This is the fourth in a series of 10 self-guided driving tours of Houston’s original six wards, written by architectural historian Stephen Fox. Click for Fox’s tours of First and Second wards and the first of his three-part tour of Third Ward. All the tours are collected in a limited-edition zine, forWARDS, that was published in conjunction with RDA’s 40th annual architecture tour. The zine, designed by Spindletop Design and illustrated with photography by Peter Molick, can be purchased for $15. Call 713-348-4876 or email rda at rice.edu.

Start at St. Emanuel and Grey Street below the I-45 / US 59 interchange. Head south into what is most commonly thought of today as Third Ward. The Houston Police Department South Central Patrol Division at 2202 St. Emanuel bounds the edge of the neighborhood. At the Hadley Avenue-St. Emanuel intersection is the Hadley complex of eight shotgun ranch houses, a post-war form of the “row house” complex at 2102 St. Emanuel. At 2501 St. Emanuel and McIlhenny, the Chua Dai-Goac Buddhist Temple occupies a rustic compound.

Turn left onto McGowen Avenue, then left onto Hutchins Street. Extensive townhouse construction replaces two long blocks through which the tracks of the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railway were laid en route to its terminus on McKinney. The portions of these two blocks along Hutchins were occupied by the Polar Wave Ice Company plant and its popular moneymaker, the Polar Wave Ice Palace skating rink at 2323 Hutchins and McIlhenny (1926; demolished), distinctive for its vaulted lamella lattice roof structure. The tiers of blocks from Hadley Avenue south to Wheeler lie in the J. S. Holman Subdivision of the J. S. Holman Survey. There, “outlots” (superblocks equivalent in size to six city blocks with the intervening streets) were surveyed initially; only later were these outlots subdivided into smaller city blocks. The Holman outlots account for the sometimes irregular interval at which cross streets intersect the streets parallel to Main Street in Third Ward. Holman, an associate of the Allen brothers, was Houston’s first mayor.

Despite proximity to the railroad corridor, substantial Montrose-like brick houses were built in the 2100 and 2000 blocks of Hutchins, such as the burned-out H.E. Reichardt House at 2104 Hutchins (c. 1917) and the Isadore Gross House at 2020 Hutchins across Gray (c. 1913).

Turn right onto Gray Avenue past the twin-towered St. John Baptist Church at 2222 Gray Avenue (1946, James M. Thomas), which was designed by a prominent local African-American architect-builder for an African-American congregation. Turn right onto Dowling Street.

Dowling Street was the “main street” of the African-American sector of Third Ward. The Dowling line of the Houston Electric Company’s streetcar system ran up Dowling as far south as Holman, where it turned east. Like so much of old Houston, all that is left today are a few retail buildings and such imposing institutional buildings as the Wesley Chapel AME Church at 2209 Dowling (1926, W. Sidney Pittman). Its architect, Sidney Pittman, the son-in-law of Booker T. Washington, was based in Washington, D. C., before relocating his practice to Dallas.

Turn left onto Hadley Avenue, then turn left onto Sauer Street, then turn right onto Trulley Street. The ex-Douglass Elementary School (now Yellowstone Academy, 1926, Hedrick & Gottlieb) at 3000 Trulley is a fraternal twin to Hedrick & Gottlieb’s contemporaneous Gregory Elementary School in Fourth Ward.

Turn right onto Briley Street, then left onto Hadley Avenue. The blocks on the right-hand (south) side of Hadley lie in the William A. Wilson Addition, a six-block subdivision that Wilson platted for African-American purchasers before he developed Woodland Heights and Eastwood. The linear park you cross follows the route of the Columbia Tap Railway, one of the first two railroad lines to go into operation in Houston. At Hadley and Tierwester Street is the Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church (1955, John S. Chase with David

C. Baer; James Thomas, builder). This is one of the earliest building commissions in Houston for John Chase, the first African-American architect to be registered in Texas. Turn right onto Tierwester and proceed through the William A. Wilson Addition, then turn right onto McGowen Avenue.

