City of West University Place

The plaque starts with Hooper's investors; the Handbook picks up when lots actually sold. A. D. Foreman sold the first ones in 1917 and named the development for nearby Rice Institute, and about forty families lived here in 1923. A 1940 home-rule charter brought council-manager government, and the town kept its own water and sewage plants, police and fire department. Zoning and other restrictions, the Handbook says, kept it ethnically and economically uniform. Growth around 1940 was said to rank second in the nation, from 1,322 people in 1930 to 9,221 in 1942. By 1948 Houston surrounded it completely.

What the plaque says

City of West University Place Tennessee politician Ben W. Hooper led investors in forming the West End Realty Co. in 1910. They chose land near Rice Institute, which opened in 1912, and created West University Place, connected to Houston by streetcar. Homesites sold primarily to young, middle-class families. Trying to address the area's frequent flooding, citizens incorporated in 1924, electing L.B. Ryon as mayor. The city's second mayor, Harold B. Schlesinger, helped develop a strong infrastructure. With several additions, the city grew to its current size, approximately two square miles. Today, the independent, viable community features park space and other amenities for its several thousand residents. (2004)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 2.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 2.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.0 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 3.9 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Southside Place Park — 0.3 mi
• Harris County Poor Farm — 0.6 mi
• Teas Nursery Company — 1.0 mi
• Texan Capture of Mexican Dispatches (San Jacinto) — 1.7 mi