As we noted yesterday, the Doyle house on Heights Boulevard is no more — and Harry James, the man who had it demolished, is pissed off that anyone tried to save it. In an e-mail to the Chronicle, James said the house was beyond repair:
"This house is not a historic mansion, as is being classified in the media by my opponents. It sat in disrepair for 35 years, without any occupants and with major water leaks for decades," James said in an e-mail Wednesday afternoon. "The house has deteriorated to the point where it is rotten and unhealthy. Any reasonable person could see that it was neglected too long by the previous owner and heirs.""I gave the HHA almost two weeks to submit to me an offer to purchase it, but never received anything except verbal amounts that were a lot less than what my costs were to acquire the property," James said.
"I have plans to build a magnificent Classic Victorian that will be part of the future history of the Heights," James said. "Some times you have to ring out the old, and ring in the new."
For the record, the Doyle house was built in 1906 by William A. Wilson, a Heights developer who went on to build Woodland Heights the following year; according to city preservation officer Randy Pace, the house had some architectural elements that can't be found anywhere else in Houston. Not a historic mansion? If you say so, Mr. James.
James's motivation in getting rid of the Doyle house is to continue his quest to rebuild the Heights by demolishing classic Victorian homes to make way for his "Victorian classics." James has built six so far on Heights Boulevard, nine on Oxford Street, one on Courtland Street and another on Arlington Street, and he told the Chronicle that "Everything that I've built has been an improvement over what was there before." There are some pictures on James's website — check them out and judge for yourself. (If you want to live in a fake Victorian, James's own house at 2110 Oxford — whose design was supposedly inspired by San Francisco's famed "Painted Ladies" row houses — is on the market now.)
David Bush of Greater Houston Preservation Alliance told Houstonist on Tuesday that James said he'd be willing to sell the Doyle house for between $800,000 and $900,000, but as James told the Chronicle, no one bit: "I gave the [Houston Heights Association] almost two weeks to submit to me an offer to purchase it, but never received anything except verbal amounts that were a lot less than what my costs were to acquire the property," he said. (For the record, the 2007 appraisal of the property is about $290,000.)
As we've noted before, the best chance at protection for structures in Houston's historic neighborhoods is the 90-day waiting period that comes when a demolition request is refused by the Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission. However, that waiting period doesn't apply to the Heights because Heights residents haven't approved the neighborhood's designation as a city historic district. The HHA is working to create two city historic districts covering the Heights, but it has to get the signatures of people who own 51 percent of the land in the proposed districts — and in the meantime, about two and a half historic homes are being demolished in the Heights each week. They'd better hurry.
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