family moved to Houston. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Texas A&M University in 1906. After graduation, he worked in the Houston office of F. S. Glover & Sons, architects, until 1909, when he moved to Victoria, Texas, to enter the offices of the locally prominent architect Jules Leffland. In 1913, he established his own architectural practice in Victoria in partnership with Charles Praeger. Around 1919, he moved to Houston, where, in 1922, he formed Briscoe and Dixon, a partnership with Birdsall P. Briscoe that lasted for four years. Between 1937 and 1939, he worked with the Houston architect A.  B. Ellis to design houses for the Houston developer E. H. Borden in the suburbs of Braeswood, Southgate, and Riverside Terrace. Interview, Greg Dunnam, Director of Victoria Preservation, Nov. 23, 2010. I would also like to thank Stephen Fox for his assistance in the biography of Dixon. 56. River Oaks Corporation Scrapbooks, Vol. 4A, HMRC. 57. Will Hogg to Potter, May 17, 1924, Box 2J363, WCHP. 58. Kaplan and Cook, 27. 59. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 1. 60. Ibid. 61. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 13, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 62. “J. C. Nichols of Kansas City Art Institute, Head and Country Club District Developer Visits Houston,” Houston Chronicle, Jan. 16, 1925, Box 2J303, WCHP. 63. Will Hogg to S. Herbert Hare, Mar. 4, 1925; Hare & Hare Company Records, no. KC-0206, SHSMO-KC;

hereinafter S. Herbert Hare will be referred to as Hare, because he, not his father, Sydney J. Hare, corresponded with the developers of the River Oaks Corporation. According to entries in Will Hogg’s diaries, he frequently visited the Los Angeles area for several business interests and was familiar with suburban development in Southern California. 64. Potter, 31. 65. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 29, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 66. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 5. 67. Quoted in Kaplan and Cook, 30–31. 68. Ibid. 69. Will Hogg to Hugh Potter, Mar. 29, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 70. Fox, “Riverside Terrace and Environs: An Architectural Tour,” 21. 71. Clarence J. Malone to Julia Ideson, Apr. 30, 1925, Subdivisions—Riverside Terrace, HMRC. 72. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 7. 73. Potter to S. Herbert Hare, Mar. 4, 1925, Hare & Hare Company Records, no. KC-0206, SHSMO-KC. 74. Ibid. 75. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 15, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 76. Will Hogg to S. Herbert Hare, Mar. 4, 1925. 77. Ibid. 78. S. Herbert Hare to Will Hogg, May 23, 1925, Hare & Hare Company Records, no. KC-0206, SHSMO-KC. 79. Potter to Will Hogg, Aug. 20, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 80. River Oaks Corporation advertisements in the Houston Chronicle, Apr. 12, 1925, and in the Houston Post-Dispatch, Apr. 13, 1925. 81. Potter, 28–30, 32. 82. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, May 3, 1925, Box 2J303, WCHP. 83. Kaplan and Cook, 26–27. 84. Unsigned River Oaks Corporation memo, 8. 85. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 29, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 86. “Plans to Make River Oaks a Flower Garden,” Houston Chronicle, Jan. 8, 1926. 87. Quoted in Weber and Cook, “Will Hogg and Civic Consciousness: Houston Style,” 30. 88. Ibid. 89. “River Oaks Country Club Estates,” advertising booklet, Subdivisions—River Oaks, HMRC.

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N ot es to pag es 180–192 90. “River Oaks Given Dallasite’s Praise,” Houston Post-Dispatch, Aug. 2, 1925. 91. Will Hogg interoffice memo, Dec. 5, 1924, Box 2J363, WCHP. 92. Ibid. 93. Worley, J.  C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City, 203–204. 94. Will Hogg wrote several times to Potter in letters and memos stating that “all plans are to be [super]vised by Miss Ima.” Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 15, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 95. Potter, “When You Buy Real Estate,” 126B. 96. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 551. 97. Box 2J303, WCHP. 98. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 29, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 99. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 13, 1925, Box 2J305, WCHP. 100. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 29, 1925. 101. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 693. 102. 1926, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 1218. 103. Although the house has been demolished, a photograph and description of it appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1926. 104. “Colonial Home is Completed in River Oaks,” Houston Chronicle, Jan. 31, 1926. 105. River Oaks Corporation invitation, Box 2J303, WCHP. 106. 1927, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 926. 107. “Smallest River Oaks Home,” Houston Post-­ Dispatch, Feb. 7, 1926. According to Houston city directories from 1925 to 1930, no one resided in this house. 108. 1926, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 1525. 109. “A Modern Expression of Old-World Charm,” n.d., 1, Box 2J363, WCHP. 110. 1928, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 426. 111. See Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 76. 112. In corporate correspondence the model house was referred to as “Staub No. 1.” The name was used in a River Oaks Corporation publication, “River Oaks Latin Colonial,” 4, Box 4W01, IMP; and in a published article by Staub, “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” 6. 113. Staub, “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” 6.

114. Quoted in Lucia Bryan, “A Model Home, Sweet Home: Designed by John Staub, the old Picton House Holds an Important Place in River Oaks History,” 19. 115. Staub, “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” 6. 116. “River Oaks Latin Colonial,” 10. 117. Ibid., 11. 118. Potter to Will Hogg, Oct. 3, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 119. Potter to Will Hogg, Feb. 24, 1927, Box 2J303, WCHP. In this letter, Potter informed Will Hogg that the house had not been sold. 120. Potter to Will Hogg, Oct. 3, 1926. 121. Bryan, 20–21. 122. “Colonial Home Perennially Appealing,” n.d., Box 2J303, WCHP. 123. Over time, the term “Early Republic” was dropped, and the style became known as “Federal” or “American Neo-Classical.” See Morrison, Early American Architecture From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period, 574-575, who called it the “Federal” style, while Pierson Jr., American Buildings and their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles, 210–211, used the term “American Neo-Classical.” 124. The house and its plans were illustrated in Southern Architect and Building News 53, no. 4 (Apr. 1927): 49–52. Copies of the photographs of the front-south elevation, front door, and floor plans were illustrated in House Beautiful 60, no. 12 (Dec. 1926), n.p., and were cut out and glued into one of the River Oaks Corporation Scrapbooks, Vol. 4, HMRC. 125. Quote from House Beautiful. 126. “Analysis of Cost on Staub #2, Lot 13, Block 9,” Box 2J363, WCHP. 127. Potter to Will Hogg, Oct. 3, 1926. “Hugh Potter Buys House in River Oaks,” Houston Post-Dispatch, Oct. 2, 1926, HMRC. 128. Staub may have chosen this style because his wife was from Massachusetts (Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, 84). 129. Meyer, “An Interview with John Staub,” 136. 130. Houston Architectural Survey, 111, 502. In 1979 the house was extensively restored and expanded by Charles Tapley Associates Architects. 131. “Guide to the Blanche Harding Sewall Papers,” Texas Archival Resources Online, www.lib.utexas.edu /taro/ricewrc/00045/rice-00045.html.

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N ot es to pag es 192–201 132. Fox, Spanish-Mediterranean Houses in Houston, 17–18. 133. The quotation was taken from the introduction of the book. 134. These were illustrated on pp. 4, 11 of the magazine, DBCAH, and on p. 337 of Cram and Ferguson’s book. 135. See Byne and Stapley, Spanish Interiors and Furniture, ii, and plates 5 and 6. 136. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 207–208. Ellen Biddle Shipman visited Houston in 1935 and lectured at the River Oaks Garden Club and at the Garden Club of Houston. It may have been at this event that Mrs. Sewall and Ima Hogg met her. It was noted in the Houston Post, Jan. 19, 1938, that Shipman had consulted with Ima Hogg about designs for her Diana Garden (Warren, 45–47). 137. Will Hogg to a confidential list of prospective buyers, July 20, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP; and Potter to Mr. H. Lutcher Brown, Jan. 2, 1929, Box 2J363, WCHP. Will Hogg wrote that the retreat was 90 acres, but, according to Potter in his letter to Brown and the “Agreement Creating a Residential Retreat in River Oaks, Houston,” the acreage was only 79.4 acres. This is Block 54. 138. Will Hogg to a confidential list of prospective buyers. 139. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 2, 1925, Box 2J303, WCHP. 140. The retreat names were found in Will Hogg’s records in correspondence with Potter, Box 2J363, WCHP. 141. The Hare & Hare designs for Homewoods were not used by the River Oaks developers, who chose instead a design by Kipp, which is stored in Box 2J364, WCHP. The Hare & Hare designs for Homewoods are located in the Hare & Hare Collection at HMRC. 142. “Engineer is Elected Vice President of Country Club Estates,” Houston Chronicle, Aug. 1, 1925. Kipp served in this capacity throughout this entire period. 143. Comparative Schedule for Homewoods, May 1, 1928, Box 2J363, WCHP. 144. Undated letter from Hogg Brothers to F. C. Proctor, Box 2J303, WCHP. 145. Ibid. 146. A copy of the restrictions are located in Box 4W201, IHP. 147. The corporation was referring to Article 12 in J. S. Cullinan, “Agreement Creating Shadyside,” Sept. 24, 1919, 4. 148. Potter to Will Hogg, Oct. 3, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP.

149. Will Hogg to the River Oaks Corporation, Apr. 7, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 150. Warren, 3. Originally, Ima Hogg named their residence “Bayou Banks,” Box 2J325, WCHP. The bound contract with the contractor Chris Miller was labeled on the binding cover: “Contract for Miss IH’s Home ‘Bayou Banks’ Lot C in ‘Homewoods,’ River Oaks, Houston, Texas, Chris Miller, Contractor & Miss Ima, W.  C. Hogg & Mike Hogg, owners,” Box 2J325, WCHP. 151. Meyer, 135–136. 152. Warren, 3. 153. Ibid., 24–28. 154. The Garden Club of Houston, founded in 1924, was not affiliated with the River Oaks Garden Club. See Johnston, Houston: The Unknown City, 1836–1946, 243, and Warren, 40. 155. Ima Hogg also had an interest in historic preservation. She became a member of the Texas State Historical Survey Committee (now the Texas Historical Commission), served on the advisory board to maintain the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, and, in 1967, was honored by the committee for her “meritorious service in historic preservation.” In 1956, she helped found the Harris County Heritage and Conservation Society, which moved antebellum and Victorian houses to Sam Houston Park as an open-air museum. In 1958, she donated Varner for a state park. That same year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed her to the committee for the planning of the National Cultural Center (now the Kennedy Center), and in 1967, she gave her historic 113-year-old Winedale Inn and its 130 acres located near Round Top to the University of Texas to serve as an endowed center for the study of Texas arts, architecture, and letters and as a center for the study of the ethnic history of the state. See Virginia Bernhard, “Hogg, Ima,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fho16, and Curtis, “Bayou Bend Gardens,” 20–23. 156. As indicated on the plat map the lot was 7.5 acres, but Proctor purchased additional acreage. Will Hogg to Potter, Tabulation of Comparative Prices of Fifteen Homesites in Homewoods, Mar. 11, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 157. “Hogg Buys Property,” Houston Post, Mar. 3, 1931. 158. The minutes dated Mar. 30, 1925, are housed in Box 2J303, WCHP. The remainder of the quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 159. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 21, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 160. Ibid.

