Home of John S. Chase, state’s very first Black architect, goes on the market

The house arrives with the cachet of having been intended and lived in by Chase, Texas’ 1st Black licensed architect and the initially Black scholar to enroll at the College of Texas in 1950 to show up at its architecture college. After graduating, the Globe War II veteran observed wonderful opportunity in Houston and moved below with his spouse, Drucie, who was a university teacher.

He made this dwelling for himself and his household, beginning as a one-story household with an interior atrium and later on adding a 2nd tale to achieve 5,099 sq. feet on a much more than 16,000-sq.-foot great deal in Riverside Terrace in Houston’s 3rd Ward.

Riverside Terrace was established in the 1920s and for several a long time was known as “the Jewish River Oaks.” In the 1950s and ’60s, affluent Black households started relocating to the neighborhood, and it continues to be a numerous neighborhood with far more affluent and middle-course citizens.

When Chase died in 2012, he and and his spouse, Drucie, experienced been married 62 years. She died before this 12 months in January.

The house has been in the Chase relatives since it was crafted, and in the course of the a long time they lived there it was a heart of society in the city.

Chase built his apply by way of intense networking, attending Black churches all in excess of the metropolis and condition, permitting residents know there was a certified Black architect in the point out completely ready to layout properties for them.

“(My father) was a amazing marketer. He seriously was,” claimed his son, Tony Chase, a tenured legislation professor at the University of Houston. “For the first 15 a long time of my daily life I went to a various church every single Sunday. We’d go to Tyler and Wichita Falls and all in excess of Texas. They would introduce him and converse about their constructing fund and go the plate. He was sort of a superstar just about everywhere he went.”

The property was written about in a monograph by David Heymann, a College of Texas architecture school professor who wrote “John S. Chase – the Chase Residence” final yr.

“John Chase was the seed for a complete era of Black architects in Texas. For a although, there ended up no Black architects who did not work for John Chase. Everyone arrived via that business in Houston,” Heymann explained in an job interview very last year about the e book.

Contemporary style and design in residential architecture was just using off in the town when Chase arrived on the scene and Heymann described the Chase property as Houston’s 1st modernist property with a centralized inside courtyard, enclosed on all four sides almost as its personal space.

That courtyard had a small pond with fish in it, and Tony Chase remembered that his close friends generally commented that they had a lake in their home.

From this property, John and Drucie Chase and their buddies held court. If you ended up functioning for a area or point out office, you stopped by the Chase home and met with him and his pals, who often donated to candidates’ campaigns as a group.

The Chases’ daughter, Saundria Chase Grey, remembers a fund raiser for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign with actor Gregory Peck as a specific visitor. U.S. Reps. Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland were being standard company, as were U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. Athletes arrived all over, too, including Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Jimmy Wynn.