A Texas Vernacular in the Old Sixth Ward

By the way, it is time to abandon the miserable, old-fashioned box houses… Houston Daily Telegraph, July 13, 1870 1 The act of revealing the traces (and the scars) of a site and the unmasking of cosmetic applications…suggest a heroic architecture of resistance. Alberto Pérez-Gómez 2 Hidden In Plain Sight: A Texas Vernacular In The Old Sixth Ward By Marie Rodriguez and Ernesto Alfaro It is no secret that the City of Houston, resilient and impetuous, was born, in 1836, out of pure speculation. It exists, to this day, much in the same manner: in a continuous state of a change. It has been this way, in no small part, due to the character of its inhabitants: men and women driving their built environment, continually replacing their urban fabric in the name of progress. Historical buildings have traditionally been a problem for the Bayou City, for its inhabitants have had no patience for them, and are inclined to tear down buildings deemed antiquated, if seen as an impediment to the next great technological or real-estate development. However, as the city pushes headlong into the 21 st century, historical preservation is fast becoming inevitable and Houstonians are beginning to understand and appreciate the value that historical buildings bring to their city, as artifacts of their own material culture. In the process of historic preservation of residential buildings, the primary concerns have to do with the people who inhabited the house in question, and their relevance to the historical narrative of the city or region. Typically, issues related to the ideologies, social drives, and technology employed in the fabrication of a house assume a secondary role – sometimes avoided or disregarded altogether. This is unfortunate because narrative components such as these are intrinsic to understanding a house in an expanded context, and serve as the means by which the past can truly be understood. A close reading of a house – an architectural hermeneutics – can not only answer the primary questions ( how the house was built, why was it built and whom did it shelter), but also can shed light on the architectural intentions and “values articulated through the stories that ground acts and deeds in a particular culture.” 3 In the case of Houston, the early development of the city needs to be understood not only through the primary narratives of major civic architecture and prominent residences, but also through the stories and events that unfolded when the residential architecture of the working class first emerged. Residents in the late 19 th century proudly referred to their town as “Houston City,” an optimistic, yet perceptive projection of its impending growth. These early Houstonians believed they had stumbled across a place that would develop into a great metropolis- a city that would one day conquer the transportation of commodities and its own landscape - be it natural or artificial. History would prove them right as the city began to expand beyond its limits, repeatedly, due to its first development catalyst: Buffalo Bayou. Another significant catalyst would soon be found in the railroad and its direct effect on the lands that it would divide, dissect and develop. One of the early examples of this is in Houston’s historic Old Sixth Ward (OSW), 1 Cited in Dorothy Knox Howe Houghton, et. al., Houston’s Forgotten Heritage, Landscapes, Houses, Interiors, 1824-1914 . (Houston, TX: Rice University Press. 1991): ?. 2 “Introduction” in Architecture, Ethics, and Technology . (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994): 10. 3 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Ethical Image in Architecture” in Built Upon Love . (Boston: MIT Press, 2006): 205. 1 where open tracts of land of the W.R. Baker Addition were first altered into railway tracks, stockyards and neighborhoods. Throughout the city, shipping and railroad industries allowed for the physical development of industrial and commercial buildings, with planked roads to connect them all.4 Buffalo Bayou was harnessed and continually transformed to function more efficiently, acting as a business tool in the development of the city. It is logical, then, that the area known as NSBB 5 would be developed early on, as was the case with the W.R. Baker Addition, which came in to being in 1856 [Fig. 1]. Workers who were employed by railroad, industrial and nearby docks first populated this neighborhood. 