20th Century Tour of Downtown
20th-Century Seguin
Our Landmarked Downtown
Seguin is one of the oldest towns in the state. Our heritage includes the Magnolia Hotel, from the days of the Republic of Texas, and Sebastopol, from the era of the plantation South now gone with the wind.
Downtown is an outdoor museum of early 20th Century buildings, the period when brick replaced wooden structures. For its notable architectural and historical merit, the District was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
To see this treasure, we cover 12 blocks on foot, mostly in the shade. You can drive most of it, but didn't your doctor tell you to get a little exercise?
Begin in Central Park, near the statue of Juan Seguin, at the corner of South Austin and Nolte.
A century ago the most prominent building on the corner was the Nolte bank, by the state's most prominent architect during the 1890s, J. Riely Gordon. (Yes, he riely did spell his name that way.)
Gordon designed more than a dozen Texas courthouses, including the masterpieces in Waco, Marshall, and Gonzales. After moving to New York City, he won the commission for the Capitol of the new state of Arizona.
This impressive structure, finished in 1898, features elements of the Romanesque Revival, a style that evoked the days of knights in armor. The imposing tower, the monumental entrance arches, and the solid stones create a castle where your money will be secure.
The bank had been founded by Eduard Nolte, an immigrant from German whose descendants ran it for decades. Afterward, they urged the new owners to make the blockfront addition compatible with the gem Eduard Nolte and J. Riely Gordon placed on this corner.
Here 'Wall Street' intersected 'Main Street.' The Post Office was next door, and 'Central' connected callers from an office on the bank's second floor. A block north, in the courthouse, land records protected property rights, and the courts enforced the laws.
Mule-drawn streetcars brought passengers, mail, and express packages here for some 30 years, hauling them from the depot, down Austin Street, circling the squares in the center of town.
Look down Austin to the marquee of the Palace Theater, rebuilt after an explosion destroyed an existing theater. Movies were shown this location long before they were "talkies"!
On the next corners see a vestige of the early 1900s, when it was a fashion to emphasize the intersection, cutting off corners and putting the entrances at the angle. This town has more than a dozen examples.
Now cross Austin St.
Starcke Furniture Co., a family-owned business, has occupied this fine commercial building since 1912. (Earlier the home of Eduard Nolte stood here. His earlier bank building, now much "modernized" but with a period-telling sliced-off corner, was across the street.)
Starcke's generous canopies shade the show windows and sidewalks. The brick exterior is ornamented with pressed and cast metal, polished marble, and chicken-wire tile. Step indoors to see the selling floor bathed in natural light, filtered through paneled windows beneath ceilings of pressed tin.
Atlee B. Ayers, a leading San Antonio architect, was responsible for this fine building. His son did the addition almost 30 years later.
Cross Nolte St to the next corner.
Look back at the colonnade of palms and the fine home built for Edgar Nolte, one of Eduard's children. Until recently it was occupied by a great-great-grandson of the patriarch.
Return to Austin, turn left.
Pop into Amy's & Cathy's Take Out, a tiny space where the sandwiches have big taste.
Cross Donegan St.
Look left to the far corner at a 19th Century Baptist church built of concrete. It got a secular makeover early in the 20th Century in the Alamo Revival style − with a mock Alamo facade.
The building housing Chiro Java dates back to the Civil War. The current tenant offers a good cup of its namesake, and a tasty sandwich or a snack.
Rustic Charm offers charming and useful things for your home, a use not so different from the building's original and longtime purpose.
As a boy before the Civil War, Philip Vivroux immigrated to San Antonio. His father wanted him to be a priest, but after the war ended, he followed family tradition instead and, in 1869, he opened a hardware store.
Over the years it grew to occupy the adjoining buildings. Until a recent fire, this store was run by Philip's great-grandson, the eighth generation in the hardware line! (In Germany, as far back as 1802, a Vivroux had sold hardware.)
Until the fire, Vivroux's was the oldest hardware store in Texas operated continuously by one family. Afterwards, a careful restoration preserved the time-worn ambience of creaking wooden floors and pressed tin ceilings.
Continue to the corner of Court St.
Here the Tips Building is sliced off. The name and 1890 date at the roof line can be seen coming from north or east. Cattycorner, in the onetime First National Bank, glass blocks obscure a former corner doorway.
Turn left and go mid-block to the Italianate style Le Gette Building, now serving the modern needs of a law firm. Duck inside to see classic photos of old-time Seguin on the walls.