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N ot es to pag es 201–207 161. Will Hogg to Hugh Prather, May 2, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 162. Potter, “Modern Residential Development in Relation to City Planning,” 14, 24. 163. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 25, 1925, Box 2J363, WCHP. 164. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, Mar. 1926, Box 2J303, WCHP. 165. Will Hogg to Potter, Mar. 29, 1925, in which Will Hogg said that Ima Hogg had compiled a list of fourteen names for the new streets, Box 2J363, WCHP. 166. “Prices Advance to Full Market Value at the Close of this Sale,” Mar. 1926, River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, Box 2J303, WCHP. 167. Ibid. 168. For a list of these restrictions, see pp. 5–7, ROPO. 169. Ibid., 8–24. All information in this paragraph is from the same source. 170. “List of River Oaks Owners is Doubled,” Houston Chronicle, Apr. 11, 1926, Subdivisions—River Oaks, HMRC. 171. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, “Another Low-Price Pre-development Sale in River Oaks,” May 9, 1926, Box 2J303, WCHP. 172. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, “Drive Thru River Oaks,” Houston Post-Dispatch, May 9, 1926. 173. Will Hogg to Potter, Apr. 10, 1927, Box 2J363, WCHP. 174. Will Hogg to Potter, Feb. 15, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 175. Potter, “When You Buy Real Estate,” 126B. 176. Riddle, “Homes to Last for All Time: The Story of River Oaks,” 24. 177. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, “Why Not Join Successful Men in the Field of Home Investment?” 1926, Box 2J303, WCHP. 178. “River Oaks Has Natural Gas,” Houston Chronicle, Mar. 2, 1926, River Oaks Corporation Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, HMRC. 179. Our Story of River Oaks, Chapter II, 9. 180. “River Oaks to Get Two New Boulevards and Eastern Outlet,” Houston Post-Dispatch, Mar. 14, 1926, in which Potter reported that they were making progress in the development of the “public parkway system of the city.” River Oaks Corporation Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, HMRC. 181. Charles W. Oliver (1893-?) was born in Wynne, Arkansas, and attended the University of Texas at Austin,

where he majored in architecture. He never graduated, leaving in 1918 to work for the Russell Brown Company in Dallas, which specialized in domestic architecture. During that time, he and his family resided on Princeton Avenue in Highland Park. In 1925, the company transferred Oliver to Houston. From 1926 to 1932, he designed more than seventy-­five houses in River Oaks for the corporation, including his own house on Pelham Drive in 1927. Oliver opened a private architectural practice in 1932, but in 1935, he took a position as a regional supervisor for the Home Owners Loan Company in Dallas. Ten years later, he returned to Houston to manage the Stewart Corporation. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 663–665; Fox, Spanish-Mediterranean Houses in Houston, 25–29; “Oliver Takes New Office,” Houston Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1932; “C. W. Oliver, Architect, To Take Dallas Position,” Houston Post, Feb. 14, 1935; and “Charles W. Oliver Appointed to Manage Stewart Corp,” Houston (Nov. 1945): 40. 182. Potter to All River Oaks Property Owners, May 10, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP; “Oliver to Serve River Oaks Area as Service Head,” Houston Post-Dispatch, May 9, 1926. 183. Ibid. Russell Brown (ca. 1877–1963) was not trained as an architect, although he had some experience in building and gained experience from the various architects in his employ. In addition to the Houston office, his company had offices in Dallas, San Antonio, and Los Angeles (Houston Architectural Survey, III, 762). 184. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 624. Michael’s interest in Spanish Mediterranean architecture was reflected in his use of it for the design of Houston commercial buildings. The most well known are the 1927 Isabella Court, designed by the architect W. D. Bordeaux, and the 1927 Ironcraft Studio Building, designed by Hiram A. Salisbury (now in disrepair). Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 80. 185. Potter to Will Hogg, Aug. 20, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP. 186. The journal article was written by the River Oaks publicity director, Don Riddle, “House of Mr. P.  L. Michael, Houston, Texas,” 45–48. 187. Manufactured by the Ludowici-Celadon Company, the red-tiled roof was expensive (Houston Architectural Survey, III, 623). 188. O. J. Cadwallader, assistant secretary-treasurer of the River Oaks Corporation, to Will Hogg, OJC Weekly Report—Country Club Estates, Dec. 18, 1926, Box 2J363, WCHP.

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N ot es to pag es 207–223 189. The document is stored at River Oaks Property Owners, Inc., Houston, Texas. 190. “River Oaks Owners 1926,” 11, Country Club Estates Incorporated, advertising booklet, Subdivisions— River Oaks, HMRC. 191. “An Architect’s Own House: The House of Mrs. Charles  W. Oliver, Houston, Texas,” 30–33. The Oliver House was also featured in Rexford Newcomb’s second book on Spanish Revival architecture, Spanish-Colonial Architecture in the United States, plate 102. 192. The document is stored at River Oaks Property Owners, Inc., Houston, Texas. 193. “Additional Reservations, Restrictions and Covenants in River Oaks Addition Supplementing Resolutions of March 15, 1926, and July 1, 1926,” 5–6. All information in this paragraph is from the same source. 194. River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, Apr. 1927, Box 2J303, WCHP. 195. Ibid. 196. Potter to Will Hogg, May 7, 1927, Box 2J363, WCHP. 197. “River Oaks Corporation Extends you this Invitation to visit Our New Home at the Southern Entrance to River Oaks,” n.d., River Oaks Corporation, advertising booklet, Box 2J303, WCHP. 198. Ibid. 199. “Entrance to River Oaks,” Houston Chronicle, May 1, 1927, Box 2J303, WCHP. 200. “Chief Landscape Architect Named For River Oaks,” Houston Chronicle, Aug. 14, 1927, Box 2J363, WCHP. 201. OJC—Weekly Report, O. J. Cadwallader to Will Hogg, Sept. 12, 1927, Box 2J363, WCHP. 202. Will Hogg to Potter, Organization, Apr. 10, 1927, Box 2J369, WCHP. 203. Potter to Will Hogg, Oct. 24, 1927, Box 2J303, WCHP. The next two quotations are from the same source. 204. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 693. Potter to Will Hogg, Aug. 11, 1928, Box 2J304, WCHP. 205. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Jan. 6, 1928, 1–15, Box 2J363, WCHP. Potter began writing his resumes at this time. The next six quotations are from the same source. 206. This newspaper clipping is located in Box 2J303, WCHP. 207. Ibid. 208. The newspaper article was titled “Honeymoon

Cottage,” DBCAH. Born in Cuero, Texas, Edward Muegge (“Buck”) Schiwetz (1898–1984) graduated in 1921 from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University) with a degree in architecture. He moved to Dallas and apprenticed with the artist John Doctoroff and the commercial artist Guy F. Cahoon. He also worked for the Dallas architectural firm Thomson and Swaine. In 1928, Schiwetz moved to Houston. After he won the Honeymoon Cottage competition, the River Oaks Corporation employed him from 1928 to 1929 to produce sketches mainly as illustrations for their advertisements in the Houston Gargoyle. Vance D. Phenix also worked for Thomson and Swaine before moving to Houston, where he was employed by John F. Staub. 209. “Second Prize Honeymoon Cottage Competition,” DBCAH. 210. “The Honeymoon Cottage Competition,” 444–449. 211. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Mar. 10, 1929, 4, Box 2J363, WCHP. 212. Written on River Oaks Corporation letterhead, this letter is housed in the SHSMO-KC. Potter asked Hare for his definition of a two-story house. 213. Hugh Potter and O. J. Cadwallader, “Additional Reservations, Restrictions and Covenants in River Oaks Addition Supplementing Resolution of March 15, 1926; July 1, 1926; and May 2, 1927,” May 1, 1928, ROPO. 214. Harry D. Payne moved to Houston in 1925 after working in the St. Louis office of William B. Ittner, an architect who specialized in designing schools in the Midwest (Houston Architectural Survey, III, 112, 205, 211). The current address of the school is 2008 Kirby Drive. 215. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Mar. 10, 1929, 4. 216. Ibid. 217. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Aug. 11, 1928, 1–7, Box 2J363, WCHP. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 218. Anchorage Foundation of Texas, Braeswood: An Architectural History, 7. 219. Fox, “Braeswood: An Architectural Tour,” 12–13. The following information is from the same source. 220. Anchorage Foundation of Texas, 23. 221. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Mar. 10, 1929. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 222. Will Hogg to Potter, June 26, 1929, Box 2J363, WCHP.

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N ot es to pag es 223–238 223. Potter and Cadwallader, “Additional Reservations, Restrictions and Covenants in River Oaks Addition Supplementing Resolutions of March 15, 1926; July 1, 1926; May 2, 1927; and May 1, 1928,” Aug. 1, 1929, ROPO. 224. “One Year’s Growth of Houston Would Fill River Oaks,” Houston Gargoyle, Feb. 12, 1929, rear cover, DBCAH. 225. O.  J. Cadwallader to Will Hogg, Jan. 20, 1929, Box 2J363, WCHP. 226. Will Hogg to Edward Teas, May 11, 1929, Box 2J363, WCHP. 227. Houston Post-Dispatch, Jan. 22, 1929; Riddle, “Homes to Last for All Time,” 25. 228. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Mar. 10, 1929. 229. “River Oaks Corporation announces that Mr. and Mrs. Ben H. Johnston will occupy their new Chevy Chase English Home,” n.d., 1–2, Subdivisions—River Oaks, HMRC. 230. U.S. Census, 1930, Harris County, Texas, Texas State Archives, Austin, Texas. 231. 1928, Morrison and Fourmy’s Houston City Directory, 700. 232. Ibid, 1740. 233. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 535–536. 234. “Oak Alley Plantation,” www.oakalleyplantation .com/about/history/. 235. Hoskins, “Old Traditions in a New Home,” 17–18. 236. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Aug. 1930, 3, Box 3F362, WCHP. There is no specific date on this document. 237. Fox, “Modern Homecraft: The Houses of Katharine B. and Harry L. Mott,” 31–35. 238. Ibid., 32. 239. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Mar. 10, 1929, 1. 240. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 632. 241. Fox, “Modern Homecraft,” 35. 242. McComb, Houston: A History, 75. 243. Frank Joseph Forster (1886–1948) was born in New York City and received a degree in architecture in 1908 from Cooper Union. Specializing in country houses, he began his own practice in 1911. Early in his career, he was inspired by the English picturesque style, but by 1924, after a tour in the French countryside studying farmhouses

and rural buildings, he devoted his practice to the French Provincial mode for his country houses. He was awarded a Silver Medal of the Architectural League of New York in 1927 and 1929, with an Honorable Mention in 1928. In 1933, he won the Better Homes in America Medal. For a complete biography, see Hewitt, The Architect & the American Country House, 1890–1940, 274. 244. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 209. 245. The house is extensively illustrated in Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 153–163. 246. Ibid., 156. 247. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Feb. 1930, 1–6, Box 2J304, WCHP. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same source. 248. Potter to Will Hogg, River Oaks Resume, Aug. 1930, 1–4, Box 3F362, WCHP. 249. Kaplan and Cook, 24–25; “Homes Are Still Being Sold, in River Oaks, Houston’s Non-Profit Subdivision,” 82. 250. “River Oaks Pre-development Sale,” Art Gravure Section, Houston Chronicle, Oct. 2, 1938. 251. Houston Architectural Survey, III, 502. 252. Riddle, “Homes to Last for All Time,” 27–28. 253. This was on Block 26, which was originally intended for house sites. 254. Longstreth, “River Oaks Shopping Center,” 8–13; Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 203. 255. “River Oaks Shopping Center,” 116–118. 256. Longstreth, “River Oaks Shopping Center,” 11. 257. “River Oaks Gardens,” 114–115; River Oaks Corporation, advertisement, 127. Both are located in Subdivisions—River Oaks, HMRC. 258. Fox, Houston Architectural Guide, 205. 259. “Homes Are Still Being Sold,” 82. 260. Ibid. 261. For a history of Tanglewood, see Miller, Tanglewood: The Story of William Giddings Farrington; for the Memorial area, see Brichford, “Where the ’50s were Fabulous: A Driving Tour of Memorial Bend,” 10–11, and “Memorial Bend,” http://memorialbendarchitecture.com /bendads.htm. 262. The ten counties are Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Waller, Chambers, Austin, and San Jacinto. See “U.S. Census Bureau Delivers Texas’ 2010 Census Population Totals,” http://2010 .census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb11-cn37.html.

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N ot es to pag es 239–249

Chapter 6 1. Significantly, Highland Park and River Oaks were nationally known by residential real estate developers through various professional organizations of which Hugh E. Prather and Hugh Potter were active members, particularly the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). 2. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Fort Worth: Near North Side and West Side and Westover Hills, 95, and Fehrenbach, “Alamo Heights in Perspective,” 6–9. 3. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, 128. 4. Originally built in 1859, the Anderson-McLane House was named after the original owner of the ranch, Charles Anderson, who had owned the ranch from 1850 to 1861, and McLane, who owned the property for thirty years. See Fehrenbach, 6–7. 5. The other oil discoveries were the Old Burkburnett (1912), Burkburnett Townsite (1918), and Northwest Extension (1919). By 1929, these wells showed signs of being overproduced. See Julia Cauble Smith, “Wichita County Regular Field,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/ articles/dowmw. 6. Roark, Fort Worth’s Legendary Landmarks, 109. The Waggoners named their daughter Electra after the township. 7. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Phase III: Fort Worth’s Southside, 3–4. 8. Ibid., 82. 9. 1911, Morrison and Fourmy’s General Directory of the City of Fort Worth, 114. 10. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Fort Worth, Near North Side and West Side and Westover Hills, 96–97. 11. Fort Worth Plat Books, 310:92, June 20, 1911, and 388:91, n.d. 12. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth was erected after Carter’s death in 1955, with funds from the A.  G. Carter Foundation, established in 1945. The museum was built around Carter’s collection of painting and sculpture, mainly the work of America artists Frederick Remington and Charles M. Russell. See “Amon G. Carter Foundation,” www.agcf.org/history-of-the-foundation .html.

13. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Fort Worth: Near North Side and West Side and Westover Hills, 127. 14. A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, David Adler (1882–1949) received a degree in architecture from Princeton University in 1904. He also attended the Polytechnikum in Munich for three semesters and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris for five years. During his studies in Paris, he traveled extensively through Europe and collected postcards, his favorite images being those of Norman chateaux. After returning to the United States, he worked in the offices of architects Howard Van Doren Shaw, Henry C. Dangler, and Robert Work until the 1910s, when he set up his own architectural practice. He became known as one of the foremost Midwest eclectic architects working primarily in the North Shore of Chicago, limiting his practice to the design of residences and country clubs. Probably his most famous residential design, or at least his largest, was a 1924 Georgian country house in Ispwich, Massachusetts, for Florence and Richard T. Crane, the plumbing fixture millionaire. The Cranes named their country house “Wrenaissance Crane.” Salny, The Country Houses of David Adler, 13–21, 62–73, and Hewitt, The Architect & The American Country House, 267. 15. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Fort Worth: Near North Side and West Side and Westover Hills, 155. 16. Ibid., 177, 153, 145. For more discussion on these residences, see Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 136–153. 17. Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub, 136. 18. Ibid., 139. 19. Staub quoted in Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, 143. 20. Page, Anderson, and Turnbull, Tarrant County Historic Resources Survey: Fort Worth: Near North Side and West Side and Westover Hills, 168. 21. Ibid., 189–203. 22. “Westover Manor,” in Westover Hills, Fort Worth, Texas, advertising booklet, n.d., n.p., Fort Worth Public Library. 23. Brian Hart, “Kemp, Joseph Alexander,” www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fke14. 1909, Wor­ley’s ­­ Directory of Wichita Falls, 4. Flora Anderson

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N ot es to pag es 249–258 Kemp and her husband organized a building gift fund of $25,000 to found the Kemp Library. Built in 1917 on an entire city block at 1300 Lamar Street, it remains today as one of the most important architectural accomplishments in the city. The library’s Classical Revival style resembles the south elevation of the White House. See Ellen Beasley, “Historic Preservation Survey and Plan for Wichita Falls, Texas,” prepared for the Wichita County Heritage Society, May, 1982, 15, and Texas Historical Commission Building Marker, no. 2917, Texas Historical Commission files, Austin, Texas. 24. 1927, Worley’s Directory of Wichita Fall, 133; Susan Campbell, “Morningside Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1983; and Beasley, 37–38. The plat maps do not have a vol. n. or a p.n. 25. In addition to residential projects, Voelker & Dixon were commissioned to design most of Wichita Falls governmental and education buildings. They were best known for their collaborative work with the St. Louis architect W. B. Ittner for the Hardin Junior College Administration Building (now Midwestern State University). For an illustration of the administration building, see Beasley, 21. 26. 1927, Worley’s Directory of Wichita Falls, 228. 27. 1934, Worley’s Directory of Wichita Fall, 245. 28. He and his wife Rose Ella Reeder Walker Hamilton were also involved with a number of philanthropic endeavors, including the donation of sixty acres to Hardin Junior College, and were supporters of the Wichita Falls Symphony. See Texas Historical Building Marker, no. 83003826, Texas Historical Commission, Austin, Texas. 29. Hamilton-Martin Investment Company, advertising brochure, Country Club Estates, 1926, 3. 30. Wichita Falls Plat Maps, 262:268. Hare & Hare’s plat map is dated Apr. 1, 1926, and there is another unsigned plat map at the County Clerk’s office. 31. Hamilton-Martin Investment Company, 5. 32. Deed Restrictions for the Country Club District, Wichita Falls, June 14, 1926, no vol. n., pp. 39–47. All the restrictions in this paragraph came from this source. 33. 1927, Worley’s Directory of Wichita Falls, 190. 34. Ibid., 218. 35. Ibid., 376. 36. Amarillo Daily News, Jan. 24, 1928. 37. Potter Co. Deed and Plat Map, 98:321–324; Hardy-Heck-Moore, “Wolflin Historic District,” National

Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1992. 38. “Many New Homes to be Built around Model Home,” Amarillo Daily News, Mar. 15, 1925. 39. Potter County, Texas, Deed, 134: 21–24. 40. “Wolflin Developer Dies; Memorial Services Set,” Amarillo Globe-Times, July 23, 1991, reported that, besides being the real estate developer for Wolflin Estates, Charles Wolflin had helped to open the FHA Loan Department at the Amarillo National Bank in 1947 and had served on the Amarillo Park Board, the City Planning and Zoning Board, the Community Chest Board, the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce, the First Federal Savings and Loan Board, and, from 1929 to 1951, he was president of the Amarillo Real Estate Board. 41. The letter from Charles Wolflin to Hare & Hare is among a large collection of correspondence between them from this date until the completion of the comprehensive plan on Aug. 22, 1927. This correspondence details the relationship between them during the planning of Wolflin Estates. All of this correspondence is from the Hare & Hare Company Records, KC-0206, SHSMRC-KC. 42. “Oldham Circle is Name to be Used for Wolflin Estate Park to be Established,” Amarillo Daily News, Oct. 17, 1927. 43. Potter County, Texas, and Randall County, Texas, no vol. n., pp. 110–114C. 44. This slogan appeared on the letterhead of Charles Wolflin’s stationery in a letter to Hare & Hare dated Apr. 6, 1927. It was also used as the title for advertising brochures. 45. “How Wolflin Estates, Amarillo’s Select Residential Park, is to Appear: Wolflin Estates $160,000 Improvements Program is Going Ahead Very Rapidly,” Amarillo Sunday News and Globe, Sept. 18, 1927. 46. Ibid. In 1929, Charles lived with his mother at this address, and in 1930, he married Grace Fain, and they all lived together until 1934, when his mother moved to another address in Amarillo. 1932 and 1934, Hudspeth’s Amarillo City Directory, 352, 370. Wolflin Estates, “Wolflin Estates, Amarillo’s Crowning Achievement in Residential Development,” 6, Local History, Mary E. Bivins Memorial Library, Amarillo, Texas. 47. Matthews, “The Bold Vision of Charles Wolflin,” 30. 48. Wyly, Amarillo’s Historic Wolflin District, 29. 49. Christopher Long, “Corsicana, Texas,” www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hec05.

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N ot es to pag es 258–264 50. “Mills Place Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1995. 51. For the work of David R. Williams in Corsicana, see McCarthy, David R. Williams, Pioneer Architect, 70– 89; and Wade, “David Reichard Williams: Avant-Garde Architecture and Community Planner, 1890–1962,” 142–151. 52. T.  R. Fehrenbach, “San Antonio, Texas,” www .tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hds02. 53. For these neighborhoods, see Gribou, Hanley, and Robey, San Antonio Architecture: Traditions and Visions, 93–100, 190–198, 209–212. 54. Thorman started his career as a carpenter and became a contractor in Toledo before moving to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon, finally settling in San Antonio. He was a member of the Kiwanis Club, Turnverein Club, Elks Club, Alamo Country Club, and he participated in a number of social organizations. He also served as regional vice president of the Home Builders Institute (H.B.I.) of America, first chairman of the San Antonio H.B.I. chapter, and director of the National Association of Real Estate Boards. For a complete biography, see “H.  C. Thorman,” New Encyclopedia of Texas, 1:421, and “H.  C. Thorman, Builder, Dies,” San Antonio Express, May 18, 1954. 55. “Olmos Park Terrace,” www.sanantonio.gov /historic/Districts/Olmos_Park_Terrace.aspx. 56. “Unites Two Sides of City, Speeding Up Growth in Several New Residential Areas, Thorman Has Tract, $150,000 Being Spent by Developer in Park Hill Estates,” San Antonio Express, Dec. 5, 1926. Thorman purchased the land from the Herff & Dittmar Land Company that was recorded in the Bexar County Plat and Deed Records on June 3, 1927, 954: 395–398. 57. Miller and Sanders, “Olmos Park and the Creation of a Suburban Bastion, 1927–39,” 119. 58. Chipman, “Alamo Heights Public Schools,” 16–17. Although Hare & Hare designed a small segment of the 640-acre Terrell Hills in 1929 in an area north of Garraty Road, along the winding Wiltshire Avenue east, south of Piersol Road (now Rittiman Road), and west of North New Braunfels Road, because of the Depression, virtually no houses were built in this section until after World War II. Hare & Hare provided almost the exact restrictions for Terrell Hills that were written for the Country Club Estates in Wichita Falls and Wolflin Estates in Amarillo. George J.

McLernon and C. Y. Hirshfield, “Stipulations, Restrictions and Conditions in Terrell Hills, Beautiful Homesites,” San Antonio: Terrell Hills County, Mar. 9, 1929, n.p. filed in the Bexar County Plat Records, 980:141. The restrictions were found in the San Antonio Conservation Society Collection. Terrell Hills became a city in 1930 but was not incorporated until 1957. The Terrell Hills sections developed in the early 1920s were laid out in a grid pattern with few early houses built in them. For houses in Terrell Hills, see Gribou, Hanley, and Robey, 217–220. 59. The club was closed during World War II, and when it reopened in 1946 at the same location, it was given a new name. “Oak Hills Country Club,” www.oakhillscc .com/about_Oakhills. 60. The San Antonio Country Club opened on July 7, 1907, at North New Braunfels Road, designed in an English half-timber style by Atlee B. Ayres. Before construction was completed, memberships were already almost filled, and all outstanding invitations by the board of governors were cancelled. This was the same year Thorman arrived in San Antonio. “New Home of San Antonio Country Club,” San Antonio Daily Express: Sunday Morning, July 7, 1907. 61. Bexar County Plat and Deed Records, 980: 116–117. 62. 1927–1928, Worley’s San Antonio City Directory, 1078. Bartlett Cocke (1901–1992), a product of both the University of Texas and MIT, formed his own practice in 1931 and is well known in San Antonio for his design of the downtown department store Joske’s in 1938 and his collaboration with the architect O’Neil Ford in designs for buildings at Trinity University. See Gribou, Hanley, and Robey, 295. 63. 1934–1935, Worley’s San Antonio City Directory, various pp. 64. See Ferguson, “The Country Houses of Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres,” 18–20, and “A House of Distinction in San Antonio,” 89–91. 1929–1930, Worley’s San Antonio City Directory, 850. 65. 1929–1930, Worley’s San Antonio City Directory, 974. 66. Ibid., 861. 67. The MIT School of Architecture was founded in 1866. For a list of other American universities that granted degrees in architecture in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, see Burchard and Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History, 126.

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N ot es to pag es 265–271 68. For a history of the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University, see Langford, The First Fifty Years of Architectural Education at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas: A Brief History of the Division of Architecture from September 1, 1905 to August 31, 1956. The author would like to thank Professor Richard Cleary for his account of the history of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas. Cleary, ed., Traces and Trajectories: The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture at 100. For Rice University, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_University_School_of Architecture. For Texas Tech University, see “TTU College of Architecture,” http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/Texas_ Tech_College_of_Architecture. (Select Lubbock and the School History.) More recently, schools of architecture have been established at the University of Houston in 1945, the University of Texas at Arlington in 1976, and Prairie View A&M University in 1992. 69. Their work extended across North and Central America from Massachusetts to California, Washington to Florida, and Victoria, British Columbia, to Cuernavaca, Mexico. 70. More than eighty schools offered courses in land-

scape architecture, however, few granted degrees. For all of this, see Simo, 100 Years of Landscape Architecture: Some Patterns of a Century, 45–89. 71. Texas A&M University’s program began in 1969, followed by Texas Tech University in 1972, the University of Texas at Arlington in 1995, and the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, creating a body of trained landscape architects in the state and eliminating the prior dependence on those who were educated outside of Texas. 72. Nichols, “Real Estate Subdivisions: The Best Manner of Handling Them,” 7, JCNCR. 73. Interview, James P. Gaines, research economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, Oct. 18, 2010. 74. Ibid. The numbers are not all for individual subdivisions, as a single subdivision may have more than one section, which could have been recorded separately. 75. Ibid. Probably the most restricted communities in Texas are master-planned, a good example being The Woodlands, a community twenty-eight miles north of Houston begun in 1975. See “Deed Restrictions—The Woodlands Township,” www.thewoodlandstownship-tx .gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=891.

Epilogue 1. “Pemberton Heights and the Enfield addition in Austin.” See the National Register of Historic Places application for the Old West Austin Historic District of 2003 on the Texas Historic Sites Atlas: http://atlas.thc.state .tx.us/shell-county.htm. 2. See Warren, Bayou Bend Gardens: A Southern Oasis. 3. Will Hogg quoted in Weber, “Will Hogg and the Business of Reform,” 126. 4. Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston, 25. 5. Ibid., 25–27. 6. One of the subdivisions in the Monte Vista District in San Antonio platted between the 1880s and 1920s indicates that the district of 1920 was the first to incorporate a clause in its restrictions barring “any persons of other than the Caucasian race or . . . any Mexican” from residing there. See “Monte Vista Historic Residential District,” http://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/shell-kword.htm.

