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Downtown Movie Theater Tunnels


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I'm cleaning out some old e-mail today and came across an interesting letter from an HAI reader about the downtown tunnels that existed before the downtown tunnel system.

In the early 1930s, Horwitz was planning to air-condition his three vaudeville/movie theaters located in downtown Houston. The Iris was located on Travis Street where JPMorgan Chase Center stands today. The Texan was on Capitol Street, where JPMorgan Chase Tower now rises, and the Uptown Theater was across the street where the Houston Club Building is located. Realizing that his air-conditioning project would require excavating the basements under the three theaters, Horwitz decided to connect the them with a tunnel. The tunnel became part of Horwitz\'s Uptown Center project, which included shops and restaurants upstairs and a penny arcade and a German wine tavern downstairs.Horwitz died on Christmas Day in 1941. One by one, his theaters also died. The Texan was razed in 1953 and, by 1968, Horwitz\'s tunnel was filled with debris.While Ross Sterling, owner and publisher of what became the Houston Post, was connecting his two buildings on Fannin at Texas with a tunnel, Jesse Jones, later publisher of what became the Houston Chronicle, completed the Gulf Building, known today as the JPMorgan Chase Building. Jones ran two tunnels through his building\'s basement - low, narrow tunnels constructed in 1929, one month before the stock market crashed.Both of these well before the 1947 construction start date of the Foley\'s building.
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I'm cleaning out some old e-mail today and came across an interesting letter from an HAI reader about the downtown tunnels that existed before the downtown tunnel system.

The only ones I clearly knew of were the ones at Allen Center mini-theaters in mid 70's and the one short tunnel connecting the Foley's parking garage to the basement department store area of Foley's.

Mom worked in vicinities of areas you mentioned and she and all workers knew nothing of these tunnels described at least around 1944-1953. Sure they may have existed but were maybe changed to loading elevators, etc. If kids/teenagers knew about it, I guarantee you we would have been playing in them all the time (in mid 70's anyway). :P

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I'm cleaning out some old e-mail today and came across an interesting letter from an HAI reader about the downtown tunnels that existed before the downtown tunnel system.

The two Ross Sterling buildings on Fannin at Texas were connected by tunnels? Interesting. I've never seen any other reference to that.

One of the Fuermann books from the late 1960s has a photo of people in the tunnel section around 806 Main, and the 1971 AIA guide has a tunnel map, so I'm guessing a lot of the system was built in the 1960s around the time of construction of the Civic Center garage/Jones Hall.

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The Tunnel Lady.

I knew I had seen this article somewhere, found it in the NYT.

The information about radio history in the first article is crap. Ross Sterling did not buy KPRC in 1924, it didn't exist then. And he didn't buy it from Will Horwitz, he started it anew in May, 1925, putting Will Horwitz's WEAY out of business.

I hope the rest of her 'history' is more reliable.

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