Short Cuts: Episode I 
Montrose Lives!
There's something for everyone in Houston's Montrose, the strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos.
(Page 3 of 5)
The educational focal point of the Montrose, however, is Hank Grover's alma mater, the University of St. Thomas. UST was begun in 1947 when the Basilian Father of Toronto dispatched Fr. Vincent Guinan to Houston to start a university. In the 25 years since it began classes with 40 students and a faculty of eight, UST has secured a comfortable niche within both Houston's educational community and the Montrose.
No longer church supported, the University has recruited a lay board of Houston's most powerful laity and has built a subdued but impressive campus of soft bricks, covered walks, and live oaks that retains and blends with the earlier residential architecture. In some cases, old buildings have been restored and put to new uses, like the boyhood home of Howard Hughes, which is now the Modern Language Building. (Fine mesh of history and irony that one, eh? Told you the Montrose was pretty weird.)
UST has probably been, as its spokesmen like to think, "a major factor in the preservation of the Montrose." A prime example of preservation is the building that first attracted Father Guinan to the Montrose, the former Link-Lee mansion, now the St. Thomas Administration Building, and one of the key reference points in the history of the Montrose.
Way back around the turn of the century, in what future archeologists will unavoidably call the Pre-Astrodome Period, there was, sadly, no Montrose. While it's true that Houston must have been a dreadful dull place without a Montrose, there were few people who had to suffer it: just about 40,000, all working to finish off the ship channel and not yet fully realizing what a good deal oil was. There wasn't anything to the west of "downtown" but a few dairy farms and a jerky old country road angling out to where some folks called the Westheimers lived.
Houstonians, though, were just beginning to get it into their heads that they were going to be a Big City, and they were pushing in that direction. The Westmoreland and Courtland "additions" (what we call "subdivisions" nowadays) were right next door and included some of the finest homes in the city, colossal constructions with galleries, gables and gazebos, towers and balconies fastened on everywhere in pretentious Victorian grandeur. Fine Homes, they were called. Burlington railroad vice-president W.W. Baldwin had organized the South End Land Company in 1902 to build the posh little neighborhood, and it was just about filled up. The time semed ripe for what we know now as a "real estate killing".
In 1910, a group of investors headed by J.W. Link formed the Houston Land Corporation and "conceived the idea of laying out and improving a great residential addition." The plot was to be called the Montrose Addition and built around Montrose boulevard, an enormously wide street for those days, with its esplanade planted in palm trees. At the corner of Montrose and Alabama, Link built his own home, an immense Doric edifice of imported limestone and nitrified brick that cost $60,000 even then. When the Galveston Hurricane ravished the Gulf Coast, neighbors from blocks around took safety within its fortified parlors. In 1916, the Links sold the mansion to oilman T.P. Lee, whose family would later deliver it to the newly-born University of St. Thomas. The family had other things to worry about than the upkeep of the mansion, what with Howard Lee running off to marry, consecutively, Hedy Lamarr and Gene Tierney.
The Montrose Addition, meanwhile, was busily becoming just what its corporate progenitors had envisioned: "the most superbly developed residential area—not only in the City of Houston, but the entire South." The great and wealthy of the city all found homes nearby: the Hogg family, the Joneses and the Garwoods, Edna Saunders, Lamar Fleming, Ross Sterling, the Cullens and Cullinans, Neuhauses, Kirbys, Espersons, Rices, all of the names that would make up Houston's history for the next three decades.
In the ‘twenties the Hogg brothers and Hugh Roy Cullen had conceived their own great residential addition, River Oaks, followed in later years by Memorial and Tanglewood. The social elite, always on the lookout for new plateaus, began emigrating west. The middle-class, developing tastes for two-car garages and central air conditioning, was moving into the carefully homogenous split-level suburbs that kept rolling out to the southwest.
