How Houston's Old Money Built a Boulevard of Mansions and Never Tore One Down: Broadacres

There are 26 houses in Broadacres. Not one of them has ever been demolished. That sentence should not be remarkable. It is remarkable because this is Houston — the largest city in America that has never had a zoning code, on land a short walk from Rice University and the Museum District, where the ground alone would be worth a fortune to anybody who wanted to build something else on it. Three miles north, Montrose Boulevard was laid out in 1911 with the same idea and the same esplanades. Its deed restrictions expired in the mid-1930s, the city refused to pass zoning, and today that boulevard carries six gas stations, five towers, a Walgreens and a hole in the ground where a supermarket used to be. The difference starts with a telegram. On September 23, 1900, a Houston lawyer named James Addison Baker was told his elderly client had died in his sleep in New York. Baker didn't believe it. He got on a train. William Marsh Rice had been murdered — smothered with a chloroform sponge by his own valet, working with a New York lawyer who had forged a will. They'd tried mercury pills first and it hadn't worked; Rice was too tough. The whole plot unravelled because a bank clerk noticed an enormous cheque on which the payee had misspelled his own name. Baker then spent years defending the estate against more than a hundred claimants. He won. That $4.6 million became Rice University, and he chaired its board for fifty years. Twenty-two years after the telegram, the same man and his son built Broadacres. They bought the land from Captain Baker for $125,000 and put another $150,000 into roads and underground utilities — more on the infrastructure than on the ground itself. They hired William Ward Watkin, who had built the Rice campus and the Museum of Fine Arts, and he laid out a horseshoe of three boulevards under double rows of live oaks, with a brick walk down the centre of every median. Watkin designed exactly one of the 26 houses. He wasn't there for the commissions. Then four deed restrictions, and that was all. Residential only. Sixty-foot setback. A $20,000 minimum. And a specified orientation on the lot. No approved style list, no design panel — which is precisely why the street is Tudor and Spanish and Colonial and medieval all at once, and why it works. A century later the covenants have never been allowed to lapse. CHAPTERS 0:00 Twenty-Six Houses 2:05 The Telegram 3:28 The Butler Did It 5:24 What Baker Actually Saved 7:18 The Lesson 8:22 The Land 9:38 Nineteen Twenty-Two 11:47 The Architect Who Built Rice 15:04 What the Deeds Said 16:55 The Houses 19:10 The One They Gave Away 20:30 Why Montrose Died and This Did Not 23:52 The Second Lock 25:18 What It Actually Proves 28:00 What Remains SOURCES Broadacres Historic District — City of Houston, Historic Preservation Manual https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/HistoricPres/HistoricPreservationManual/historic_districts/broadacres.html Broadacres Historic District, History — City of Houston, Historic Preservation Manual https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/HistoricPres/HistoricPreservationManual/historic_districts/broadacres_history.html History — Broadacres Homeowners Association https://www.broadacreshouston.org/history Broadacres Historic District — The Cultural Landscape Foundation https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/broadacres-historic-district Broadacres Historic District National Register Nomination Form — Texas Historical Commission https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/NR/pdfs/80004128/80004128.pdf Centennial video series: The Rice murder mystery — Rice University News https://news2.rice.edu/2012/07/26/centennial-video-series-the-rice-murder-mystery-2/ A Murder, A Mystery and a Vision — Rice Magazine https://magazine.rice.edu/fall-2018/murder-mystery-and-vision James Addison Baker: Steady hand shaped success — Houston Chronicle https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/history/article/James-Addison-Baker-Steady-hand-shaped-success-7722733.php With Only 26 Homes in Broadacres, It's Rare When a Property Goes on the Market — Houston Press https://www.houstonpress.com/news/with-only-26-homes-in-broadacres-its-rare-when-a-property-goes-on-the-market-11286012/