Look across Court at a white building, second from the right. Pressed metal in an elaborate pattern adorns the second-floor facade. Known popularly as "pressed tin," this fire-resistant, lightweight, low-cost, and lovely material was widely used indoors from Victorian times until World War II. On an outdoor wall here, the pressed tin has held up well, with care − and plenty of paint!
Keep going to the corner of Camp St.
Lone Star Printing is proud of its showpiece from a long-gone local saloon. Step inside, rest an elbow among the stationery.
Look left, at the oak growing in the street.
Frederick Law Olmsted visited in the 1850s, before he undertook the design of New York's famed Central Park. He wrote that Seguin was "the prettiest town in Texas [because of its] shaggy live oaks, which have been left untouched, in their natural number and position, the streets straying through them ... not always at right angles ... how wonderful." Since his visit, alas, many wonderful live oaks have died to make way for the now-straightened streets.
Turn and cross Court.
A 19th-century building houses Vogue Shoes, where you get old-fashioned service and attention. One of the Mistrot's chain stores was here early in the 20th Century, and it was the first in town to install plate-glass windows. Later the old building was reclad in yellow. Back in the 1930s Libbey-Owens-Ford had co-sponsored a national "Modernize Main Street" promotion and contest. The clean-looking, colored-veneer panels became so widely used by Walgreen's and Rexall that one wit dubbed the style "drug-store modern."
Stay on Camp to Timeless Treasures in mid-block.
Note the terra cotta tile in the facade high above the front door. Glazed terra cotta ("baked earth" in Italian), a fire-resistant material, was fashionable from Victorian times into the 1930s. Peek inside at the antiques and collectibles under the pressed tin ceiling.
Proceed to the corner of Gonzales St.
The building cattycorner was the Post Office from 1936 to 1997, in a fully flowered example of the Mission Revival style. It is law offices today.
The remnant grove around the old Post Office is now called the Ranger Oaks. The first settlers, Rangers from Gonzales, camped here under the canopy of live oaks while surveying the lots. Camp Street takes its title from that fact − so the street's name is older than the town itself!
But some say the name "Ranger Oaks" applied quite specifically to a pair of trees that came to share a tiny island of earth in the middle of Gonzales Street. Well, they're gone, like others that inconvenienced hurrying motorists.
Turn right. Mid-block, peer in the windows at Leon Studio. Leon and Nelda Kubala compiled a record of life in our town since 1944. Timeless shots are rotated in this display.
At Austin, look left.
A time-honored street clock from the 1920s stands in front of today's American Bank of Texas. A block north is the 1916 Aumont Hotel, designed by Atlee B. Ayers. Now apartments there have great views.
Cross Austin.
Stop on the corner and look back.
Citizens State Bank was taken over by its bigger neighbor during the Depression. Its former home, graced by pilasters (columns made part of the wall) topped by Corinthian capitals, was also designed by Atlee Ayers, around 1905.
Continue on Gonzales.
Mid-block on the north side is the Oak, in operation with the same name at this location since Prohibition ended. Or some say before it ended, but with no name! ;-) Stop in for a cool one. Look over the considerable beer can collection. But don't ask for a fancy mixed drink with a little umbrella in it. This ain't that kind of joint − this place serves beer.
Continue to the corner of River St.
Diagonally is our Municipal Building erected in 1935. (A new wing was added in1984.) The stones at the base of the building are full of fossils from an ancient sea. The ship's bell from a World War II liberty ship named for Juan Seguinis inside. And public restrooms
During the Depression, Congress voted public works to create jobs, but with a catch: Local governments had to match the Federal funds. The stock market crash in 1929 had ushered in hard times. Afterwards, most towns could barely afford any new buildings. But this one seemed exempt. Also in 1929, as it happened, the Darst Field had come in nearby, setting off a classic oil boom: fortunes to be made, jobs to be had, supplies to be sold, rooms to be let, and yes, taxes to be paid.
Max Starcke, the mayor in those years, was a big supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He proudly totaled up projects paid in part by local taxes, the rest from Washington: this city hall, the courthouse, a fountain in Central Park, a jail, a system of storm sewers, a wonderful public park along the Guadalupe, a smaller park along Walnut Branch.
And three swimming pools. Three! The largest pool was for the Anglos, of course. One at Ball High was for the Colored, and another one was at Juan Seguin School. This trio was about as close as "separate but equal" as any such facilities ever got to actually being equal under the laws of segregation. Older Black folks from nearby towns still fondly recall summer visits to the pool at Ball, because in those days not even San Antonio had a swimming pool that Black citizens were allowed to use.
Turn right.