6 Many of the original houses stand to this day. One of these is 2109 Kane. Michael Morrow and Taryn Kinney, of Kinney Morrow Architecture (KMA), purchased the house on Lot 9, Block 407 (2109) Kane street in the spring of 2004 [Fig. 2]. It was not a jewel of architectural design, but it was a compelling, compartmentalized, if internally rambling house, that with some amount of repair and dedication could turn into a cozy and comfortable residence. The pair quickly found themselves trying to decipher the piecemeal history of their new house and its due role within its historic neighborhood. Their process of discovery grew to collecting a variety of information, recorded legends, oral interviews, city maps and directories mentioning their property, with the intent of understanding their home’s interplay with its previous inhabitants and the OSW. Over the years the house had experienced a bevy of adaptive experiments with walls added and subtracted in a continual remaking of rooms, residual spaces and reinvention of their uses. This environment of constant cosmetic changes persisted due to the variety of tastes and needs of the previous inhabitants: the rooms were painted in entirely different and uncomplimentary colors; the cramped kitchen was festooned with stenciled trim and flower decorated wall tiles; there was carpet in the bathroom; and the entirety of the house exhibited pseudo-historical decorative touches that had no true connection to the house, neighborhood, or city [Fig. 3]. KMA quickly moved to edit at least a modicum of these excess elements. As they scraped the interior walls they found obscured walls of unknown use - doubled and overlapped upon each other, shiplap covered in numerous metal tacks, swaths of thin fabric netting, newspaper, wallpaper, and plasterboard, smothered windows, nested hallways, and thermal brick rubble from a vestigial chimney. They proceeded with caution once they reached the raw structure by creating several circular cuts along the walls of the corridor in order to understand what had occurred. This process resulted in a veritable diagnostic chart that revealed the existence of several competing structural members. Their curiosity was piqued. Why were there window frames within the walls? Why were there a variety of different wall treatments? Why were there shadow lines on the floor, indicative of walls that had been removed? All these questions strengthened the architects’ resolve to fully understand the conditions under which this house was built. These investigations brought to light the architectural inconsistencies within the house and its exchange of material culture and assembly. The result brought to the fore a rare breed of vernacular construction, in the heart of Houston, fully unearthed and restored as a 4 Houston City Directory , 1870-1871. (Houston: W. Murray, 1870): 92-93. 5 From the initials letters of North Side of Buffalo Bayou. This acronym was also employed in the area south side of the buffalo bayou, SSBB. 6 “W.R. Baker was a railroad investor who plotted the early additions to Houston in the early 1850’s near his railroad yards on the north side of Buffalo bayou and in the Fourth ward area.” Dorothy Knox Howe Houghton, et. al., Houston’s Forgotten Heritage, Landscapes, Houses, Interiors, 1824-1914 . (Houston, TX: Rice University Press. 1991): 114; “Several additions north of Buffalo Bayou were developed in the 1860s primarily with rent houses for railroad and dock workers.” Ibid., n.p. map: “Houston City Limits and Subdivisions.” 2 specimen of Texas architectural history. In the midst was a house ripe with a creolized vernacular style and a colorful registry of preceding inhabitants. The house at 2109 Kane is commonly referred to as the Coulter-Sweeney house 7 and, at first glance, it exhibits a simple structure. Mrs. Mary E. Coulter, a widow, is one of the first known inhabitants of the house, which at the time, was located on the adjacent lot 8. 8 Her son, William J. Coulter, a druggist, had already arrived in Houston a year or more previously, and is listed as residing at the southwest corner of Henderson and Lubbock. 9 His mother’s house was a simple hall and parlor house, 10 probably built with East Texas lumber from the nearby Piney Woods. The Coulter’s W.R. Baker Addition neighborhood positioned them in close proximity to the railway yards and expanded their material choices and availability, in turn making certain building resources more economical. A sampling of the materials distributed and traded by the late 1800’s were old-growth lumber, window sashes, hand-carved doors, iron foundry-made hardware, tinning mill-made roof panels, pine tongue-and-groove floor boards with imported glass panes, and metal nails, filling Houston railway stations weekly. 11 This early version of the house, far different from what existed when KMA found it, is a direct expression of utility and clarity. It is fitting to assume, that the builder of this house had average construction skills and a limited budget. The result was a creolized three bay, box construction house 12 with a front porch that ran along its width. Around the time of its construction, the Republic of Texas had voted to join the United States and Houston was experiencing rapid economic and demographic growth. This resulted in a construction boom, practically tripling the size of the city between the years 1870-1890.

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