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Chapter 9 a new home for texas commerce When I arrived at Texas Commerce Bank in April 1967, one of the first things I was told was that we needed a new building. Lloyd Bolton, who later became head of the Real Estate Group, was then in charge of TCB’s properties. He agreed. “Jesse Jones moved the bank into his new Gulf Building in 1929,” he said. “Today, the pipes are rusty and breaking.” So, the idea was planted. I agreed with Lloyd because Texas Commerce was not the same bank it had been in 1929, and we needed space badly because we were growing and adding people. By 1977, ten years after I had arrived, TCB had become a $6.6 billion statewide organization with thirty-five banks in thirteen markets and more to come. Meanwhile, in the Gulf Building, more than the pipes were failing. We were faced with a decision : Renovate or raze? The case for renovation was strong. First, the Gulf Building was the bank’s traditional home. An elegant, historic building, it served as the centerpiece of Jesse Jones’s empire. At thirty-four stories, the Gulf Building was Houston ’s tallest building for more than thirty years until the forty-six-story Exxon Building finally surpassed it. More practically, space in a renovated Gulf Building would be cheaper than space in a new, Class A structure. Space in a Class A structure, however, would be easier to lease. Renovating around our major tenant, Gulf Oil Company, posed a daunting problem. But Gulf, which occupied twenty floors, solved that problem by deciding to move into a new building in Houston Center, leaving TCB with a much more vacant structure in which to work. In addition, the significant investment tax credit that TCB could earn for restoring a landmark building was financial icing on the cake. And so, we decided to renovate the Gulf Building and list it on the National Register of Historic Places. I proposed that we build two new buildings, the Texas Commerce Tower and the Texas Commerce Center. These moves would preserve a landmark, keep most of the Banking Department in its traditional home with its glorious lobby, provide Trust and Operations with the space they needed to grow, save money on rent, equip the bank with a mod- ern, efficient garage, and provide a striking headquarters for the multibilliondollar statewide organization TCB had become. The decision, although tough to make at the time, seems obvious in retrospect. Work began on the $50 million restoration of the Gulf Building in 1981. It was completed in 1986, in the bank’s centennial year. At the same time, planning for the new Texas Commerce Tower proceeded apace. The growth of downtown Houston was marching to the south and west of Main Street, led by skyscrapers for Shell Oil, Humble Oil, Tenneco, Bank of the Southwest , and Houston Natural Gas, to name just five. This exodus left the north end of Main Street looking dowdier and dowdier. I thought we might materially anchor the traditional core of downtown Houston by turning toward the city’s historic northern border. By that time, Jones Hall had allayed the stampede away from the heart of the old city and laid the foundation for what is now the Performing Arts District. Gerald Hines had crossed the street from Jones Hall and built Pennzoil Place, designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Philip Johnson. ★ assembling the land Ironically, Jesse Jones, a man who had died twenty-five years before work began, delayed the construction of the Texas Commerce Tower. Initially , our preferred site for the new building was Block 68, the block on Main Street between Jones’s prized Gulf Building and Rice Hotel. Fearing that this attractive property could fall into the hands of a competing bank that might construct a building to rival his two prized possessions, Jones had bought part of the block and engineered the subdivision of the rest among his friends. This left us with fourteen separate landlords to deal with, some as far away as Mexico City. “Nobody,” Jones had said, “will ever be able to put that block together again!”1 He was nearly right. It took almost ten years and the hard work of two superb commercial real estate professionals to purchase 95 percent of that block. All that remained was one twenty-one-foot tract on Main Street owned by the Levit brothers. Land assemblage began in 1967, when...

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