This former Baenziger Red & White Food Store is now the Heritage Museum. Exhibits draw from private collections of photos and paintings, antiques and artifacts. Note the display of this town's Black history, featuring the famed Wilson Pottery.
Continue to Court.
On your right, two doors over, is P.J.'s, a nice place to grab a tasty Tex-Mex lunch or a soft drink.
Cross cattycorner to the building with blinded windows. The red-brick, Chicago-style Levy's Dry Goods replaced a wooden store where a German-born pharmacist operated until 1916. Then he built a new building behind it, on the next corner.
Go down Court to the corner of Crockett.
The A. Bergfeld & Co. Drug Store boasted canopies below beveled and stained glass panels. The ceiling had an elaborate pressed-tin border.
The old store burned recently, and today only the sanitary whiteness of a chicken-wire floor recalls that this was once the site of a pharmacy.
Across Court, not much more remains of "The String." Since the 19th century, freed slaves and their descendants have had businesses at this spot.
At the end of the 1920s, Clarence Friday, M.D., a graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., became one of the first Blacks to practice medicine in this state. Dr. Friday set up his office amid a thriving business district that included, at one time or another, retail stores, a barbecue pit, a pool hall, a juke joint or two, a blacksmith shop, a funeral home, a photographer's studio, a dentist's office, and a hotel. In those segregated days, a popular beauty parlor had a front entrance on River St. to serve white ladies, and on this side a back door opened after hours for the Colored customers.
Today, at Meghan's Resale, adjoining what was Dr. Friday's first office, you might find an antique among the junque. The Hot Spot in the corner premises will have a cool beverage to hit the spot on an early evening. And as long as even one Black-owned establishment carries on the timeworn tradition, this corner may be the oldest site in the state continuously occupied by African-American businesses.
Return to River and go left toward the park block.
The Guadalupe County courthouse, built in 1935, is our fourth on this site. It is a youngster compared with most Texas courthouses, and the buildings that face the square. So it does not always get the respect it richly deserves.
Lewis Milton Wirtz and Harold Calhoun were the architects of both the city hall and this striking structure. Calhoun sculpted the bas-reliefs, of Justice and Wisdom, that adorn each entryway. Art Moderne, the sleek, streamlined, smoothed-out variation of the Art Deco style seen here exemplified the period's most progressive architecture. Yet these civic monuments also pay homage to this town's 19th-Century glory.
The modern structures are built of limestone quarried in the Hill Country. Their luminous pale surfaces recall the striking appearance of whitewashed concrete buildings that once stood amid log cabins and live oak trees. Back when this settlement was almost on the frontier of civilization, settlers were early experimenters with using concrete for houses and public buildings. Seguin earned the title, The Mother of Concrete Cities.
Lewis Wirtz's older brother had been the State Senator for this district. As an ally of L.B.J., Alvin Wirtz went on to become head of the LCRA in Austin, then Under Secretary of the Interior in Washington. Perhaps political connections got the recent Rice graduate and his partner this plum assignment. But young Lewis Wirtz excelled here, and went on to a distinguished career in Houston.
Ahead is the Plaza Hotel, now offices.
This has been the tallest building in this part of town since its completion in 1916. The architect, Leo M.J. Dielmann, is credited with many churches, such as our own St. James Catholic, a few blocks away. Like a church, this building has graceful proportions. The wide ground floor and mezzanine are topped by a narrow, soaring tower.
Dances were held on the rooftop under the stars. An old-timer recalls the thrill of seeing the ballplayers entering the hotel when the Chicago White Sox came for spring training in the early 1920s.
Venture through the canopied main entrance on Nolte St. The lobby boasts a mezzanine, and generous use of marble and tile. Prof. Jay C. Henry, the author of Architecture in Texas, 1895-1945, calls this building "the most remarkable" for its fine features among a crop of hotels erected in small cities during the period.
Crossroads Bookstore is run by the Episcopal Church, with its historic sanctuary next door. This fine building once was a garage, another Vivroux family enterprise, and one of the first automobile dealerships in these parts.
We're back at the plaza first called Market Square, now called Central Park. In the 1920s, street lamps were installed as a memorial to the dead of World War I. Those cast-iron lamps illuminated what was proudly called Seguin's White Way. Copies made of a lone survivor of the original set now grace the Historic District.
In the 1930s, the Deco-style fountain was built, illuminated with colored lights. It has been restored. In this century, the fine equestrian statue was erected to honor Juan Seguin, the Tejano hero of the Texas Revolution for whom this town is named.
We've come full circle.