Casimiro Tamayo Building- 947 E. 15th Street, Brownsville, Cameron County TX

We thank Fernando Balli for sharing this document written by architect Stephen Fox with us:

5-7 October 2018

 

I. CONTEXT

The historical context for evaluating the Casimiro Tamayo Building involves the theme of Industry, Business and Commerce and the sub-theme of retail: the development of corner stores in the residential neighborhoods of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brownsville. A second context for evaluating the significance of the Casimiro Tamayo Building involves the theme of Architecture and the sub-theme of commercial architecture as applied to Brownsville during the nineteenth century.   

II. OVERVIEW

The Casimiro Tamayo Building is a one-story, five-bay-long by two-bay-wide brick corner store building at 947 E. 15th Street in the Second Precinct of the Fourth Ward (el Cuatro Dos) of Brownsville, Cameron County, Texas. The property originally consisted of Lots 1 and 2, Block 118 of the Original Townsite of Brownsville at the southwest corner of E. 15th Street and E. Monroe Street. The Tamayo Building occupies the north half of Lot 1.  A brick wall built along the sidewalk along E. Monroe Street encloses the street front of Lot 1, containing the building’s rear patio. The Sanborn fire insurance map of 1906, the first edition in which this block was mapped, shows this wall as outlining the Monroe Street frontage of Lots 1 and 2. It now outlines only Lot 1, then turns to follow the west side property line between Lots 1 and 2 as a concrete block wall.  A one-story brick house on Lot 2 and a one-story, side-gabled wood cottage with inset veranda at 927 (also numbered 931) E. 15th Street on the south half of Lot 1 shown in the Sanborn maps of 1906, 1914, 1919, 1926, 1930, and 1930/1949 no longer exist. The Tamayo Building is constructed of locally made mesquite-fired brick and exhibits the gold-to-rose color blend typical of this brick. The brick is laid in running bond. The five openings on the E. 15th Street (east) elevation are spanned by flat structural arches of gauged brick. Each opening contains a barred horizontal transom, beneath which are three pairs of double-leaf doors (the central entrance and the openings to the north) and two pairs of casement windows (the openings to the south of the central entrance). Solid wood shutters of chevron patterned construction with wrought iron hardware frame each opening. A single opening containing a barred transom and double-leaf shuttered doors faces E. Monroe Street.  A three-layer corbelled belt course at the level of the roof spans the E. 15th and E. Monroe elevations of the building. A tall parapet rising above the belt course conceals the shallowly pitched roof from the street faces of the building. Notations in the Sanborn maps indicate the exterior wall is fifteen feet high and that the roof is a brick roof. These material and design attributes identify the Tamayo Building an example of the Border Brick Style, a transnational architectural vernacular that took form in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, across the Río Grande from Brownsville, in the 1820s and ‘30s and dominated building practices along the Tamaulipas-Texas border until the early twentieth century.

The Tamayo Building was part of a residential compound associated with Casimiro Tamayo (1837-1910), who acquired this property in a series of seven transactions between 1877 and 1879 from his sister-in-law, María del Carmen Levrier (1831-1907), widow of a French immigrant, Louis Renaud (1818-1872), and six of their children. Renaud bought the two lots separately in 1868 and 1870.[1] Tamayo and his first wife, Josefa Levrier (1847-1901), were from El Frontón de Santa Isabel (Point/Port Isabel).[2] Mrs. Tamayo and Mrs. Renaud were the daughters of a French immigrant baker, Andrés Levrier, and a Mexican mother, María Micaela Longoria.[3] Casimiro Tamayo’s death certificate indicates he was born at Rancho La Cañada, Tamaulipas, the son of Filomeno Tamayo, born in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, and María Paula Cisneros, born in Matamoros. His occupation was listed as merchant and stockraiser.[4] By 1891 Tamayo owned 1,100 acres in Share No. 25 of the Potrero del Espíritu Santo land grant.[5] He held elected office as Cameron County’s Inspector of Hides and Animals during the 1890s and his “frame building” at 15th and Monroe served as the polling station for Brownsville’s Fourth Ward in the early 1900s.[6] After the death of his first wife, Tamayo married a second time to Luciana Galván in 1903; their son Roberto was born in 1909.[7] Tamayo’s son Valentín Tamayo (1868-1905) served two terms as City Marshall of Brownsville (1894-98) and was Deputy County Clerk of Cameron County (1902-05).[8] His youngest son by his first marriage, Casimiro Tamayo, Jr. (1880-1914), was a Deputy Constable of Cameron County.[9] Casimiro Tamayo, Jr., was shot and killed by a Brownsville policeman on 30 October 1914 after Tamayo shot and wounded the Brownsville builder Domingo V. Farías in an unprovoked attack, then fired at the policeman.[10]  Casimiro Tamayo’s eldest son, Vicente Tamayo (1867-1919), lived in Brownsville, as did his daughters, Paula Tamayo (d. 1905; Mrs. Benito Esparza), Refugio Tamayo (1875-1930; Mrs. Justino Garza), Guadalupe Tamayo (Mrs. Francisco Esparza), and Rosa Tamayo (1878-1941; Mrs. Juan Bouis).[11]

