The Houston Club

The plaque says the club moved to this site in 1955, but it was written when the club stood elsewhere. For more than fifty years members met in a downtown high-rise Jesse Jones built for them at 811 Rusk Street. After that building was sold to Skanska in 2011, the club merged with the Plaza Club, kept its own name and in 2013 moved into the Plaza Club's quarters on the 49th floor of One Shell Plaza, renovated by Gensler for $3.5 million. The Rusk Street building was set for implosion in October 2014. The club is private.

What the plaque says

The Houston Club Chartered in 1894, the Houston Club began as a gentlemen-only club for literary discourse. In the 1920s, it became more business oriented through association with the Houston Chamber of Commerce. Its membership has included such notable civic and professional leaders as William Marsh Rice, John Henry Kirby, Jesse H. Jones, M.D. Anderson, Hugh Roy Cullen, Tobias Sakowitz and Ben Taub, among many others. The club expanded its member base with the first African American member joining in 1981 and the first woman in 1982. The club, which moved to this site in 1955, remains a significant center of business, social, cultural and philanthropic influence within the city. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.4 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Emancipation Park — 1.6 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 — 1.8 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.4 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.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Organization of Lady Washington Chapter, NSDAR — steps away
• Edward Mandell House — 0.2 mi
• Thomas William House, Jr. — 0.2 mi
• Christ Church Cathedral — 0.2 mi