Kauffman and Runge Building (Stewart Title) - Galveston, TX - Victorian Style Architecture on Waymarking.com

From the National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form

The Strand Historic District (Period of Significance Amendment), Galveston, Galveston County, Texas

76. Kauffman and Runge Building
1882 (Eugene T. Heiner), 1905 (Charles W. Bulger)
Alias Stewart Title Building
220-222 22nd Street Lots 13 and 14 Block 621
Contributing building
High Victorian/Italian Renaissance Revival

The Kauffman and Runge Building stands at the northeast corner of Mechanic and 22nd Street, serving as a central landmark in a manner analogous to the role played by the W.L. Moody Building on the Strand. The four-story building has ten bays on its southern elevation addressing Mechanic and 14 bays on its western elevation facing 22nd. Both elevations display painted-brick bodies with first-story arched entryways and arched four-over-four wooden sash windows in each bay of the upper stories. The gable roof is hidden by a parapet. To design the building, merchants Julius Kauffman and Julius Runge hired architect Eugene T. Heiner, who employed a modernized Victorian version of the Italian Renaissance style for which he is commonly known. The building lost its original cornice in the 1900 Hurricane. In 1905, Maco Stewart purchased the building to serve as headquarters for the Stewart Title Company. He hired architect C.W. Bulger to create a renovation plan. At some point in the twentieth century, the exterior bricks were painted red. In 1977, Stewart Title hired architect David V. Barker to repair the building and restore the pre-1900 cornice.

Biographical Notes on Architects

Eugene T. Heiner

Born 1852 in New York, Heiner trained in Chicago before relocating to Texas in 1877. He settled in Houston in 1878, but designed several noteworthy buildings in Galveston County. He won competitions to design the 1878 Galveston County Jail and the 1881 expansion of the Galveston County Courthouse. His contributions to the district are the 1879 Leon and H. Blum Building (2310-28 Mechanic) and the 1882 Kauffman and Runge Building (220-222 22nd Street). Both buildings are examples of High Victorian Renaissance Revival.

Renaissance influences, Eugene T. Heiner and Nicholas J. Clayton (1879-1884)

The district features ten buildings categorized here as High Victorian, including a few with Italianate and Renaissance influences (see below). Seven of these buildings date to 1877-78 and the remaining three date to 1882.

At the beginning of the 1880s, Galveston’s commercial activity and continued diversification fostered architectural development in style and scale. In the 1879 and 1882 Leon and H. Blum Building (2310-28 Mechanic) and the 1882 Kauffman and Runge Building (220-222 22nd Street), Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner introduced two of the district’s most massive buildings, each demonstrating Renaissance Revival influences. The buildings are distinguished by their dense configurations of arched openings, which give the impression of stacked arcades of various shapes. The Blum building has segmental arches on the first story, basket arches on the second, and semicircular on the third. At the Kauffman and Runge building, the first story has large, elliptical arches and the upper stories have flat, basket,segmental, and rounded arches. Both buildings were constructed to demonstrate the rapidly expanding wealth of their respective firms.

Howard Barnstone characterized the Kauffman and Runge Building as “straightforward,” “standard,” and “something rushed through to completion,” befitting the circumstances of its construction, in which booming commercial meant that any efficiencies in design would result in lost business opportunity.93 Nonetheless, Heiner managed to instill traces of the Italian Renaissance through flourishes of white stone and pressed brick of multiple colors. However, these polychromatic effects, weakened by the twentieth century application of red paint to the exterior brick, paled in comparison to those that Nicholas Clayton incorporated in the neighboring 1882 Trueheart and Company Building (212 22nd Street).