Gribble-Hofheinz House

Hofheinz, born in Beaumont on April 10, 1912, graduated from the Houston Law School at nineteen, sat in the Texas House from 1934 to 1936 and was Harris County judge from 1936 to 1944. Elected mayor of Houston in 1952, he had four council members arrested in 1954 for boycotting a meeting he had called, and when the council voted to impeach him in 1955 he refused to recognize it. A stroke in 1970 left him in a wheelchair, and by 1975 his Astrodomain, $38 million in debt, had passed to two credit companies.

What the plaque says

Gribble-Hofheinz House Constructed in 1896 as the summer home of prominent Houston businessman Risdon D. Gribble (1836-1907) and his wife Adelaide (8141-1926), this house was oriented toward the water to take advantage of bay breezes. Flamboyant Houston businessman and politician Roy M. Hofheinz (1912-1982) bought the house from the Gribbles' descendants in 1950. Judge Hofheinz, developer of the Astrodome and part owner of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, decorated rooms in a circus theme and named it "Huckster House." It remained in his family until 1987. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 7.5 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 9.9 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 22 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 23 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

• Bay Ridge / Morgan's Point — 0.3 mi
• New Washington — 0.5 mi
• Morgan's Point Cemetery — 0.9 mi
• Saint Mary's Seminary — 1.0 mi