Time has changed the view from Quality Hill.
If you ever find yourself strolling around Discovery Green, conventioneering at the George R. Brown Convention Center, or waiting in line at an Astros game, you are standing where Houston’s first highclass, mansion-filled neighborhood, Quality Hill, once was.
Houston, then just a fraction of the size it is now, had no affluent neighborhoods to speak of until Quality Hill emerged on the northeastern side of current downtown at the middle of the 19th century — not too far from where the movers and shakers did business.
“At that time, it was the only upscale neighborhood, though some people lived on ‘farms’ outside of town, which might mean around today’s Montrose,” said Mike Vance, program director for Houston’s Heritage Society. “Quality Hill was the first neighborhood for the upper and merchant class.”
It’s hard to define exactly where Quality Hill geographically sat.
“Since it’s not a development, in the sense that you could define boundaries of River Oaks or the Houston Heights, it’s more of an approximation,” Vance said. “Some people on the edges considered themselves part of Quality Hill, just like how surrounding areas seem to claim to be in the Heights today.”
In 1960, Chronicle columnist Sig Byrd wrote that the “heart of Quality Hill” was the 100 block of Chenevert, just a block north of Minute Maid Park, roughly where Joystix is now.
According to Jim Parsons with Preservation Houston, Quality Hill could be compared to the Garden District in New Orleans, at least architecturally. Houston’s population was barely 70,000 in 1895. As the little neighborhood with deep pockets grew, newer homes were built farther south toward what would now roughly be the Discovery Green area.
“There were some beautiful houses in the area, some of which had expansive lots and well-known gardens,” Parsons said. “Quality Hill’s heyday was definitely the era of carriage rides and fancy parties, so a lot of the descriptions of the neighborhood have a definite romantic slant to them.”
Parsons points to a 1942 Work Projects Administration guide on Houston that paints an absolutely cinematic, genteel portrait of Quality Hill.
“On Quality Hill, a small area in the northeastern part of the town, south of Buffalo Bayou, stood great houses shaded by the big oaks that lined narrow thoroughfares. Gardens of flowers surrounded houses screened by tall hedges. Here the manner of life was thoroughly in keeping with the setting. Wealthy businessmen wearing high silk hats drove downtown in velvetupholstered carriages, to spend a few hours in offices resplendent with red plush. In harness with gold or silver buckles prancing horses drew gleaming victorias as fashionable women took their regular afternoon drives. On warm days, ice tinkled in mint juleps.”
It wasn’t to last long, as the neighborhood stood in the way of Union Staton and big railroad companies’ need for property. Monied Houstonians soon found other places to live, away from noisy locomotives and choking exhaust. The train companies gobbled up land and, in turn, many of the best houses were demolished for progress. By the first decade of the 20th century, most former residents of Quality Hill had relocated to chic areas south and west of downtown.
“Union Station and the adjacent freight terminal destroyed a big chunk of it,” said Vance. “But even before that, people started moving away after the Hardy yards started thriving.”
According to Vance, when the wind came out of the north, Quality Hill was less than ideal.
“All that steam train activity brought smoke and ash blowing right into the houses and yards of many of the richest people in Houston,” Vance said. “Imagine windows open for the breeze and also what that did to their white laundry hanging from the line in the backyard.”
As transportation improved, Houston began to sprawl. Some things have always been in Houston’s DNA, Parsons muses.
“The wealthy folks continued to move south into what was then called the South End, or present-day Midtown. They wanted to stay close to downtown because transportation was still pretty limited in those days,” Parson says. Places farther away from downtown, like River Oaks and Riverside Terrace, popped up by the 1920s with the proliferation of the automobile.
Two of the biggest artifacts left standing from Quality Hill’s former opulence are located in front of Minute Maid Park. One is known as the Cohn House, built in 1905 by accountant Arthur Cohn, and was once located down the street at 1711 Rusk. Cohn helped found the Rice Institute after his boss, William Marsh Rice, died in 1900.
There is also the William Foley House standing next door, built in 1904, by the Irish businessman who was the founder of a dry goods store located off Travis. The home was moved to its current spot after the land it sat on was purchased for railway use just a few years after it was constructed. Both are waiting to be renovated to their former glories.
A collection of other Quality Hill-era homes sit in Houston’s Sam Houston Park, like Eugene Pillot’s house, built in 1868 and previously located 1803 McKinney. The Nichols-Rice-Cherry House was built in 1850 and was once located on courthouse square, moving to the park in 1959.
But what kind of name was Quality Hill? Houston doesn’t have hills, of course, but there was a slight elevation that allowed residents to look down at Buffalo Bayou.
“In the early days, a deep ravine ran along what’s now Caroline between about Texas Avenue and Buffalo Bayou,” Parsons says. “The neighborhood was on the higher bank of the ravine, which is why it was called Quality Hill.”