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 RÃo
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, MarÃa 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. Tamayo and his first wife,
Josefa Levrier (1847-1901), were from El Frontón de Santa Isabel (Point/Port
Isabel). Mrs. Tamayo and Mrs. Renaud
were the daughters of a French immigrant baker, Andrés Levrier, and a Mexican
mother, MarÃa Micaela Longoria. Casimiro Tamayo’s death
certificate indicates he was born at Rancho La Cañada, Tamaulipas, the son of
Filomeno Tamayo, born in Guerrero, Tamaulipas, and MarÃa Paula Cisneros, born
in Matamoros. His occupation was listed as merchant and stockraiser. By 1891 Tamayo owned 1,100
acres in Share No. 25 of the Potrero del EspÃritu Santo land grant. 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. After the death of his
first wife, Tamayo married a second time to Luciana Galván in 1903; their son
Roberto was born in 1909. Tamayo’s son ValentÃn
Tamayo (1868-1905) served two terms as City Marshall of Brownsville (1894-98)
and was Deputy County Clerk of Cameron County (1902-05). His youngest son by his
first marriage, Casimiro Tamayo, Jr. (1880-1914), was a Deputy Constable of
Cameron County. 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. FarÃas in an unprovoked attack,
then fired at the policeman. 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).
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.”
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 RÃo 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.
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.
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,RÃo 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 RÃo 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
Jovita
González, “America Invades The Border Towns,” Southwest Review, 15 (Summer 1930), p. 471.