7. In this context, prohibition and segregation stand out as rational modern techniques for achieving desired planning goals, rather than as mere reactionary impulses. 8. This was often in the case of twentieth-century U.S. garden suburban communities, which excluded not only Jewish families but also families of southern or eastern European, or Asian, descent. Generally, deed restrictions did not address this segment of the population. See “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Gentlemen%27s_agreement. 9. Cigliano and Landau, eds., in The Grand American Avenue, 1850–1920 examine the late nineteenth-century residential streets of various U.S. cities and their domestic architecture, identifying the processes that led to the disintegration of most of them.

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Houston, Texas. Lexington, KY: S. M. Baron Company, 1996. Beasley, Ellen. The Alleys and Back Buildings of Galveston: An Architectural and Social History. Houston: Rice University Press, 1996. Benedict, Pierce F. History of Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills, CA: A. H. Cawston and H. M. Meier, 1924. Bernhard, Virginia. Ima Hogg: The Governor’s Daughter. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1996 (1984). Betsky, Celia. “Inside the Past: The Interior and the Colonial Revival American Art and Literature, 1860– 1914.” In The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod, 241–247. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985. Binford, Henry C. The First Suburbs: Residential Communities in the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Birnbaum, Charles A., and Robin Karson, eds. Pioneers of American Landscape Design. New York: McGrawHill, 2000. Black, William N. “Empire of Consensus: City Planning, Zoning, and Annexation in Dallas, 1900–1960.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1982. Blackburn, Sadie Gwin. “The Evolution of the House Landscape.” In Houston’s Forgotten Heritage: Landscape, Houses, Interiors, 1824–1914, 13–59. Houston: Rice University Press, 1991. Blackford, Mansel G. The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890–1920. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. Blue Book of Dallas: A Social and Club Directory. Dallas: South Publishing Company, 1909. Boedeker, Madeline Hutsell. “Biography of Clifford Dorris Hutsell.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Bohnn, Anne S. “Broadacres Historic District.” Bachelor’s thesis, University of Houston, 1979. Brichford, Michael. “Where the ’50s Were Fabulous: A Driving Tour of Memorial Bend.” Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston (Spring 2003): 10–11.

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Roark, Carol. Fort Worth’s Legendary Landmarks. Photographs by Byrd Williams. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1995. Robinson, William. The People’s Architecture: Texas Courthouses, Jails, and Municipal Buildings. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1983. Rogers, John William. The Lusty Texans of Dallas. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1960. Rose, Mark H. “There is Less Smoke in the District: J. C. Nichols, Urban Change, and Technological Systems.” Journal of the West 25, no. 1 (January 1986): 44–54. Roth, Leland M. American Architecture: A History. Cambridge: Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2001. Salny, Stephen M. The Country Houses of David Adler. Introduction by Franz Schulze. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Sanborn Map Company. Insurance Maps of Dallas, Texas. New York: Sanborn Map Company. Various years. Savage, Charles, “Vandeventer Place, St. Louis, Missouri.” In The Grand American Avenue, 1850–1920, ed. Jan Cigliano and Sarah Bradford Landau, 231–257. Washington, D.C.: Pomegranate Press in association with The Octagon, 1994. Saxon, Gerald B., ed. Reminiscences: A Glimpse of Old East Dallas. Dallas: Dallas Public Library, 1983. Scardino, Barrie M. “The Development of Domestic Architecture.” In Houston’s Forgotten Heritage: Landscape, Houses, Interiors, 1824–1914, 60–104. Houston: Rice University Press, 1991. Schalck, Harry G. “Mini-Revisionism in City Planning History: The Planners of Roland Park.” JSAH XXIX, no. 4 (December 1970): 347–349. ———. “Planning Roland Park, 1891–1918.” JSAH XXXV, no. 4 (December 1976): 288. Schoelwer, Susan Prendergast. “Curious Relics and Quaint Scenes: The Colonial Revival at Chicago’s Great Fair.” In The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod, 184–216. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985. Schwartz, Joel. “Evolution of the Suburbs.” In Suburbia: The American Dream and Dilemma, ed. Philip C. Dolce, 1–36. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976. Scott, Hestor. “The Forum Weaves into the Future, The Shuttle Moves Across the Threads of the City.” Civics for Houston 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 5. Scott, Mel. American City Planning Since 1890: History

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Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas. Dallas: John F. Worley Directory Company. Various dates. Worley’s Directory of Wichita Falls. Dallas: John F. Worley Directory Company. Various dates. Worley’s San Antonio City Directory. Dallas: John F. Worley Directory Company. Various dates. Worley, William S. J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovations in Planned Residential Communities. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. ———. “Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Missouri.” In The Grand American Avenue, 1850–1920, ed. Jan Cigliano and Sarah Bradford Landau, 281–305. Washington, D.C.: Pomegranate Press in association with the Octagon, 1994. Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Work. Introduction by Edgar Kaufmann Jr. New York: Horizon Press, 1968. Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1983. Wright, Roscoe E. “Tender Tempest—A Tardy Tribute to Will C. Hogg.” The Houston Gargoyle 3 (September 21, 1930): 6, 22–23. Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Texas. Houston: A History and Guide. Houston: The Texas Anson Jones Press, 1942. Wyly, Christine. Amarillo’s Historic Wolflin District. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2010. Zoning Ordinance for the City of University Park. University Park, TX: City of University Park, December 17, 1929: 426–435.

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I N D E X

Page numbers in italics indicate material in figures. Absinthe House (French Quarter, New Orleans), 186– 187, 186 Adams, H. H., 44 Adkins, John Scudder, 141, 142, 298n116 Adler, David, 243–244, 244, 308n14 Affiliated Garden Clubs of Houston, 10 African Americans: communities of/for, 35, 74, 179, 269; and race restrictions, 62, 74, 202, 269–270, 311n6 Ainsworth, Roy, 218 Aladdin houses, 45 Alamo Country Club (now Oak Hills Country Club, San Antonio), 261 Alamo Heights (San Antonio), 13, 239–241 Albro, Lewis Colt, 282n104 Aldredge, George W., 43, 48 Aldredge (Rena Munger and George N.) House (Munger Place), 48–49, 49, 104 Allen Parkway (formerly Buffalo Drive), Houston, 12, 178 Allison & Allison, 151 Alta Vista Creamery Company, 243 Amarillo, Texas, 18, 255–258, 257, 258 American Architect (1928), 128, 128 American City Planning Institute (now the American Institute of Certified Planners), 112, 277n5, 281n93 American Civic Association, 6, 17, 265, 277n17 American Colonial style, 19, 22–24, 147, 174, 188 American Foursquare style, 44–45, 63, 72, 81–82, 121, 250, 271 American Home, 137 American League for Civic Improvements, Dallas Chapter, 5 Amon Carter Museum, 308n12 Anderson, Clayton, and Company, 173 Anderson, Flora, 243, 244 Anderson, William B., 223 Anderson (Mrs. Elizabeth) House (River Crest), 243, 246 Arcade Building (Beverly Hills), 149 Architectural Record (1910), 23, 102; (1932), 237

Argyle Hotel (formerly the Anderson-McLane House) (Alamo Heights), 241, 308n4 Arlington Heights (Fort Worth), 13, 239–241, 240, 267 Armor Building (now the Hogg Building) (Houston), 168 Armstrong, Alice, 71, 75, 89, 92; on donation for the John S. Armstrong School, 91 Armstrong, John S., 73, 283n20, 288–289n26; in California, 67; death of, 71, 75; donations of land by, 75; and Highland Park project, 66, 69; and naming of Armstrong Parkway (formerly Armstrong Avenue), 111; and Oak Cliff project, 33, 63, 66; purchase of Philadelphia Place, 36 Armstrong Packing Company, 66, 114, 280nn72,74 Arnold (Pauline and Henry K.) House (River Oaks), 184– 185, 185 Arrantz, Edward, 236–237 Arts and Crafts movement, 81 Atkinson House (San Antonio), 262 Ausgefürhte Bauten und Etwurfe, or Executed Buildings and Projects (Wright), 47 Austin, Texas, 268 Austin (Dorothy and Frank) House (Highland Park), 96– 97, 97, 99 Autry, James, 276n1, 301n14 Ayres, Atlee B. and Robert M., 128–129, 128, 156, 262, 263, 296–297n85, 310n60 Azalea Trail (Bayou Bend), 198 Bacon (F. C.) House (Highland Park West), 120, 121 Bailey, Mr. and Mrs. Weldon, 105 Baker, Brookes, 242, 248 Baker, James A., 55 Baker, James A., Jr., 55 Baldwin, W. W., 40 Ball, Thomas H., 59 Ball Boulevard (now River Oaks Boulevard), 61, 62, 171 Baltimore, Maryland (Roland Park), 14, 15–17, 16, 76, 146, 146 Barcelona World Exposition’s “Spanish Village,” 152 Barglebaugh, C. E., 46, 47, 168, 285n97

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Baroque style, 101, 125–127, 146, 157, 163 Bartholomew, Harland, 151, 248 Baum, Harry S., 249 Bavarian style, 145 Bayou Bend (Homewoods), ii (fig.), 128, 196–199, 197, 244, 272, 279n43. See also Hogg, Ima; Hogg, Mike; Hogg, Will Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, 199 Beau Monde, 41 Beaumont, Texas, 18 Beaux-Arts styles, 19, 21, 47, 175, 222, 225, 293n175 Belle Meade House (John Harding; outside Nashville, TN), 198 Belo, Alfred H., 3 Bendelow, Thomas, 76 Benedict (E. C.) House (Greenwich, CT), 102, 104 Bennett, Edward H., 277–278n20 Bennett & Crittenden, 255 Berney, Morris T., 242 Berney (Flora Anderson and Morris T.) House (River Crest), 243–245 Better Homes and Gardens, 137 Beverly Hills, CA, 14–15, 67–69, 68, 76, 83, 149, 166 Bewley (Martha and E. E.) House (River Crest), 244–246, 245, 248 Bewley Mills and Elevator Company, 243 Blankenship, Bartholomew, 34 “Blendon Hall.” See Osgood (Anna Parkman) House (“Blendon Hall”) Blossom House (Chicago), 285n99 Blue Book of Dallas, The, 75, 77 Boedeker, Madeline Hutsell, 143–145, 298n120 Bomar, David T., 242 Bomar, William, 243 Bomar-Carter House (River Crest), 243, 243 Booker T. Washington Addition, 74 Borden, E. H., 302n55 Bossom, Alfred C., 125, 143, 143, 295–296n70 Bouton, Edward H., 15–17, 74, 85–87, 91–92, 145, 179, 294n22 Bowen, R. B. and Sarah, 215, 222 Bowman, William McKnight, 264 Boyle, J. Allen, 109, 109 Brackenridge, George Washington, 296–297n85 Bradfield, John S., School (Highland Park), 116 Brady, William, 28 Braeswood, 221–222, 234, 257, 268

Breese (James L.) “The Orchard” House (Southampton, Long Island), 79, 79, 282n104 Brewington, Goldie and Charles, 135 Briscoe, Birdsall P., 19, 58–59, 59, 167–168, 180, 196, 197, 199, 199, 218, 222, 279n43, 302n55; and Forum for Civics, 9–10; and Lester House, 58, 59; and River Oaks, 180, 181 Briscoe and Dixon, 173, 174, 175, 175, 181–183, 181, 182, 302n55 Broad, John W., 242 Broadacres (Houston), 55–59, 56–58, 63, 279n43 Bronco Buster, 301n23 Bronze Boy (Muench), 171 Brooks, Thelma, 249, 248 Brosius, Ethel B., 202, 210, 215 Brown, Arthur Page, 125 Brown, Russell, 305n183 Brown (Edgar R.) House (Munger Place), 47–48, 48, 104 Brownsville, Texas, 18 Bryan & Sharp, 251 Bryce (William J.) House (Arlington Heights), 240, 241 Buffalo Drive (now Allen Parkway), 12, 178, 179, 204, 210, 214, 222 bungalows, 39, 82–83, 243–245, 250, 271 Bunn, Dee N., 135 Burnham, Daniel H., 277n20, 288n93 Burns & James, 227 Burrows, Reynolds and R. C., 61–62 Butler, J. Elmer, 258 Byne, Arthur, 194 Byne, Arthur and Mildred Stapley, 126–127, 194, 296nn75,78 Cader, Macon, 256 Cadwallader, O. J., 212 Cahoon, Guy F., 154, 155, 300n170, 306n208 California Mission style, 44, 67, 125 Callier (Nadine and Frank) House, 96, 98, 99 Campbell (Lula and William T. Jr.) “Redbird House,” 181–183, 181, 182 Camp Logan, 8 Carle, Joseph, house and store of, 138 Carrère & Hastings, 102, 104, 105 Carter, Agnes, 230–232, 230, 231 Carter, Amon G., 243 Carter, Oscar Martin, 36–37 Carter, W. T., Jr., 230

