McKinney at San Jac - W - Houston Time Portal

Rossonian at McKinney

9 December 1912: The YMCA building at center was finished in 1908, and judging by the carriage at the curb and the lack of automobile traffic, this postcard must have been sold to the sender soon afterwards. The neighborhood at the time was mixed residential and business, with commercial activity gradually coming to predominate over the subsequent decades. Homes in this section of town were in the process of transitioning from single-family occupancy to boarding houses, but the commercial area two blocks west at Main Street consisted of buldings 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.

3 February 2017: The overhanging trees in the foreground at left are landscaping at 1001 Fannie, a white 49-story office tower built in 1981 as headquarters for First City National Bank. The building occupies the entire block between McKinney, Fannin, Lamar, and San Jacinto, but due to its diagonal rotation away from the city´s street grid, it gives the impression that the structure has a larger footprint than it actually does. 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).

Postmarked:   9 Dec 1912; Houston, Tex.
Stamp:       1c Green George Washington #405

To: Mr. Paul Jewell
       161 W 10th Ave
       Columbus, Ohio

Message: Well old sport, how is it going? Am having a great time. Say old boy you ought to be here. Everett.

Everett sent this postcard from Houston exhorting his friend Paul Jewell to visit. The terms “old sport” and “old boy” suggest a collegial relationship between the two, as if they were Jay Gatsby fraternity brothers, or wanted to be. The short message suggests that he and Paul were chums, but beyond this fact there is little solid evidence to identify this Everett. Research reveals that Paul’s middle name was Everett, but no family research revealed an Everett who could be the author of this postcard. Everett is a reasonably common name, and efforts to separate the dozens of Everett X’s in Houston, TX or Columbus, OH were futile.

Paul Everett Jewell, the son of Foster Weatherby Jewell (1866-1933) and Emma Ford Jewell (1867-1949), was born in Leonardsburg, Delaware County, OH in 1890. The Jewell family moved to Marysville in neighboring Union County by 1900 where Foster and Emma owned a notions store. They moved to Toledo by 1910 as Foster became manager of a steel company, but Paul soon became a student at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH about 30 miles south of where he had grown up. In 1913 he was member of the Southern Club and Sergeant of the Ohio State Trumpet Corps where he seems to have acquired a taste for the military life. After his 4 years of college, the family moved to California where they lived at 900 Kendall Avenue in 1919. Paul served on board the USS Iris just prior to WWI where the vessel supported the war effort around San Diego and San Francisco. He joined the US Army and was stationed at Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio of San Francisco 1930-1940. After he retired from active service he had a residence in Fairfax, Marin County, CA, but he never married and had no children. He died in 1974 at the hospital where he had worked so long and his cremated remains were placed in Woodlawn Cemetery at Colima, San Mateo County, CA.