The Heights
A planned community blending residential and commercial development. A grand hotel attracting new investors and business partners. Light rail easing transit and speeding travel to the central business district. A development plan for parks, schools and tree-lined boulevards.
It sounds like news from today’s headlines but The Houston Heights achieved all this more than a century ago. Proudly listed on the National Register of Historic Places and home to 100 structures on the National Register, The Houston Heights was a visionary community ahead of its time.
In 1886, self-made millionaire Oscar Martin Carter believed Houston’s growing middle class would flock to an attractive, planned residential community outside the city. His company purchased 1,756 acres at $45 per acre, added utilities, streets, alleys, parks and schools. Carter built a business district at 19th and Ashland Streets and planned stores there to serve new residents. Daniel Denton Cooley, grandfather of world renowned heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley, served as treasurer and general manager of the budding master-planned community on Houston’s outskirts.
The first Houston Heights homeowners were more than willing to commute the four miles (quite a distance in those days) from a community that offered a new way of life for the turn of the twentieth century. On Sunday, October 23, 1892, for the handsome price of a nickel, Car No. 2 made the first paid streetcar run from downtown Houston to The Houston Heights.
The founding fathers also built a series of grand homes along Heights Boulevard, a broad, tree-lined central thoroughfare patterned after Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Elaborate, Victorian homes were built from the plans of George Franklin Barber, an early Knoxville, Tennessee architect. Barber modernized the concept of house plans by selling them through catalogues. He offered houses designed by an architect without the cost of hiring one. Homeowners could make their own suggestions and Barber would incorporate them into his designs–thus becoming Houston’s first purveyor of “semi-custom” homes. Two of the original 17 Heights homes still stand as they were built – 1802 Harvard Street and 1102 Heights Boulevard.
The community’s rapid growth at times made for an awkward blend of city and country life. In 1911, The Houston Heights passed an ordinance that forbid residents keeping cattle on their property and banned chickens in 1913. Meanwhile, The Houston Heights became home to an opera company to provide culture and entertainment.
By 1917, the citizens approved the annexation of The Houston Heights by The City of Houston. The Heights would no longer elect its own mayor or maintain its own jail, but it did preserve its genteel and refined demeanor: to this day The Heights remains a dry district where no alcohol can be sold.
In 1973, the Houston Heights Association (HHA), began working diligently for the neighborhood’s revitalization. More than 1,000 HHA members and residents of Houston Heights work to improve and enhance the community. From the annual holiday celebration of Lights in The Heights, to the turn of the century Victorian rose garden at Heights Blvd. and 20th streets, to live oak plantings, park improvements and other preservation and beautification efforts, the HHA has restored O.M. Carter’s utopia to new glory.
Today, The Heights is enjoying a vibrant revival and a strong upturn in home values. The Heights is favored by professionals and families who appreciate (by today’s standards) a short commute to downtown and the small-town quality of life.