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I n d ex Cary, Edward H., 119 “Casa del Herrero.” See Steedman (Carrie Howard and George Fox) House Cato, Lamar Q., 237 Cedars district (Dallas), 27 Chase, Pearl, 149 Cheek, James Bruce, 294n36, 300n172; on trip to California with Hugh E. Prather, 149; on trip to Spain with Prather, 152–153. See also Fooshee & Cheek Cheek-Neal Coffee Company, 232 Cheney, Charles H., 118–119, 150 Chicago, 5 Child, Emery E., 52 Chillman, Dorothy, 188 Chippendale styles, 175, 183, 188 Christie (Theodosia Campbell and George R.) House (River Oaks), 226–227, 226 Chrysler, Walter, 297n104 Churrigueresque style, 157, 160–161, 163 City Beautiful Movement, 3, 6, 53, 66, 87, 278n25 City Plan for Dallas, A (Kessler, 1912), 6 City Planning Commission of Houston (1929), 11–12, 201, 269, 279n43 Civics for Houston magazine, 9–10, 168, 188, 194, 215 Clark, A. L., 44 Classical Revival style, 32, 99, 309n23 Classical style, 6, 47 Clayton, William L., 4, 170 Clayton (Sue Vaughan and William L.) House (also referred to as Clayton Summer House) (River Oaks), 173–176, 174, 175, 269 Cline (Ella and Walter P.) House (Country Club Estates, Wichita Falls), 254, 254 Cochran (Annie and William S.) House (Broadacres), 55, 56 Cocke, Bartlett, 262, 310n62 Cohen, Robert I., 287n130 Cohen (Edwin P.) House (Dallas), 31 Colby Court (Houston), 167, 215 Collum (Landon H.) House (Country Club Estates, Wichita Falls), 252, 254 Colonial Revival styles: in the 1890s and early 1900s, 30– 31, 31, 271; in interior decorating, 79, 80; and River Oaks Elementary School, 220; in suburban homes, 17, 44, 94, 116, 176, 180, 183, 184, 210, 215, 217, 262, 271. See also Spanish Colonial Revival style Comey, Arthur Coleman, 10

Community Arts Association, Santa Barbara, CA, 148 Community Place (Houston), 167 Condit, Alfred J., 40 Coney, Mason C., 180, 204, 205 Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, 14; First Annual, 14, 17, 74, 75, 91–94, 110, 112, 113–114, 147; Second Annual, 93, 117; Third Annual, 74, 93–94, 115, 145 Conklin, Roland R., 15 Cook, J. J., 251 Cook, Wilbur David, Jr., 14, 67–71, 84, 288n15 Coombe’s Park (Houston Heights), 37 Coral Gables (Miami), 14 Corsicana, Texas, 18, 258–259, 260 Coughlin, Charles A., 296–297n85 Country Club Bulletin (for the Country Club District), 86 Country Club District (Kansas City, MO), 7, 8, 14, 15, 76, 84–87, 146, 166 Country Club Estates (Houston): Hogg Brothers’ acquisition of, 62, 169–172; model houses in, 180–189, 185, 186, 188, 190; planning and infrastructure for, 59–62, 60, 61; prior to Hogg Brothers’ acquisition of, 59–63, 63; promotion of, 172, 173, 184–186, 185; realty company, 170–171. See also River Oaks (Houston) Country Club Estates (Wichita Falls), 250–255, 253, 254 Country Club Plaza (Kansas City, MO), 146, 147, 148, 154, 279n40 Country Houses (Forster), 230–232, 230, 231 Country Life magazine, 58 Courtlandt Place (Houston), 50–52, 50, 51, 63, 241, 268, 279n43 Cowan (Edwin P.) House (“The Shingles”) (Dallas), 30, 31 Cox, Theodore, 256 Craftsman, The (Stickley), 81 Craftsman style, 19, 32, 44–45, 63, 81, 94, 96, 242–243, 271, 290n77 Cram & Ferguson, 128, 169, 192 Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, 169, 192, 279n43, 287n130 Cram, Ralph Adams, 192 Crane (Florence and Richard T.) House, 308n14 Creole style, 185–186 Cret, Paul Philippe, 249, 287n130 Croly, Herbert, 23, 81, 96, 99 Crook, Bill, 91 “Crusade Against Ugliness, A” (McFarland), 6 Cuenod (Nadine and Dr. E. M.) House (River Oaks), 224, 225

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Cullinan, Joseph Stephen, 53–54, 167, 196, 276n1, 301n14 Curtis, Victor Marr, 249 Dahl, George, 163 Dallas, Texas: 1800s construction in, 3, 27–28, 30–31, 31; annexation attempts by, 8; and City Plan concept, 5–8; Dallas State Fair grounds, 5; East Dallas, 31–33, 142–145; map of (1872), 28; suburban houses in, in the 1890s–1930s, 18–22, 20, 21 “Dallas: City of Art and Commerce” (Western Architect), 94–97, 95, 97, 98, 99 Dallas Country Club (Highland Park), 14, 75–77, 76, 89, 102, 106, 117 Dallas Land and Loan Company, 33–34 Dana House (now Dana-Thomas House) (Springfield, IL), 47 Dangler, Henry C., 243, 308n14 Davis, A. J., 52 Davis, Henry R., 151 Davis (Ileyn and Hal) House (River Oaks), 224, 225 Davis Park (Highland Park), 88 Dealey, George Bannerman (G. B.), 277n5; and American City Planning Institute, 112; and Armstrong, 75; and challenge of unregulated growth, 3; as “father of Highland Park,” 14; and Flippen-Prather, 65–66; on Highland Park Shopping Village, 154; and Highland Park Town Hall, 101; and Olivia and G. B. Dealey House, 31, 31; as promoter of city planning, 4, 5–8 deed restrictions/restrictive covenants: at Braeswood, 221; at Broadacres, 55; at Country Club District, 86, 92; at Country Club Estates, 251–252; in East Dallas, 32–33; and garden suburban community planning, 13, 269–272; in Highland Park, 66, 73, 84, 89, 92; and Mexicans and Mexican Americans, 270; at Munger Place, 41, 43, 50; in Oak Cliff, 34; in Park Cities, 139, 164; popularity of, in Texas, 265; positive and negative results of, 12–13; and private place concept, 39; and Progressive Movement, 25; and racial exclusion, 62, 74, 202, 269–270, 311nn6, 8; at River Crest, 242–243; at River Oaks, 62, 177, 179, 202, 237, 238; at Roland Park, 15–16; at Ryan Place, 242; at Shadyside, 53–54; at Volk Estates, 139; at Westmoreland, 40 Delk, Edward Buehler, 146 Demarest, John M., 74, 91, 115 De Witt, Roscoe, 91 Dickson, Raymond, 276n1 Dilbeck, Charles Stevens, 138–139, 138, 297–298n109

Dines & Kraft Building Company (Dallas), 143, 297–298n109 Dixon, Samuel Haynie, Jr., 173, 181, 279n43, 302n55. See also Briscoe and Dixon Doctoroff, John, 306n208 Dogwoods (Homewoods). See Proctor-Hogg “Dogwoods” House Domestic Architecture of H. T. Lindeberg (Lindeberg), 23, 24 Donoghue (Thomas L.) House (Courtlandt Place), 51, 51, 63 Dorrance (James E.) House (Courtlandt Place), 51, 51 Drexel, Morgan, & Company, 36 Dulaney (Stella and Richard Otto) House (Ryan Place), 242, 243 duplexes, 135, 272, 294n36 Dutch Colonial style, 19, 96, 184, 255 Early American style, 87 “Early Republic” style, 189, 303n123 East Dallas, Texas, 31–33, 142–145 Edwards (Caro and Harry L.) House (Highland Park), 95–96, 95, 97 Elizabethan style, 106, 145 Elliot, Mrs. Card G., 10 El Paso, Texas, 18 Empire Revival style, 234 Enfield addition (Austin), 268 English Arts and Crafts movement, 81 English styles, 145, 210, 218, 224, 248, 256–257; Classical style, 96; cottage style, 54, 87, 106; Gothic style, 76; manorial styles, 59, 228, 245; Regency style, 196–198; Renaissance style, 49, 255; Tudor style, 180; vernacular style, 22. See also Jacobean style Exall, Henry, 35 Exall Lake (Highland Park), 36, 36 Fairfax Park (Highland Park), 118 Fair Park, 5 “Fairview.” See Bryce (William J.) House Farish, William Stamps, 62, 167 Farrell (Thelma Brooks and John E.) House (“Westover Manor”) (Westover Hills), 248–249, 248 Farrington, William G., 221, 235 Federal style, 51, 101, 171, 184, 189, 244 Ferguson (William P.) House (Country Club Estates, Wichita Falls), 252, 254 Field, Thomas, 32 Finger, Joseph, 12, 280n61

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I n d ex Fire Alarm Building (Houston), 12 Flanders, James E., 28, 282n3 Flemish style, 145, 246–247 Flippen, Edgar L., 280–281n74; and Dallas Country Club, 77; on Dealey, 14; and John S. Armstrong, 66; on Kessler, 84; and zoning ordinance, 119 Flippen (Minnie May and Edgar L.) houses (Highland Park): first, 77–80, 77, 78, 108, 174, 290n67; second, 106, 108 Flippen Park, 118 Flippen-Prather Realty Company, 66, 73, 81–83, 83, 84, 89, 102; architectural styles of, 106–110, 107, 109; and Dealey, 65–66; deed restrictions instituted by, 92, 164; “Grounds Beautiful Awards,” 117; Highland Park Views promotional booklet, 79, 102–109, 103–105, 107–109); John S. Armstrong and, 66, 71, 73, 75; and Kessler’s and Nichols’s design influence, 83–84, 112, 147; on model houses, 131–135, 133, 134; sales offices of, 116. See also Highland Park (Dallas); Highland Park West (Dallas) Floral Heights Addition (Wichita Falls), 249 Foat, R. W., 44 Fooshee, Marion, 48, 294n36 Fooshee & Cheek: and Highland Park Shopping Village, 145, 147, 149, 153–163, 153, 155–162; and Highland Park West, 128, 135, 135, 247, 248; training under H. B. Thomson of, 265 Ford, O’Neil, 138, 297n104, 310n62 Forest Hill (Houston), 53, 267 Forest Hills Gardens (Queens, New York), 14, 91, 112– 113, 113 Forster, Frank J., 230–232, 231, 307n243 Fort Worth, Texas, 18, 240–249; Lake Como, 240 Forum of Civics (Houston), 9–11 Forward Dallas! (Ulrickson), 8 Frank, D. A., 119 Franzheim, Kenneth, 237 Frasier, W. H., 119 Frazer, W. A., 91 French, J. C., 257 French chateaux style, 87 French Colonial style, 19, 218, 222, 225 French-Italian Renaissance style, 48–49 French Provincial Revival style, 183, 227, 307n243 Galveston, Texas, 18 Gard, Wayne, 137 Garden Book for Houston, A (Sewall and Elliot), 10

garden suburban community planning, 3, 13–15, 267–273 Gartner (Elizabeth Reynolds and Herman) House (River Crest), 246 Gaston, William H., 32 George, J. E., 91, 93, 291n150 Georgian style, 87, 183–184, 211, 212, 247, 308n14. See also neo-Georgian style Gerner (Ida Mae and Charles J.) houses (River Oaks): first, 184; second, “Mediterranean Villa” (River Oaks Corporation model house), 212, 213, 214 Gilbert, R. R., 119 Gill, Jones, Tyler, and Potter, 276n1 Glover, Louis A. and Sons, 237, 302n55 Golf and Country Club (Wichita Falls), 250 Goodhue, Bertram G., 22, 101, 125, 157, 169 Gordon, James Reily, 286n114 Gothic style, 76, 127, 255 Greek Revival style, 30, 187, 198 Green, Lewis Sterling, 279n43 Greene, Herbert M., 102, 102, 292–293n175 Greene and Greene, 243 Green Pond (Houston), 269 Greer (A. C.) House (River Oaks), 184 Greer (George C.) House (Munger Place), 48, 48, 104 Griffin, Walter Burley, 47 “Gwinn.” See Mather (William G.) House Gwinn (Peyton F.) House (Morningside Park Addition), 250, 250 Hamilton, William Benjamin, 251 Harding, John, 198 Hare, S. Herbert, 278–279n40; death of, 265; and Houston zoning plans, 11–12, 269–270; and River Oaks Corporation, 302n63; and Wolflin Estates, 257–258, 257, 267 Hare, Sidney J., 53, 256–257, 268, 278n40, 302n63 Hare & Hare, 9, 12, 14, 84–85, 94, 147, 171, 178, 201, 221, 235, 248, 251, 262–265, 268 Harlan (Mabel and Harry) House (Highland Park West), 129–131, 130, 131 Harsch, Paul A., 93 Harwood, J. T., 291 Haskell, Llewellyn, 52 Hawes, Allen, 151 Hazelhurst, Joan, 287n137, 301n38 Hearst, William Randolph, 296n78 Hedrick and Cochrane, 34 Heiner, Eugene T., 30, 282n13

