City Hall and Market House

The building belongs to the years Laredo changed. The Laredo Times began in 1881, the year the Texas Mexican and the International and Great Northern railroads arrived. Streets were graded and graveled in 1882, and the first public school since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo opened, though Laredo's first had come in 1783. Population climbed from 3,521 in 1880 to 13,429 by 1900. As Anglo newcomers multiplied, the Handbook says, intermarriage declined and a separate Anglo society grew beside the original Mexican community.

What the plaque says

City Hall and Market House In the early 1880s several railroad lines were built into Laredo from both the United States and Mexico, resulting in a major economic boom for the city. Laredo's population tripled in size with the arrival of U.S. and Mexican immigrants, and city leaders began planning for larger municipal offices to replace a smaller facility on the south side of St. Augustine Plaza. The construction of this city hall and market house complex in 1883-84 led to a rapid shift of community activity away from St. Augustine Plaza and toward this site. The city hall housed offices of the mayor and other city officials, city council chambers, and an auditorium. Later public uses of the building included a skating rink, library, and temporary quarters for Laredo High School in 1916-17. The adjacent market house provided indoor retail space to merchants who had previously operated from open-air stalls on the site. By 1930 it was converted into office space and an arena for local athletic events. Although the city hall and market house complex has been significantly altered over the years, it remains an important landmark and link to Laredo's late 19th-century development. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Cathedral — steps away
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• San Agustín Plaza — steps away
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — steps away
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 1.0 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• Laredo's Washington's Birthday Celebration — steps away
• The Ramón Family — steps away
• Laredo Election Riot, 1886 — steps away
• Benavides Brothers — steps away