EPILOGUE
In its 115th year, newspaper is in midst of change after a change in locations
The Houston Chronicle leaves the ghosts — but not its soul — behind at 801 Texas.
Deep in the night, when the presses rumbled and only a handful of workers peopled the Houston Chronicle’s venerable downtown office and printing plant, ghostly music filled the dimly lit building’s sleeping hallways.
Some swore the melodies wafted from the top floor, once the opulent home of a select businessman’s club; others, just as adamant, insisted they came from the old gilded and mirrored vaudeville palace, now vanished without a trace beneath the building’s inscrutable white marble facade.
Ghosts don’t exist, of course. Nor, for that matter, do giants.
Both, though, likely would have been right at home at 801 Texas Ave.
For more than a century, legions of men and women — some gifted, some outrageous, many both — labored in the big white building to condense the day’s happenings into 12-point type.
They filled the paper’s pages with tales of calamity — and a generous measure of joy and human warmth. Along the way, they garnered accolades, most notably a 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Above all, they helped their readers understand and cope with change.
Now the Chronicle, at 115 years old, the city’s oldest continually published newspaper, is itself in the midst of change.
In March, the newspaper completed its move to its new southwest Houston home — a state-of-the-art center for print and digital journalism in the 21st century.
The new complex, formerly the home of the Houston Post, provides more than 440,000 square feet in seven buildings. The plant at 4747 Southwest Freeway was acquired after the Post closed in 1995 and has for a number of years been the site of the Chronicle’s production departments.
The Chronicle’s block-sized downtown headquarters and a nearby parking garage were purchased for an undisclosed sum by a partnership led by development giant Hines in October. Plans call for demolition.
A kind of paradise
As arrangements to relocate reporting, photography and art staffs — among the last to leave the downtown building — moved into high gear, the editorial rooms were charged with an uncommon level of chaos.
Tubs materialized for the transport of valuable files; garbage cans overflowed as paper-piled desktops — a literary archaeologist’s paradise — were swept clean. Pyramids of outdated reference books, “Guiness Book of Records 1995,” “The Complete Directory of Prime Time TV Stars 1946-Present (1987),” mysteriously grew on any available vacant surface. Former employees, perhaps dabbing at a too-moist eye, came by for one last look. “Yes, yes, there is a sense of loss,” lamented one.
Down in the art department, a rose-colored heart topped by a “Chronicle star” appeared on the wall with the legend: “801 Texas. We love you!”
The Chronicle’s new home bears little resemblance to the old. With stark vertical components, the 1970-vintage, four-story New Brutalist-styled building seems like a modern concrete castle suitable for knights of the pen.
By contrast, 801 Texas, at least in recent decades, offered viewers an architectural visage of unadorned boxiness.
An accretion of four buildings made into one, it featured a maze of corridors, cul-de-sacs and steps that seemed to spring on strollers at the most unexpected times.
Beverly Harris, who joined the newspaper in 1960 and retired almost a quartercentury later as Lifestyle editor, doubtless spoke for many when she confessed: “I often didn’t know which building I was in.”
Founded in 1901 by former Houston Post reporter Marcellus Foster, who parlayed an investment in the Spindletop oil field into his own newspaper, the Chronicle first occupied the building in 1910.
Spittoons no longer
Erected by Houston builderbanker Jesse H. Jones for a share in the business, the new building on the northwest corner of Texas Avenue and Travis Street was long and narrow.
The exterior featured a base of polished Texas granite, set off by a border of dark-green enameled brick. The upper portion was white brick ornamented with belt courses.
Inside, the hallways featured floors of pink marble and wainscoting of white Italian marble with a black marble base.
“The entire building is steam heated, has a system of ice drinking water fountains, electric ceiling fans, electric and gas lights, mail chutes, telegraph and telephone facilities, hot and cold water and a vacuum cleaning system,” a promotional brochure boasted.
An early photograph of the newsroom shows a surprisingly neat tile-floored room furnished with shaded lamps suspended from the ceiling and spittoons.
Contemporary editors frown on public expectoration.
On the 10th floor was the Houston Club, a businessman’s social club equipped with dining facilities, a billiard room and a cozy fireplace.
A second Jones-built building, the Majestic Theater, opened immediately to the west of the Chronicle building the same year.
David Welling, author of “Cinema Houston: From
Nickelodeon to Megaplex,” said the theater, lavish but not as ostentatious as later movie palaces, initially was a vaudeville venue that featured film shorts.
Known as the “Theater Beautiful,” the Majestic borrowed architectural stylings from Pompeii for its lobby, 17th century France for its “ladies’ parlour,” and Holland for its men’s smoking room. The multibalconied auditorium seated 1,500, not counting box seats that featured chandeliers.
Expansions
By the mid-1940s, the theater was defunct; within a few years, the building had been incorporated into the Chronicle complex.
A third Jones structure, the Milam Building, rising immediately west of the theater in 1919, also became part of the newspaper’s expanding plant. In 1938, an annex fronting Travis was added to the main building’s north side.
For a time, photographs reveal, the distinct presence of four individual buildings combined into one easily could be discerned.
The building assumed its current form during extensive renovation in the late 1960s.
A fifth floor — a new home for the editorial department — was added to the 1938 annex. A production plant was built at Travis and Prairie streets, immediately north of the older buildings. The entire primary structure was clad in white marble.
Spirit of the Chronicle
For a certain generation of Houstonians — journalists included — the spiritual home of the Houston Chronicle forever will be 801 Texas Ave.
And for many, memories billow and swell like the clouds of tobacco smoke that once filled its offices.
“It was rough and tumble,” recalled Fernando Dovalina, one of the former employees who visited the building in its final days as Chronicle headquarters.
He joined the newspaper as a copy editor in 1968 and left 31 years later as an assistant managing editor.
Reporters in his first years were boisterous, editors formidable, and everyone loud.
Weaned on a “very civilized” North Texas newspaper, Dovalina hit Houston — once dubbed a whiskey and trombone town — to find a newsroom brimming with larger-than-life characters.
Burning cigarettes dangled precariously from desk edges; desk drawers accumulated empty whiskey bottles; editors deliberated at lawn-mower volume.
“I thought to myself, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ ” he recalled.
Added longtime homedesign editor Madeleine Hamm, “It was just like ‘The Front Page.’ ”
“In the city room, a cloud hung over the ceiling. Everybody smoked,” said Hamm, who retired in 2003 after almost four decades with the paper. “There were these old wooden desks that had been there forever. The teletype machines were clacking. When I went to work there, we had manual typewriters. We had copy paper, rubber cement and carbon paper. Oh my gosh! It was terrible.”
Hamm and Dovalina’s earliest years reflected a period of growing decorum in the news business; the most colorful staff members were relics of decades past.
“They harked back to the 1930s and ’40s,” Dovalina said. “They had a tabloidish, very florid style. The younger reporters made fun of them, but, at some level, they were jealous. These guys did it very well.”
At a distance of almost half a century, Dovalina still recalled one two-fingered typist’s lead into a mundane story about an unseasonable cold snap: “There will be frost on the jonquils tonight.”
“I wish I had written that one,” Dovalina said, “and many others.”