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Hermann Park (Houston), 53, 178, 204 Higginbotham (Mabel and Rufus W.) House (Munger Place), 46, 47, 94 Highland Park (Dallas County): advertisements for, 2, 20, 69–73, 71, 79–83 79, 82, 83, 89–90, 100, 102–106, 103, 105; first installment, 69–74, 70, 71; second installment, 87–89; third installment, 89–90; fourth installment, 90; fifth installment (known as the Highland Park Acreage Addition), 94; aerial photograph of (1923), 100; annexation attempts directed at, 8, 91; areas within, 90, 91; attached and detached garages in, 93; construction of lakes in, 268; current conditions in, 163–164; Dallas Country Club, 75–77, 76; Dallas Saddle and Bridle Club, 117; as discouraging wood houses, 92; duplexes in, 272; and Highland Park Celebrations Association, 115; and Highland Park newsletter, 115, 116–117, 131–132; and Highland Park Nursery, 99–100; housing for African Americans in, 74; improvements in, during the early 1920s, 99–100; incorporation of, 8, 91; initial plans for, 14–15, 17–18, 66, 71–72; land purchase for, 13; on map of first four installments, 88; Oak Lawn Dallas Golf and Country Club, 75–77; permit book records of, 119–120; pricing for lots in, 42–43, 72, 74, 89–90; sales office, 116; Town Hall, 101, 101; vacant property sales in, 92; zoning in, 118–119; and zoning ordinance, 119, 164 Highland Park Methodist Church, 91, 291n125 Highland Park Shopping Village, 116, 145, 147, 153– 163; aerial photograph of (c. 1948), 162; on the plan, 153–154, 153; on Group A stores, 157–158, 158, 160; on Group B stores, 155–157, 157; on the rendering, 154, 155; and (Texaco) Company Station (formerly the Highland Park Company Station), 300n173; on Unit C, including Village Theatre, 159, 160–161; on Unit D, 162; on Unit E, 160, 161–162; on Unit F, location of the Flippen-Prather Stores Company, 154, 161–162, 161; on Unit G, South Filling Station, 155, 156, 162–163 Highland Park Views promotional booklet, 79, 102–110, 103–105, 107–109 Highland Park West (Dallas County), 20, 268; duplexes in, 135; first installment, 102, 106, 110–111, 112, 114–115; second to ninth installments, 116–118, 147; events in, 115; lot fees for maintenance in, 115; permit book records of, 119–121; prices for lots in, 118; West Park, 118; zoning in, 118–119 Hill, C. D., 19, 43, 76, 76, 77–79, 77, 78, 285n83 Hobby, William P., 221

Hoera (Jennie and Carl L.) House, 244, 246–247 Hoffman, Bernard, 149 Hogg, Ima, 269, 276n1, 304n155; and Bayou Bend, 128, 196–199, 197; and Chilton Road, 202; and Country Club Estates model houses, 185–187; death of, 199; and donation, with Mike, of Will Hogg’s art collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 301n23; family background of, 167; and influence on designs for River Oaks Garden Club, 198–199; interest in the arts of, 167–169, 168, 301n21; interest in historic preservation of, 304n155; and River Oaks model houses, 181, 183, 185–189, 185, 186, 188; and sale of River Oaks Corporation to Hugh Prather, 235; and Shadyside, 53 Hogg, James S., 1, 167, 276n1 Hogg, Marie and Thomas E., 128–129, 128 Hogg, Mike, 276n1; and Bayou Bend, 128, 196–199, 197; buys option on two hundred acres in Country Club Estates, 1; and Country Club Estates Realty Company, 170; and Dogwoods, 199, 208; family background of, 167; and Hogg Brothers, 168; and Hogg (Alice Nicholson and Mike) House, 225, 225; and Homewoods, 196; land purchases by, 1, 8, 62, 165, 169–170; and maintenance funds issue, 180; marriage of, 199; and River Oaks Corporation, 176; and sale of River Oaks Corporation to Hugh Prather, 235; and Shadyside, 53–55; as state representative, 216; and Tall Timbers, 169, 176, 235 Hogg, Will, 276n1; and 1929 slowdown, 223; advertising ideas of, 173, 203; and Bayou Bend, 128, 196–199, 197; on City Planning Commission, 11–12; and Country Club Estates Realty, 169–173; death of, 12, 235; family background of, 167; and Forum of Civics, 9–11; and Homewoods, 194–196; and Houston city limits, 212; and Humble Field oil leases, 301n14; influence of Highland Park on, 14, 18, 166; and initial River Oaks model homes, 180–189, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 212–214, 212, 213; interest in the arts of, 167–169, 168, 301n21; and Kimball’s Our Cities ideas, 5; and Kirby Drive, 221; land donation to St. Anne’s by, 223; and land purchase for River Oaks, 1, 62, 165; on Nichols’s system of naming, 176; on philanthropy, 9, 276n1; and plans for West-End, 199, 201; and pricing of River Oaks sites, 176–177; as promoting city planning, 4, 8–10; purchase of land for civic center by, 11; purchase of Memorial Park land by, 8–9; and race restriction areas, 269–270; raises donations to build Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 167, 169; as researching suburban

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I n d ex communities, 166; and River Oaks homeowners association, 179; and River Oaks landscaping, 180, 203, 223–224, 236, 269; and River Oaks streets and traffic, 179; and Shadyside lot Q, 53, 167; and Varner Realty Company, 167. See also Civics for Houston magazine Hogg Brothers, on purchase of Country Club Estates, 170, 235, 279n43 Hogg (Marie and Thomas E.) House, 128–129, 128, 167 Holcombe, Oscar F., 10–11, 212, 214, 220 Holmby Clock Tower (Los Angeles), 151, 152 Homewoods (Baltimore), 198 Homewoods (River Oaks), 194–199, 195, 197, 200, 214, 223, 232–234, 232, 233, 235 Honeymoon Cottage, 216–218, 217, 306n208 Hoover, Herbert, 10–11 House, Thomas W., 28 House, Thomas W., Jr., 59 House and Garden (1922), 106, 215 House (Charles Shearn) House (Houston), 30, 30 Houses for Town and Country (Croly), 23 Houston: Tentative Plans for Its Development (Comey), 10 Houston, Texas: 1800s construction in, 28–30, 30; and Houston Airport Corporation, 232; City Hall, 12; lack of zoning in, 4, 10–13, 166; map of (1877), 29; reputation of, in the 1890s, 3–4; Ship Channel, 4; suburban houses in, during the 1890s–1930s, 18–22, 20, 21 Houston Gargoyle magazine, 21, 215, 221–222, 225, 227, 306n208 Houston Heights (Houston), 13, 36–39, 37, 38, 163, 240 Howard, George H., 221 Howze, Albert, 279n43 Hubbard, Theodora Kimball and Henry Vincent, 5 Hudson, Edward, 58 Hudson, W. Asa, 149 Hugman, Robert H. H., 262, 264 Humble Oil and Refining Company, 62, 241, 287n122 Hunt, Jarvis, 6 Hunt, Myron, 22, 67, 126 Huntington, Henry Edward, 67 Hutchinson, Henry, 212, 215 Hutsell (Florence and Clifford Dorris) House, 143–145, 144, 298n120 Ideson, Julia, 178 “In Defense of Suburbia” (Smith), 25 Indianapolis Title Company, 227 Italian Renaissance style: in Highland Park, 102, 106; in Highland Park West, 130; of Mansion on Turtle

Creek, 109; in Market Square shopping center, 145; in Mills Place (Corsicana), 258; in Munger Place, 47–48; in River Crest (Fort Worth), 242–243; in Ryan Place (Fort Worth), 242; in Sleepy Hollow Court, 171 Ittner, William B., 306n214, 309n25 Jacobean style, 49, 106, 122, 136, 224 Jamieson, James P., 53 Janss Investment Company, 151–152 Jarvis, Samuel M., 15 J. C. Nichols Company, 85, 87, 211 Jefferson, Thomas, 173 Jemison, Robert, Jr., 74 Jenney, Lee M., 73, 112, 139, 289n42 John C. Ryan Land Company, 241 Johnson, Reginald, 22, 126 Jones, Jesse H., 230 Junius Street stone gates (Munger Place), 43 Kansas City, Missouri, 6, 7 Kaufmann, Gordon, 151 Kemp, Flora Anderson, 308–309n23 Kemp, Joseph Alexander, 249 Kessler, George, 278nn25; A City Plan for Dallas (1912), 6, 8; and Armstrong Parkway, 111; and Conference of Developers, 14; and Country Club Plaza, 146; death of, 94, 279n40; and Flippen House, 80; and Highland Park fifth installment (known as the Highland Park Acreage Addition), 94, 291n151; and Highland Park second installment, 90; and Highland Park West, 111–114; on his hiring as the landscape architect for Highland Park, 111; influence of, on Highland Park design, 83–84; and Kansas City park system, 6, 7; Kessler Park, 34–35; and landscaping plans for Roland Park, 15; railway changes proposed by, 6–8; redesign of Fair Park by, 5–6; and Shadyside, 53; and Sidney J. Hare, 278n40; and Turtle Creek Parkway (Dallas), 6–8, 7, 35, 84, 88, 94, 111; and Ward Parkway (Kansas City), 7, 8, 85; and White Rock Lake Park, 44 Kessler Plan Association, 5, 8, 11, 119 Key to the City of Houston, The, 39, 40 Kimball, Fiske, 189 Kimball, Justin F., 5 King (Lorena Bain and John P.) House, 246, 247–248 King (Sheppard) House, 110 Kipp, Herbert A., 220, 286n117; and Broadacres, 52, 55; and completion of the layout for River Oaks, 235; and Country Club Estates Company, 59–62, 171; and

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Homewoods, 194–195, 195; and River Oaks, 235–236, 268; and Shadyside, 52, 53–54; and West-End, 201 Kirby, John H., 221–222 Koch & Fowler, 139, 268 Korn, Anton F., Jr., 19, 102, 105, 293n180 Kramer (Camilia and Arthur) House (Lakewood), 143, 143 Lake Forest, IL, 145–146 Lake Roland Elevated Railroad, 15 Lakeside Park (Highland Park), 87, 89 Lakewood (East Dallas), 142–145, 143, 144 Lakewood Country Club (East Dallas), 43, 76 Lamar-River Oaks Shopping Center, 236 Lamar (Mirabeau B.) Senior High School, 237 Lamb (Pauline and Seth S.) House, 227, 228 Landreth (Adele and Edward A.) House (River Crest), 247, 248 Lang, Otto H., 292n164 Lang & Witchell, 19, 101, 101, 292n164 LaRoche, Edwin Bruce, 293n175 “Latin Colonial.” See Picton (Martha Nance and David Means Jr.) House “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest” (Staub), 10 Latin Colonial style, 10, 186–189, 186, 188, 210, 271 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 104, 254 Lauck, Jessie F., 249 “Laurel Acres.” See Lutz (Frederick L.) House La Villita (San Antonio), 297n104 Lazy Lane, 195, 199, 232 League of Women Voters, Houston, 12 Lee, T. P., 230 Lemmon, Mark, 91 Lester (Bettie G. and Jemison E.) House, 58, 59 Lewis, C., 279n43 Lewis, William J. and Willie, 48 Lewis-Aldredge House. See Aldredge (Rena Munger and George N.) House (Munger Place) Lindeberg, Harrie T., 22–23, 281–282n104; and John Staub, 279n43; and Shadyside, 54–55, 54, 63, 109, 243 Llewellyn Park (near Orange, NJ), 52 Lloyd, Hermon, 237 Lloyd (Rose Youree and Alfred T.) House (Highland Park), 102, 103 Lombardi, C. M., 141 Los Angeles Country Club (near Beverly Hills), 76, 83