The first edition of the Sanborn maps to map this site in 1906 designated the brick corner building at 947 E. 15th Street as a dwelling. The wood cottage at 927 (931) E. 15th Street, built along the alley line, was also designated as a dwelling, as was a no-longer-extant one-story brick house on Lot 2, which was marked “Mexican tenement” (“tenement” indicated a house built to be rented). A one-story wood porch, no longer extant, spanned the rear of the corner building. The next edition of the Sanborn map, 1914, labels the building at 947 E. 15th Street a “grocery.” It shows a wood canopy structure projecting above the E. 15th and E. Monroe street fronts that no longer exists. The 1919 and 1926 editions maintain these conditions. By 1930, the corner building was labeled “vacant” and in the 1930/1949 edition it was labeled “ruins” and “vacant.” Brownsville city directory listings are sketchy for this northeastern corner of the Original Townsite. In the 1913-14, 1927, and 1929-30 editions, many listings on E. 15th Street and E. Monroe Street do not have street numbers.  The 1942 directory lists Juan Barbosa as living at 933 E. 15th Street and the butcher Angel Barbosa as doing business at 945 E. 15th Street; Juan Angel Barbosa (1889-1965) was one person—and a butcher by trade. The 1948 city directory lists an occupant identified only as Anzaldúa as living at 927 E. 15th. The 1968 Brownsville city directory lists Emilia Méndez and Nicéforo P. Anzaldúa (1892-1969) and a student, Miss Rosa M. Anzaldúa, as living at 927 E. 15th.

The Casimiro Tamayo Building is an example of the brick-built corner store building type, which proliferated in Brownsville in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It relates to the theme of Industry, Business, and Commerce, and the sub-theme of retail trade in nineteenth-century Brownsville. The Tamayo Building is associated with ways of doing business that in Brownsville were rooted in nineteenth-century commercial practices before the advent of indoor plumbing, electricity, and refrigeration altered the ways food and household products were bought and sold in Brownsville. The decline of this cultural economy is addressed in an essay published in 1930 by Jovita González in the Southwest Review, “America Invades the Border Towns.”[12] González describes the disruptive impact of American chain stores on the Mexican-American neighborhood merchants of the borderland as part of the broader wave of modernization that accelerated dramatically after completion in 1904 of the St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico Railway linked Brownsville to the rest of Texas. The Tamayo Building’s architectural restraint and conservatism reflect resistance to the modernization of retail business trade after railroad access made a much wider array of nationally advertised and distributed products available locally than had been the case before 1904 and advances in technology made it possible to preserve perishable foodstuffs through refrigeration.

The Casimiro Tamayo Building is also significant with respect to the theme of Architecture and the sub-theme of commercial architecture in Brownsville in the late nineteenth century. The Tamayo Building is an example of the Matamoros merchant’s house type and the Border Brick Style, a transnational architectural vernacular that took form in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in the 1820s and 1830s and by the end of the nineteenth century had migrated as far upriver as Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, two hundred miles northwest of Brownsville and Matamoros. The Border Brick Style initially represented a merger of Mexican vernacular building typology—one-room-deep houses lining the street fronts of a property to enclose an open-air internal patio—with construction practices—brick as the principal material of construction and use of French doors instead of sash windows—transmitted to the lower Río Grande from Creole New Orleans. New Orleans was Matamoros’s chief trading partner in the nineteenth century and it supplied not only foreign merchants but also building professionals to the Matamoros market.[13] After the Civil War, the Matamoros Border Brick Style began to be characterized by elaborate decoration constructed with molded brick. In post Civil War Brownsville, the architect-builders S. W. Brooks (1829-1903), the Norwegian immigrant Martin Hanson (1825-1902) and his son, Martin Hanson, Jr. (1857-1916), and James McCoy (1863-1925) produced distinctive examples of the Border Brick Style, perpetuating not only the ornamental details associated with this vernacular but also the use of such Mexican building typologies as the Matamoros merchant’s house.[14]

The (now defaced) Fernández-Schodts Building at 1049 E. Washington Street (c. 1867), the M. Alonso complex at 510-514 W. St. Charles Street, the J. H. Fernández y Hermano Building at 1200-1220 E. Adams Street (1884, 1894), the Celedonio Garza Building at 1247 E. Madison Street (1886), the Miguel Fernández Building at 1101-21 E. Adams Street (1890, 1894), La Madrileña, the Adrián Ortiz Building at 1002 E. Madison Street (1892, James McCoy and Modesto Adame, builders), El Alamo, the Lucio Bouis store at 900 E. Adams Street (1893), La Nueva Libertad, the Andrés Cueto complex at 1301-1311 E. Madison Street (1893), the H. M. Field & Company (Field-Pacheco) complex at 1049 E. Monroe Street (1894), El Globo Nuevo, the Adolfo Garza complex at 1502 E. Madison Street (1897), and the Fernández & Laiseca Building at 1142-1154 E. Madison Street (1915) are the major surviving examples of Border Brick Style corner store complexes in Brownsville. The Tamayo Building is small in scale and modest in architectural detail when compared to the foremost examples of this type and style. Although the companion house at 927 (931) E. 15th Street and the freestanding back brick building shown in Sanborn maps no longer survive, they comprised a live-work compound that remains intact at the Adolfo Garza, Field-Pacheco, Andrés Cueto, and M. Alonso buildings. One- and two-story brick merchant’s houses are extant in Port Isabel, Hidalgo,Río Grande City, Roma, San Ygnacio, San Diego, and Laredo, Texas, and, on a larger scale, in Matamoros, El Soliseño, Camargo, Mier, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