The original residents of the Montrose, meanwhile, were proving less able to withstand the passage of decades that the sturdy-built, carefully crafted homes they had erected. As they moved on, their Montrose homes fell into estates, or were deeded over to suburbanite descendants who either sold them cheaply or were content to rent them out for just enough to pay the taxes. The obvious tenants were those who could neither afford nor particularly desired swimming pools and microwave ovens but preferred the leaded-glass windows, ten-foot ceilings and cheap rent in the Montrose. These were a diverse lot: students and professors from St. Thomas and nearby Rice University, artists and architects desiring proximity to the museums and galleries that cluster around the Montrose, journalists, writers, photographers and musicians seeking an atmosphere of creative excitement and Bohemian figures of every sort.
"There are always groups in society who choose autonomy, who wish to live apart from society at large. In Houston, the Montrose was the logical place for people like that," explains urban planner Clovis Heimsath. "Groups that want to live by themselves, like homosexuals, divorcees, young rebels, always head for neighborhoods where they can be left alone."
Heimsath lives and offices in a beautifully restored, immense old home in the Montrose, and has been a close student of the development of his neighborhood. "The Montrose flies in the face of national urban dynamics trends. The typical pattern of areas surrounding the central business district of a major city is that of decay. Even where attempts have been made to rejuvenate them—the Gaslight district in St. Louis, New Town in Chicago—it's been a failure. Montrose has reversed this trend, and the glory of it is that it was done without any government assistance, support or programs.
"Houston needs an urban residential neighborhood like the Montrose. Urban residential areas are common in Europe and the older cities of this country: Georgetown in Washington, Back Bay in Boston, the Garden District in New Orleans. Urban areas require high density living, and it's justified by the higher land costs. And they're always heterogeneous, a mix of people and land uses, while the suburbs are homogenous."
Paralleling the rise of Westheimer, the last few years have seen the return of many prominent, wealthy Houstonians to the neighborhood. As Houston Post columnist and Montrose resident Marge Crumbaker puts it, "Some of the folks who moved out to Tanglewood are moving back, and all of their kids are." Heimsath sees it from a more technical perspective: "These old restored homes are an enormously important visual symbol. They give a sense of history and place to an area. That's something you'll never get in the suburbs."
Area real estate agent Bob Edmiston, president of the Near Town Association, the Montrose area civic/booster group, says people are moving back because of "the interesting old architectural charm. You can redo and redecorate these old homes, come up with all sorts of ideas. It's just not the same as living in those fishbowl houses in the suburbs. Here we've got a hodge-podge of ages, types, groups. We're certainly not stereotyped like some of my friends out in Westbury."
Redoing and redecorating homes, though, is getting to be an expensive proposition. In an unzoned city like Houston, residential land values keep pace with commercial values, and the Westheimer boom, compounded by the "Return of the Prosperous," has sent prices through even Victorian roofs. To buy and refurbish a home in the lower Montrose runs on the order of $60,000. Townhouses, many of them designed to blend into the neighborhood, are multiplying rapidly, and bringing equal prices.
New single family dwellings are rare, but do exist. University of Houston architecture professor John Zemanek bought an old house, tore it down, and replaced it with an austere, Zen-inspired home that has won him architectural kudos. He admits that it would have been cheaper to build it elsewhere, but says "I wouldn't live anywhere else in Houston. I like the quality of life here, the shops, restaurants, crafts. At this time, that's what's stimulating the Montrose, pumping new life into it. People are moving in like myself, who wouldn't live in the suburbs."
Zemanek calls Montrose "essential to the City of Houston. It provides a humanistic element at its core, like the Left Bank in Paris. If the Montrose as it is now was wiped out by high rises and commercialization, the city would become sterile and materialistic to the point where culturally stimulating people would move out, and everyone would lose in the long run."
Be they "culturally stimulating" or not, a lot of people are beginning to move out. Increased rents and property values, spurred by what City hall called "a long overdue" tax valuation increase, are forcing many to move elsewhere; if the wealthy are indeed "rediscovering the Montrose," as Bob Edmiston cheerfully phrases it, one reason is that only they can afford it. Many of those less fortunate are looking north for places to live, toward the Heights, a near-North Side corner of town possessed of a comparable architectural heritage but of middle class, rather than upper class, origins.
"The Heights is now very attractive to young people," says Ann Lower. "They're moving up there because the rents are so much cheaper, and there are trees up there. You can start to see the movement in the voting patterns."
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