Louis XV Chateau Revival style, 232, 234 Love, W. G., 39 Lovett, Edgar Odell, 287n130 Lutyens, Edwin, 22, 55, 58, 246 Lutz (Frederick L.) House (“Laurel Acres”) (Oyster Bay, NY), 24, 25, 55 MacGregor, Henry F. and Peggy Stevens, 178 Mackintosh, Prudence, 164 “Magnolia Walk,” 223–224 Malaga Cove Plaza (Palos Verdes, California), 150–151, 150 Malone, Clarence J., 178 Mangold, Charles A., 34 Mannen House, 297n85 Manning, Marie and Thomas A., 135 manorial style, 59, 228, 244 Mansfield, Henry P., 37 Mansion on Turtle Creek. See King (Sheppard) House Marion, Frances, 127, 127 Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), 262, 297n85 Market Square (Lake Forest, IL), 145–146, 146 Marsalis, Thomas L., 33–34, 63, 283n20 Marshall, Agnes and Samuel Wilson, 73 Marshall, Belle and John S., 184, 204 Martin, Noros H., 250 Martin (Lila and Lowry) House (Mills Place), 259 Mary Elliott Park, 223–224 Mather (William G.) House (Rockville, CT), 104, 105 McAshan (Samuel Maurice) House (Houston), 29–30, 30 McDuffie, Duncan, 291n150 McFarland, J. Horace, 6, 17 McFarland, J. S., 44 McGinty, Milton B., 237 McIntire, Samuel, 184 McKie (Katherine and Francis B.) House (Mills Place), 259 McKim, Mead, and White, 22, 281n104 Mediterranean style, 51, 126, 152, 205, 212–213, 212, 213, 250, 252, 259, 271. See also Spanish-­ Mediterranean style “Mediterranean Villa.” See Gerner (Ida Mae and Charles J.) houses: second Memorial Park (Houston), 9, 44, 178, 180 Messer, Sanguinet, and Messer, 240–241, 240 Metropolitan Improvement Commission (Houston), 10 Mexican Architecture (Ayres), 128, 156

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I n d ex Mexican Colonial style, 128 Mexicans and Mexican Americans, 35, 270, 283n38, 311n6 Michael, Pierre L., 222 Michael (Adele and Pierre L.) House (River Oaks), 205– 207, 206, 222 Miller, Will A. and Nell, 255 Mills, Charles H., 258 Mills, Robert Q., 258 Mills Place (Corsicana), 258–259, 260 Mission and Mission Revival styles, 32, 43, 44, 67, 125 mixed-income development, 14 Mix (Tom) House, 143–144, 143 Monograph of the Work of Charles A. Platt (Platt), 23 Monrose, Clarence, 170 Monteith, Walter E., 170 Monte Vista District (San Antonio), 26, 259–262, 311n6 Moore, Harvin, 237 Moore, William Wright, 53–54 Moore (Lydia and Dr. H. Leslie) House (Highland Park West), 131–135, 133, 134 Morgan, Keith, 104 Morningside Park Additions (Wichita Falls), 249–250, 250 Mott, Harry, 230 Mott, Katherine, 222 Mott (Katherine B. and Harry) houses: River Oaks, 228, 229, 230–231; River Oaks speculative house, 227– 228, 227 Mount Vernon, style of, 77, 79, 92, 109, 168, 175 Muench, Julian, 171 Mulvey, Carl A., 222 Munger, Collett, 41, 43, 49 Munger, Fay and Le Roy, 92, 106, 291n139, 293n187 Munger, Robert Sylvester, 41–44, 284n69 Munger Place (Dallas), 41–50, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 63, 71–72, 104 Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), 167, 169, 192, 301n23 Music Hall (Houston), 12 Myers, J. Allen, Jr., 59 Nash, John, 39 National Association of Real Estate Boards committee, 220, 308n1, 310n54 Neal Chateau (Homewoods), 232–234, 232, 233 Neal (Marion and James Robert) House (Homewoods), 232–234, 232, 233 Neece, J. Ruben, 258

Neff, Wallace, 126–128, 143, 205, 296n81 Nelms (Agnes Carter and Haywood) House (River Oaks), 230–232, 230, 231 Nelson, William Rockhill, 278n25 neo-Georgian style, 58, 104–105 Neuhaus (Kate Rice and Hugo V.) House (Shadyside), 54, 54 Neutra, Richard, 237 Neville, Edwin L., 170 Newcomb, Rexford, 296n75, 306n191 Newton (Carrie and Carl) House (Olmos Park), 262, 263 Nichols, J.  C., 277n17; on alleys vs. reservation strips, 114–115; and attached garages, 93; on attracting “right people,” 16; on Booker T. Washington Addition, 74; on cash prizes for best-kept lawns, 117; on city planning, 4; and Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, 91, 92–93, 114, 145, 146; and Country Club District, 8, 14, 84–87, 146; and Country Club Plaza, 146–147, 148, 153–154, 237; and deed restrictions, 86, 92; on the development of large-scale communities, 267; and Edward Delk, 299n137; and Edward W. Tanner, 290n106; and Hare & Hare, 278–279n40; and Highland Park fifth installment, 94; on homeowners associations, 179; influence on Highland Park design of, 83–84, 147, 151–154; influence on River Oaks design of, 170–171, 176–177, 211, 237; and innovation in subdivision, 86, 171; member of National Association of Real Estate Boards committee, 220; naming of developments by, 176; and “package houses,” 181; on River Oaks, 176–177; on speech at American Civic Association meeting, 265; and use of phasing, 267; and use of triangular parks, 118; on value of universities, 75 Nicolais, Raphael A., 242 Ninde, Lee J., 91, 291n150 Noble, George, 230 Nolen, John, 5, 17, 146 Norhill (Houston), 167 Norman Revival style, 248 Norman style, 87, 138, 199, 224, 227, 230 Northrop, Joseph W., Jr., 9–10, 19, 181, 183–184, 185, 204, 212, 218, 279–280n43 Northside Investment Company, 262 Nunn, Stanley, 237 Nutting, Wallace, 301n21 Oak Cliff (Dallas), 6, 13, 31–35, 32, 63, 66, 239, 267 Oak Lawn (Dallas), 31, 32, 35, 75 Ochsner, Hare & Hare, 265

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Oliver, Charles W., 19, 20, 204–214, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 224–227, 225, 226, 305n181; layoff of, 235; styles employed by, 128, 205 Olmos Park (San Antonio), 259–264, 263, 264, 267–269 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 52 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 91–92, 112–114, 278n40, 281n93 Olmsted, John Charles, 281n93 Olmsted Brothers, 17, 69, 234, 278n40, 281n93 Olmsted–City Beautiful Movement, 6 Olmstead (Bertha and Harry A.) House (Munger Place) (Highland Park West), 44–45, 45, 82, 96, 121–125, 122–124 Omaha & South Texas Land Company, 36–37 “Orchard, The.” See Breese (James L.) “The Orchard” House Osgood (Anna Parkman) House (“Blendon Hall”) (Hadlyme, CT), 22, 24–25, 105 Otis, Harrison Gray, 67, 288n12 Our Cities To-day and To-morrow (Hubbard and Hubbard), 5 Our City—Dallas (Kimball), 5 Our Story of River Oaks (Hogg Brothers), 199 Our Story of River Oaks, Chapter II (Hogg Brothers), 204 Owsley (Lucy Ball and Alvin M.) House (Volk Estates), 141, 142 Oyster Bay, New York, 24, 25 Palmer, Edward L., 17 Palos Verdes Estates (Southern CA), 14, 118–119, 150– 151, 150, 179 Park Cities Independent School District, 136, 163 Parker (Ruth and J. E.) House (University Park), 138–139, 138 Park Hill Estates (San Antonio), 261 Park Hill (Fort Worth), 248 Parkinson, John and Donald B., 151 Pasadena, California, 69 Patton, W. S., 230 Payne, Harry D., 220, 222, 237, 306n214 Peak, Jefferson, 32 Peak’s Suburban Addition (East Dallas), 31–33, 32 Peck, Charles H., 39 Peden, Allen, 215 Pelich, Joseph R., 243 Pemberton Heights (Austin), 268 Pencil Points journal, 218

Pennsylvania Colonial style, 96 Pennsylvania farmhouse style, 184 Peterman, Fred F. and Charles E., 135 Pettengill, H. J., 89, 92 Phenix, Vance D., 217, 306n208 Philadelphia Place (Dallas), 13, 31, 32, 35–36 Picton (Martha Nance and David Means Jr.) House (“Latin Colonial”), 185–189, 186, 188, 230, 238 Pitzman, Julius, 40 Plateresque style, 156, 162–163 Platt, Charles A., 22–25, 23, 45, 96, 104–105, 105, 196, 281n101 Port Arthur, Texas, 18 Potter, Henry, 144, 152, 298–299n127 Potter, Hugh, 276n1; advice from Prather and Nichols to, 170–171, 177, 301n38; after Will Hogg’s death, 235–237; on Braeswood Corporation, 221; building of apartment complexes by, 236–237, 272; and Charles W. Oliver, 204–206; and Country Club Estates Realty Company, 1, 165, 169–170; death of, 237; and deed restrictions, covenants, 202, 207, 210, 223; on developing for mixed incomes, 14; on effects of Great Depression, 212; on elementary school, 220; on George Christie, 227; on goals for Houston, 166; and Homewoods, 196; on Katherine and Harry Mott, 227; on Katherine B. Mott, 222; and land purchases for the River Oaks Corporation, 178; as member of the National Association of Real Estate Boards committee, 220; on model homes, 180–189, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 190; on plans for River Oaks, 165–166, 170–171; and Potter (Lucille and Hugh) House, 190; on public regulation of private property, 201; on his purchase of the River Oaks Corporation, 235–236; requests for city services and support, 214–215, 220, 222, 234–235; as researching suburban communities, 166, 170; resume to Will Hogg from (1928), 214–216; resume to Will Hogg from (1929), 222–223; resume to Will Hogg from (1930), 234–235; on River Oaks as “garden,” 180; on River Oaks homeowners association, 179; and “River Oaks Residents Speak” campaign, 222; on roads to River Oaks, 178–179; on shopping center needs, 216; on success of River Oaks, 237; on transition to neighborhood planning, 26; and trees and landscaping, 207, 224. See also River Oaks (Houston) Potter (Lucille and Hugh) House (River Oaks), 189, 190 Praeger, Charles, 302n55 Prairie style, 32, 44–47, 63, 94, 243

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I n d ex Prather, Hugh E., 280n72; on attendance at the Conferences of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, 14, 17, 74–75, 91–93, 109, 113–114; California trip of, in 1907 with Armstrong, 67; California trip of, in 1928 with Cheek, 149; and Dealey, 14, 65–66; on Highland Park, 92; and Kessler and Olmsted, 113–114; Prather House, 80–83, 82, 105, 107, 109; and River Oaks, 170; Spain trip of, in 1929, 152; on Texas buyers, 17; on upper-income market communities, 266. See also Flippen-Prather Realty Company; Highland Park (Dallas County); Highland Park West (Dallas) Prather, Hugh E., Jr., 71, 147, 152–153 Prather-Bailey-Thomas House (“Shadowlawn”) (Highland Park), 105–106, 107 Prather (Johnetta and Hugh E.) houses (Highland Park): first, 80–83, 82; third, 105–106, 107; sixth, 106, 107; seventh, 109–110, 109, 125; other houses, 293n180. See also Prather-Bailey-Thomas House Prather Park (Highland Park), 88 Preston Hollow, 164 private place neighborhoods, 13, 39–40 Proctor, Frederick C., 195–196, 199, 222, 272 Proctor-Hogg “Dogwoods” House, 199, 200, 225, 272 Progressive Era, 1, 19, 23, 26, 271 Promise of American Life, The (Croly), 23 Proposed Charter for the Town of Highland Park, Texas (1913), 91 Provincial Houses in Spain (Stapley and Byne), 194 Quality Hill (Houston), 28 Queen Anne style, 17, 30, 32, 37, 44–45 “Rambling Texas Home, A” (American Home), 137 “Ranch-House Goes to Town, The” (Gard), 137 Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, El, 67 Rancho Santa Fe (Southern California), 14, 151 Randolph Air Force Base, 297n85 Rather, John Thomas, Jr., 279n43 Rebecca Meyer Park, 218–220, 219, 224 “Redbird House.” See Campbell (Lula and William T. Jr.) “Redbird House” Reid, Joseph Neel, 22 Reineman Land Company, 9 Remington, Frederic, 168, 301nn21,23, 308n12 Report of the City Planning Commission of Houston, 11– 12, 270 residential park movement, 41, 52, 53, 63, 165

restrictive covenants. See deed restrictions/restrictive covenants Reynolds, Junius W., 59 Rice Institute (later Rice University), 43, 169, 178, 192, 199, 228, 265, 279n43 Riddle, Don, 215, 224, 231 Riggs, Lutah Maria, 126, 296n77 Rittenbury, Emmett R., 256, 257–258, 258 River Crest (Fort Worth), 242–248, 244–247 River Crest Country Club, 242–243 River Oaks (Houston): advertisements for, 21, 172–173, 180–183, 179, 184–185, 185, 203, 210, 218, 222– 223; after Will Hogg’s death (1930), 235–237; architectural styles of Charles Oliver in, 19, 204–214, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 224–227, 225, 226; Clayton Summer House, 173–176; Homewoods, 194–199, 195, 197, 200, 214, 223, 232–234, 232, 233, 235; and Honeymoon Cottage Competition, 216–218, 217; improvements in, 178–180; initial concept of and land purchased for, 1, 9, 14, 165–166, 169–171; initial model homes in, 180–189, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 190, 212–214, 212, 213; plat of, 203; research on other projects as influencing, 18; and River Oaks Boulevard, 176, 178, 210, 212, 218, 220, 235–236; and River Oaks Community Center, 210–211, 211, 216, 218, 220, 222, 235; and River Oaks Corporation, 176–177; and River Oaks Corporation offices, 210–211, 210; and River Oaks Country Club (River Oaks), 1, 59, 60, 61, 62, 169, 172, 237, 269, 279n43; and River Oaks Elementary School, 220, 223–224; and River Oaks Garden apartments, 236–237; and River Oaks Garden Club, 198–199; and River Oaks Georgian gateway, 210–211, 211; and River Oaks Shopping Center, 236– 237, 236; Section One, 201–204; Section Two, 207– 210, 208, 209; Section Three, 210–214, 211–213; Section Four, 218–220, 219; Section Five, 223–224; sections opened after 1936, 235; and Sewall House, 192–194, 193; and West-End, 199–201. See also Ball Boulevard; Hogg, Ima; Hogg, Mike; Hogg, Will; Staub, John F. River Oaks: A Pictorial Presentation of Houston’s Residential Park (Riddle), 211, 224–231, 225, 226, 227 River Oaks Property Owners Association, Inc., 237 Riverside (Chicago), 52 Riverside Terrace (Houston), 178, 222, 227, 234 Robertson, Charles, 234 Robertson (Julie and John) House (Olmos Park), 264, 264

