1714 Avenue M 1/2 - Lost Bayou Historic District - Galveston, TX - NRHP Historic Districts - Contributing Buildings on Waymarking.com

United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
Lost Bayou Historic District, Galveston, Galveston County, Texas Section 7 - Page 24

Table 1. Inventory of Resources in the Lost Bayou Historic District.
PIDN: 688237
Address: 1714 Ave. M 1/2
Property Type: Single-Family House, Center Passage
Stylistic Influences: Folk Victorian
Year Built: 1890
Contributing Status: Contributing

Center Passage, 1890 | 1714 Avenue M 1/2

This center-passage house represents a typical and common type of house found within Lost Bayou. Built in 1890, for around $1,800, the house originally had four rooms, two halls, and one bathroom. Owned by Pauline Loebenstein in 1901, the house was rented out to tenants. City directories from the 1910s through the 1940s indicate the house continued to be rented out rather than owner occupied. The two-story, center-passage raised house has five bays and a side gable roof with two dormers. The house is clad in horizontal wood board siding, and its full-width porch is inset under the roof. The porch has decorative Folk Victorian wood spindlework. A double-door primary entrance with transom is flanked by two double-hung windows on either side.

Statement of Significance

The Lost Bayou Historic District is a residential area in Galveston that includes a cohesive collection of mid-to-late nineteenth- and early-to-mid twentieth-century residences. Roughly bound by the alley north of Avenue K, 21st Street (Moody Avenue) to the west, the alleys south of avenues M 1/2 and M, and 16th and 14th streets to the east, the district presents a mix of popular architectural forms and styles from multiple eras. The neighborhood’s mixed housing stock not only reflects some of Galveston’s most significant events and periods in its history, but the variety of house styles and plans also reflects how these events impacted residential and neighborhood development. The district also reflects the building trends and patterns of less-affluent neighborhoods in the city. Developed on land shared with Hitchcock’s Bayou, which was eventually filled in and “lost,” this area was considered “subpar” in comparison to land north of Broadway Street - including what became the East End neighborhood - and therefore primarily became home to the working and middle classes. As such, Lost Bayou consists largely of modest-sized homes, and is considered one of the best collections of standard architecture - commonly built using standardized plans and readily available construction materials - in Galveston. Though most of the houses in the district represent common types and styles for their era, several larger, more ornate houses are dotted throughout the neighborhood and notable architects Nicholas Clayton and Alfred Muller, among others, are represented in Lost Bayou. The Lost Bayou Historic District is nominated under Criterion C in the area of Architecture at the local level of significance, and 401 resources contribute to the historic district. The period of significance for the Lost Bayou Historic District begins in 1856—the date of the oldest building in the district-and stretches to 1940. By 1940, the major periods of development within the Lost Bayou historic district were over and all the most-significant buildings were extant. Additionally, building construction after 1940 was minimal, sporadic, and did not reflect important postwar architectural trends.