III. SIGNIFICANCE

The Casimiro Tamayo Building is significant as the location of a building that served interchangeably as retail and residential accommodations and contributed to patterns of neighborhood-based food retailing characteristic of towns along the Texas-Tamaulipas border in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It exemplifies the space planning, urbanistic, and architectural features characteristic of the brick-built Matamoros merchant’s house type in Brownsville and other towns of the Texas-Tamaulipas borderlands.

 

IV. DOCUMENTATION

Bay, Betty, Historic Brownsville: Original Townsite Guide, Brownsville: Brownsville Historical Association, 1980,.

Chatfield, Lt. W. H. Jr., The Twin Cities of the Border, Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, and the Country of the Lower Río Grande, New Orleans: E. P. Brandao, 1893.

González, Jovita, “America Invades The Border Towns,” Southwest Review, 15 (Summer 1930).

Studies in Brownsville and Matamoros History, ed. Milo Kearney, Anthony Knopp, and Antonio Zavaleta, Brownsville: University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College, 1995.

Newspapers

Brownsville Herald

City Directories

1913-14, 1927, 1929-30, 1938-39, 1940, 1942, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1955-56, 1968

H. M. Skelton, Abstracts of Title.

Maps

Sanborn Maps of Brownsville, Texas: 1877, 1885, 1894, 1906, 1914, 1919, 1926, 1930, 1930/1949

Genealogical websites

http://www.villadan.com/webcards/ps13/ps13_267.htm

https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/renaud/487/

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[1] H. M. Skelton Abstracts of Title, Brownsville, Block 118. On the Renaud (sometimes spelled Renand)-Levrier family, see http://www.villadan.com/webcards/ps13/ps13_267.htm, and https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/renaud/487/.

[2] See the entry for the household of Filomeno and Pabla Tamayo in the U.S. Census of 1860 for Cameron County TX.

[3] See the entry for the household of Andrés and Micaela (mispelled Migrila) Levrier, Point Isabel TX, in the U.S. Census of 1860.

[4] Texas Deaths: Casimin (sic) Tamayo, 6 August 1910. Dr. Alfredo Pumarejo Lafaurie of Matamoros signed the medical portion of Tamayo’s death certificate. Betty Bay expands on Tamayo’s ancestry in Historic Brownsville: Original Townsite Guide, Brownsville: Brownsville Historical Association, 1980, p. 148.

[5] As rendered in the Cameron County TX county tax rolls of 1887, 1889, 1891, and 1893. Casimiro Tamayo’s eldest son, Vicente Tamayo, sold 595 acres out of share No. 25, Espíritu Santo grant, to Louis Champion in 1907; “Realty Transfers,” Brownsville Herald, 18 October 1907, p. 4.

[6] “Directory,” Brownsville Herald, 5 January 1893, p. 4; “Election Returns,” Brownsville Herald, 17 November 1900, p. 3; “Notice of City Election,” Brownsville Herald, 26 March 1906, p. 2.

[7] See the entry for the household of Casimiro Tamayo, Brownsville TX, U.S. Census of 1910.

[8] “Valentín Tamayo Dead,” Brownsville Herald, 17 April 1905, p. 1.

[9] “Policeman Fined,” Brownsville Herald, 11 February 1914, p. 3.

[10] “Shoots Citizen, Gun Toter Himself Was Killed,” Brownsville Herald, 31 October 1914, pp. 1, 3.

[11] “Death of Vicente Tamayo,” Brownsville Herald, 10 May 1919, p. 4; “Necrologías,” El Heraldo de Brownsville, 29 September 1941, p. 1.

[12] Jovita González, “America Invades The Border Towns,” Southwest Review, 15 (Summer 1930), p. 471.

[13] Stephen Fox, “Architecture in Brownsville: The Nineteenth Century,” in Studies in Brownsville and Matamoros History, ed. Milo Kearney, Anthony Knopp, and Antonio Zavaleta, Brownsville: University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College, 1995, 201-205.

[14] “Death of S. W. Brooks,” Brownsville Herald, 16 February 1903, p. 3; “Drowned in the River,” Brownsville Herald, 22 November 1902, p. 3; “James McCoy, Pioneer and Friend of Poor, Dies Here,” Brownsville Herald, 17 November 1925, pp. 1-2.