At 3005 McGowen is the Blue Triangle YWCA (now Community Center) of 1951, designed by Birdsall P. Briscoe and Hiram A. Salisbury. One of John T. Biggers’s earliest murals, The Negro Woman in American Life and Education, is installed in the Blue Triangle building. Trinity East United Methodist Church occupies the imposing neo-Gothic complex at 2418 McGowen and St. Charles. Turn left onto Dowling Street.

The two-story Mrs. Willa F. Edwards Building at 2423 Dowling and McGowen (1957) is a Mid-Century Modern standout. Another of the monumental churches of Dowling Street is the classical St. John Missionary Baptist Church at 2702 Dowling (1948, Beckmann, Williams & Williams). Whereas today its columned front is offset by feral greenery and parking lots, it once rose above retail buildings, of which Wolf’s Department Store and Pawn Shop at 2701 Dowling (1950) is a rare survivor.

Emancipation Park, at 3018 Dowling, a City of Houston public park since the early 1900s, occupies Outlot 25 of the J. S. Holman Subdivision, one of the few 10-acre outlots that has never been subdivided. The outlot was sold to the Festival Association, an organization of African-American Houstonians, in July 1872 by Sarah J. and Marshall C. Wellborn for $800 to provide a site for African Americans living in Harris County to celebrate the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. In 1910, the district attorney of Harris County initiated legal action to claim the property for the State of Texas, alleging that the trustees of the Colored Emancipation Park Association had failed to adhere to the terms under which the property was conveyed to the Festival Association and so had forfeited ownership. Litigation was not concluded until 1917, when the City of Houston agreed to acquire the site as a public park and discharge debts that the Emancipation Park Association could not afford to pay. Public Works Administration funds were used to build a modernistic park building and other facilities (1939, William Ward Watkin). Philip Freelon/Perkins+Will of Durham, North Carolina, is the architect for extensive additions, alterations, and rehabilitation of existing structures (2015).

The modernistic Eldorado Ballroom at 2312 Dowling and Elgin (1939, Lenard Gabert) was Houston’s foremost African-American blues nightclub during the 1940s and ’50s. Turn left onto Francis Avenue past eight two-story gable-fronted duplex houses in the 2400 block built by Project Row Houses in 2009 as affordable housing. Based on a design by the Rice School of Architecture’s Rice Building Workshop, the houses evoke the gable-fronted profile associated with the shotgun cottage type. Turn right onto Live Oak Street, then right onto Holman Avenue.

Project Row Houses occupies the 22 remaining rental cottages of the Frank Cash Row in the 2400-2500 blocks of Holman Avenue (1939). Artist Rick Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses, dreamed up and has guided this extraordinary art-preservation-social service-education nonprofit, building it into an institution of national stature without losing sight of its local surroundings and constituencies.

The 1905 south city limit line slices diagonally through Project Row Houses’ property. Most of PRH’s site lies just outside Houston’s 1905 city limit. Turn right onto Dowling and left onto Stuart Avenue.

Rice Building Workshop was responsible for the metal-faced, flat-roofed ZeRow House at 2306 Stuart (2009), designed and constructed by Rice students, exhibited at the 2009 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., then brought back to PRH. Next door at 2304 is the X-Small House (2003), also by the Rice Building Workshop. Turn left onto Bastrop Street. The historic Victorian shotgun cottage at 3303 Bastrop is the OutHouse (2013) and features Rice Building Workshop’s insertion of a yellow core containing kitchen, laundry, bathroom, and mechanical systems into the rehabilitated historic cottage.

Turn right onto Francis. At 2102 Francis is a tall, slender house (2014) by Brett Zamore Design. Turn right onto St. Emanuel. At 3308 St. Emanuel is the St. Emanuel House (2009) by Ronnie Self, a compact one-story house elevated a story above grade to capture views of the Downtown skyline. Turn right onto Stuart and left onto Hutchins. Then turn left onto Elgin Avenue past the Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist (1941) at 2202 Elgin.