Rossonian at McKinney
The YMCA building at center was finished in 1908, and judging by the carriage at the curb and the lack of automobile traffic, this unmailed postcard must have dated soon afterwards (arbitrarily 1911). The neighborhood at the time was mixed residential and business, with businesses gradually coming to predominate. Homes were in the process of transitioning from single-family occupancy to boarding homes. Two blocks in Main Street was a commercial zone, with business structures of 3-5 floors being the standard, and a few up to ten stories.
1. 1112 McKinney: The tree-shaded yard at left was the home of Thomas Pierce Converse (1876-1943), a “capitalist” and manager of Keystone Oil Company with offices in the Converse Building at Main and Commerce. Further toward the vanishing point on the horizon at left were a number of boarding houses offering rooms: Shelby Prewitt at 1106 McKinney, Gertrude McFadden at 1018 McKinney, Lorena Moore at 1014 McKinney, Minnie Lyon at 1012½ McKinney and 1005 Main, and the 1012 McKinney home of Frederick H. Potthoff (1857-1930), proprietor of Union Bottling Works at 504 Milam. On the southeast corner of Main and McKinney at 1001 Main was Rehmann’s Grocery Store operated by the Rehmann family: Edmund F. and Anna Oetken Rehmann and their daughter Agnes. Across Main Street was the lumberyard of Jesse Holman Jones; 2. 920 Main: Arguably the finest church in Houston, and the one with the largest congregation, The First Presbyterian Church including its very tall bell tower, peeks over the Masonic Temple Building (Rev. William States Jacobs, pastor). It was built in 1896, but destroyed in a 1932 fire and rebuilt in 1946-1948 at its present address at 5300 Main Street in the Museum District; 3. 917-919 Main: The Masonic Temple Building with the Curry Brothers grocers on the first level owned by James Edwin Curry and John T. Curry; 4. 918 Fannin: Young Men’s Christian Association, 5 floors and a basement with a swimming pool and a bowling alley, 1908; 5. 913-919 Fannin: The Rossonian Apartment Hotel, built by James Oliver Ross (1849-1929) in 1910 to offer the most modern flats in Houston, 7 floors [LINK Rossonian 2X]. The Café was managed by Mrs. Margaret Howell, who lived in the building (James O. Ross lived in a residence at 710 Hadley); 6. 1111 McKinney: The shade trees were in front of the boarding house of Katherine Keegan, with Joseph M. McLaughlin resident, owner of the Long Reach Lumber Co., and an investor and land man.
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14 May 2019: 1. 1000 Main: Reliant Energy Plaza, 36 floors, 2003 (built on the site of Jesse Jones’ lumberyard); 2. 910 Louisiana: One Shell Plaza, 50 floors, 1971; 3. 910 Travis: Bank of the Southwest (Bank One Center, 919 Milam), 24 floors, 1956; 4. 930 Main: McKinney Place parking structure, 12 floors, 2002 (on the site of The First Presbyterian Church, and later Woolworth’s, demolished in 1999); 5. 1001 McKinney: City National Bank, 22 floors, 1949 (replaced the YMCA); 6. 909 Fannin: 2 Houston Center, 40 floors, 1974 (on the site of The Rossonian, later renamed the Ambassador Hotel).
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