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Robinson, Peter Frederick, 39 Rococo style, 234 Rodeo Land and Water Company, 67–68 Roland Park (Baltimore), 14, 15–17, 16, 69, 76, 84–86, 91–92, 166; on Roland Park Shopping Center, 146, 146 Romanesque style, 24, 25, 55, 129, 241 Ross, Donald, 62 Rossmoyne (Houston), 167 Rowell, Elmer I., 91 Rowley, Charles B., 147 Russell, Charles M., 308n12 Russell Brown Company, 222, 305n181 Russell (Nathaniel) House (Charleston, SC), 205 Ryan, John C., 241 Ryan Place (Fort Worth), 241–242, 243, 268 Ryon, Lewis B., Jr., 11 Salisbury, Hiram A., 235 Sam Houston Coliseum, 12 San Antonio, Texas, 18, 239–241, 259–264, 263, 264, 268, 271, 297n85, 310nn58,60 Sanborn Map of Dallas, General Index (1921), 32, 45, 74, 106, 292n157 San Felipe Apartments (Houston), 236–237, 272, 305n184 Sanger, Alex and Philip, 3 Sanger Brothers, 79, 80 Sanguinet, Marshall R., 51, 51, 240–241, 240, 242–243, 243, 286n114 Schiwetz, E. M., 217, 306n208 Schleser (Joseph) House (Houston Heights), 37, 39 Schmidt, Mott B., 22 Scott, Hester, 9 Seares, Urmy, 127–128 Sears houses, 45 Second Empire style, 30 Sewall (Blanche Harding and Cleveland) House (River Oaks), 10, 192–194, 192, 193 Seward, Marion Holt, 232 Sewell, Mrs. Blanche Harding, 10 “Shadowlawn.” See Prather-Bailey-Thomas House Shadyside (Houston), 52, 53–55, 54, 63, 167, 195–196, 279n43 Shaker Heights (Cleveland), 14 Shaker Square Shopping Center (Cleveland), 147 Shaw, Howard Van Doren, 145, 146, 308n14 Sheffield (F. H.) House (River Oaks), 184 “Shingles, The.” See Cowan (Edwin P.) House

Shingle style, 17, 45 Shipman, Ellen Biddle, 194, 304n136 Shoppell, R. W., 17 Skelton, D. W., 164 Skillern’s Drugs, 157, 158, 161 Slaughter, C. C., 32 Sleepy Hollow Court, 2, 61, 171, 203, 230 Small, Phillip L., 147 “Small House in Spanish Style, The” (Southern Architect and Building News), 130, 130, 131, 131 Smith, Ethel Longworth, 25 Smith, Frank M., 101 Smith, George Washington, 22, 126, 149–150, 205, 296nn76,81 Smith, J. Fred, 137 Snider, C. W., 136–137 Sorey, T. L., 255 Sorey & Valberg, 252, 254, 255 South End Land Company, 40 Southern Architect and Building News: 1927, 205; 1928, 127, 130, 141, 141 Southern California, 19, 66–69, 82, 125–126, 149–152 “Southern Garden Renaissance,” 59, 198 Southern Methodist University (Dallas), 5, 75, 90, 136 Southwestern Architect, 105, 107 Spanish Baroque style, 101, 101, 125, 146, 157, 163 Spanish Colonial Revival style: of Highland Park Shopping Village, 153–163, 155–162; of River Oaks Country Club, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69; in Southern California, 19, 125–126, 127, 149, 149, 151–152, 152, 207; of Stringer House, 250; of Stroube House, 259, 260; of suburban houses, 109, 109, 116, 118, 125, 127–135, 127, 130–133, 143–145, 143, 192–194, 193, 208, 209, 210, 212, 218, 220, 235–236, 251, 259, 260, 262–264, 263, 298n120; of Thomson House, 127, 127; in University Park, 136 Spanish-Mediterranean style, 19, 54–55, 54, 150–152, 205, 206, 207 Spanish Renaissance style, 129, 145, 146, 149–151, 149– 150, 156, 256 Spanish style, 125, 126, 130–132, 130–132, 133–135, 135, 149, 271–272 Spaulding, Walter I., 150 Staats, Carl G., 51, 51, 242–243, 243, 286n114 St. Anne’s Catholic Church, 223 Stately Homes in America (Croly), 23 State Street Arcade (Santa Barbara, CA), 149, 150

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I n d ex Staub, John F., 9, 10, 19, 55, 56–57, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 128, 172, 180–192, 186, 188, 190, 191, 204, 210– 212, 211, 232–234, 232–233, 236–237, 244–248, 245–246, 303n128; bio of, 279n43; on his article in Civics for Houston, “Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest,” 10, 187 Staub, Rather, and Howze, 279n40 Staunton, Sumner Maurice, 150 Steedman (Carrie Howard and George Fox) House (“Casa del Herrero”) (Montecito, CA), 126–127, 127 Stewart, Andrew, 227 Stewart, R. H., 34 Stickley, Gustav, 19, 81 St. Louis, Missouri, 39–40 St. Louis private place urban model, 13, 39–40, 63 Stowers Furniture Company, 184, 188, 188 Stringer (Blanche and Leslie R.) House (Morningside Park Addition), 250 Stroube, Henry M., 259 Stroube (Bessie and William C.) House (Mills Place), 259, 260, 262 Stude, Henry W., 8, 54, 167 suburban community planning in Texas, 13–15, 18–22, 20, 21 “Suburbs of Houston” (Love), 39 Surratt, John E., 8 Swaine, Frank T., 285n101, 295n68 Tall Timbers (River Oaks), 169, 176, 235 Tanglewood (Houston), 238 Tanner, Edward W., 87, 146–147, 290–291n106 Taylor, Frank J., 150 Taylor, J. C., 86–87 Teague, James C., 121 Teas (Edward C.) Nursery, 10, 207, 223 Temple, S. A., 34 Tennant (Lucile and Joseph A.) House (Broadacres), 57, 58–59 Terrell Hills (San Antonio), 261, 310n58 Texas A&M University (formerly the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas), 264 Texas State Fair grounds, 14; “Spanish Village” (1924), 41, 125 Texas Tech University (formerly Texas Technological College), 265 Texas vernacular style, 137–138 Thatcher, James S., 35–36

Thomas, Michael M., 105 Thomson, H.  B., 19, 285–286n101; and Fooshee & Cheek, 264, 294n36; and Highland Park, 96–99, 97, 98, 102; and Munger Place, 47–49, 48, 49, 63. See also Thomson & Swaine Thomson (Francis Marion and Fred) House (Beverly Hills, CA), 127–128, 127 Thomson (Geils Adoue and H. B.) House (Highland Park West), 130, 132 Thomson & Swaine, 121–125, 122, 123, 124, 129–130, 131, 139–142, 140, 306n28 Thorman, Herman Charles, 259–262 Thorpe (Leonna and Orville) House, 104, 105 Tillinghast, A. W., 261 Tilton, L. Deming, 151 Tower Building (Country Club Plaza), 146, 148 Trezevant, J. T., 35 Trinity Portland Cement Company, 8 Tucker (Rose and J. H.) House (River Oaks), 224–225, 225 Tudor and Tudor Revival styles, 17, 19, 32, 44, 95, 95, 96, 106, 121, 123, 124, 125, 135, 139–142, 140, 143, 143, 247, 248, 248, 255, 258, 258, 292n155 Turner (William A.) House (Olmos Park), 262, 264 Turtle Creek Parkway (Dallas), 6–8, 7, 35, 84, 88, 94, 111 Ulrickson, Charles E., 8, 11 Union Station (Dallas), 6 University of Pennsylvania, 265 University of Texas at Austin, 264 University Park (Park Cities), 8, 136–139, 137, 138, 164 Vandeventer Place, 39 Van Sweringen, O. P. and M. J., 147 Varner Realty Company, 8 Vaux, Calvert, 52 Veale, H. A., 112 Viaduct, Houston Street (Oak Cliff), 34 Victorian style, 30–31, 37, 80, 109 Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 11 Voelker & Dixon, 250, 250, 254–255, 254 Volk Brothers, 139, 160, 161, 163 Volk Estates (Park Cities), 139–142, 164 Volk (Reanna and Leonard W.) House (Volk Estates), 139–142, 140 Voysey, Charles F. A., 23 Wacker, Charles H., 5

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h i g hl a n d pa r k a n d r i v er oa k s Waggoner, Electra, 105 Waggoner, Tom, 105 Waggoner, William T., 241, 258 Wagner, Nellie B. & R. J., 255 Walsh, Thomas, 286n114 Ward Parkway (Kansas City), 7, 8 Warren & Wetmore, 51, 51, 63, 286n115 Warwick Window magazine, 215 Washington, D.C., Park and Shop Shopping Center, 237 Watkin, William Ward, 55, 169, 180–181, 192, 287n130 Weaver, Lawrence, 58 Webber, William F., 150 Wells, J. T., 119 Werenskiold, Nils, 69, 73, 112, 288n22 Western Architect journal, 94–99, 95, 97, 98 Westmoreland (Houston), 40, 50, 63 Westover Hills (Fort Worth), 248–249, 248, 267–268 “Westover Manor.” See Farrell (Thelma Brooks and John E.) House Westwood Village (Los Angeles, California), 151–152, 152 Wetmore, Charles (Warren & Wetmore), 51, 51, 63, 286n115 Wharton, Albert, 105 What About the House Next Door?, 183–189, 185, 186, 188, 190 Wheat, Calvin, 194 Wheeler, J. V., 250 White, Stanford, 79, 281n104 White Rock Lake Park (Dallas), 44 Whitley, Walter, 102 Whitson, Lloyd R., 168 Wichita Falls, Texas, 18, 250–255, 250, 253, 254

Widee Realty Company, 176 Williams, David R., 137–138, 251, 259, 297n104 Williams, Paul R., 151 Williams (Elbert and Lola) House (University Park), 137, 137, 138 Williford, Frank K., 121 Winn, James Buchman, Jr., 160 Winslow House (River Forest, IL), 47 Winston, Oliver C., 236–237 Witchell, Frank O., 292n164 Wolflin, Charles A., 255–258 Wolflin, C. O., 256 Wolflin (Charles Oldham and Alpha E.) House (Wolflin Estates), 256, 257–258, 258 Wolflin Place/Wolflin Estates (Amarillo), 255–258, 257, 258, 265, 267–268 Womack, Kenneth E., 59, 62, 170 Womack (Alma and Kenneth E.) House (Shadyside), 54, 55, 59, 62, 109, 170 Woodlands, The (Houston), 311n75 Work, Robert, 308n14 Work of Cram and Ferguson, Architects, including work by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, The, 194 Works of Charles A. Platt, The, 105 Worley’s Directory of the City of Dallas, 45 WPA Dallas Guide and History, 137–138 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 19, 47 Wyatt & Nolting, 145, 146 Youree, Rose, 102, 103 zoning in Houston, 4, 10–13

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