Houston’s 100-year-old history of sloppy map making has caused misery, heartbreak in First Ward
The wild new country lured ambitious men like W.R. Baker of New York. Still a teenager when he arrived in Houston, he rose from shopkeeper to run a railroad company, later serving as county clerk, state senator and mayor. He also acquired land in the new city at the soggy confluence of bayous, and by the 1850s Baker had mapped out a neighborhood bearing his name northwest of downtown in what would become First Ward.
Despite its proximity to downtown, Baker’s old subdivision was passed over as Houston’s suburbs expanded from the city center. Yet as the area has been rediscovered as a desirable, close-in neighborhood, developers have diced Baker’s original parcels into tight tracts with modern homes squeezed together for maximum density.
Surveyors said that as the neighborhood continues to gentrify similar problems lurk just below the surface, thanks to the city’s century-old mistakes. “Everyone knows it’s screwed up,” said Michael O’Dell, a 40-year surveyor who said he won’t work in the neighborhood because of the confusion. Old-timers decry a recent deterioration in the profession’s standards driven by developers who only want their legally mandated maps quickly and cheaply. “So surveyors will do five or 10 jobs a day,” O’Dell said. “But for good surveys, you’ve got to do a lot of homework.”
McMillan traced the neighborhood to 1838, when Baker bought Lot No. 18, 100 acres between the bayous. Deeds buried in the Harris County clerk’s office showed the area was mapped 20 years later. Block 241 passed through several owners before Henry Vanderzee began selling off lots in 1882, including one that would become the Holly Street townhouse property.
Despite that, surveyors said, the city today continues to insist that only those officially mapped “center” or “reference” lines be used to conduct property measurements. For a profession whose first allegiance is to the best historical evidence, the rule presents a dilemma. “My grandfather learned how to swim here — by accident — in Buffalo Bayou at age 12,” he recalled. After returning from World War II, he opened a grocery store on the corner of Holly and Bingham, where he worked until 1964. When the store closed, the building became a beer joint, then abandoned, part of a neighborhood-wide deterioration. Salazar remembers demolishing it under order of the city in the mid-1980s.
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