What remains of the Ben Milam Hotel across from Union Station will soon be gone.
The 10-story Ben Milam Hotel on Crawford at Texas Avenue came to life in 1928, across the street from Union Station, the city’s major long distance land depot to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. By 1932, the Ben Milam proudly advertised itself to the world as Houston’s only completely air-conditioned building. It’s a safe bet that those guests who traveled to Houston in the summer of 1928 to attend the 1928 Democratic National Convention would have appreciated the AC news even better, had the hotel started that way.
Maybe there’s a crate of old registration books packed away somewhere that will give us a better clue as to the names of all the world-famous people who stayed at “The Ben” during its hay-day. Along that line, Pecan Park Eagle reader Peter Denman wrote us this interesting back story on the Ben Milam this past weekend in response to the Sunday column about the SABR’s National Meeting story: “Dizzy Dean lived at the Ben Milam in 1931. If anyone in SABR is interested in Diz, there is an old magazine called the Gargoyle which they have down at the Houston Public Library, and one issue of it has a great interview with Dizzy in it which was conducted in his room at the Ben Milam.”
Wow! Those of us working on the Houston early baseball history book need to search out that issue of the Gargoyle to see what Old Diz had to say back in 1931. He apparently lived at The Ben a year prior to full air conditioning and we have no idea if that upgrade occurred gradually enough to have comforted the great young pitcher a year earlier – or if everyone had to wait until 1932 for it to arrive in one fell swooping flick of the power-on button.
Most of us emerging blue-collar middle class Houstonians of that earlier time didn’t feel the blast of home window air conditioning (and at first, only on a one-at-a-time-for-your-favorite-house-room-basis) until 1957. Until then, we lived through summers, damp-cool under the sucking breath of home attic fans and hot as hell in church with small undertaker-advertising-underwritten hand fans. Otherwise, we refrigerated ourselves as Texas cucumbers in one of the city’s many air-conditioned movie theaters. Night baseball was tolerable weather when the gulf breezes blew well into Houston from the coast, but if they died down, the Houston mosquito family took over the night. Those were the days, my friend.
At any rate, getting back to our central character for the day, the now deceased Ben Milam Hotel. It would have been a beautiful, but expensive restoration piece, but those costs, and the limited projections on income from its smaller space availablity to developers won out. As reader Bob Copus wrote in response to the same column this past weekend: “Due to the business I am in, I had many opportunities to get inside the Ben Milam Hotel within the last few years. It was the first hotel with air conditioning in Houston. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to enter the hotel, deterioration had set in and vagrants made their presence known. The site is going to become a multi-family hi-rise with retail and restaurant(s) on floor 1.”
Unfortunately, the now explosive new panorama of downtown Houston that is available only as a view from the highest points of the right field seats at Minute Maid Park (above the unspeakable internal signage), will be short-lived. Local historian and Executive Director of Houston Arts and Media Mike Vance explains clearly in a comment on yesterday’s signage column why we need to check out the new view early in the new season: “The giant new structure that will be built where the Ben Milam Hotel once stood will block not only the view, but much of the evening sun. Such is life in a city run by developers with no zoning or height/sight line restrictions such as exist in most every other city in the United States.”
This is Houston, folks. We’re getting better at historical preservation, but when the developers and their money talk hard, it’s “tear it down and build something new that makes bigger money now” time again.
At least, the developers will no longer have to worry about the Ben Milam getting in the way of progress. Nothing remains of it now, but a disappearing mountain of concrete rubble and a giant hole in the ground.
Have a nice Tuesday, everybody!
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 29, 2013 at 2:51 pm |
The first time I went to this vacant hotel back in 1988, I encountered a stray bulldog living in the parking garage. When I first met him (from a distance), he had something in his mouth. Upon closer examination, I realized he was carrying around 1/2 a bowling ball. That, along with the broken 4′ chain he was dragging around his neck, prompted me to leave the site immediately.
Bob Copus
January 29, 2013 at 3:57 pm |
Hey Bob I thought maybe that was how you met Eduardo since he loves his English Bulldogs.