APRIL 19, 2007           HOUSTON CHRONICLE-        chron.com

 

How the West won

 

TEXAS myths converge at the old West mansion off NASA Road 1. There fabu­lous wealth segued into cattle ranching, then oil, then the glory days of the space race.

But if that piece of outsized history survives another five years, it'll be because of a very human-sized effort - one involving fine print, a library basement, a schoolteacher and her friends.

 

 

 

James M. West, born poor in 1871, made the first part of his fortune in lumber. In the late '20s he bought a 30,000-acre cattle ranch in southern Harris County and built a poor boy's dream. He installed a three ­acre lake where none had been before, and hired Joseph Finger, architect of Houston's City Hall, to design a house that makes Jay Gatsby seem like a piker.

 

Finger played a Jazz Age song in a Mediterranean key. The villa stretched over 17,000 square feet. Its exterior was stucco; its roof, tile. Marble lined the fishponds in the sunken gardens. A fountain burbled in the playroom with the zigzag marble floor. Gold fixtures and doorknobs sparkled in the bathrooms.

 

                The house was completed in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. During the Great Depression, the West family's wealth shone extra-brightly. West's namesake son, Silver Dollar Jim, showered the coins on anyone who caught his fancy. At the mansion's parties, he threw fistfuls into the swimming pool so that guests would dive after them.

 

Wealth begat more wealth: Oil turned up on the ranch. In 1939, the Wests’ sold the place, including the mansion, to Humble Oil, and the grand old house sat abandoned.

                           

                            Humble Oil gave the mansion and some of its land to Rice University in 1957.

        

      After JFK selected Houston to be NASA's headquarters, Humble donated more of the old West land for the cause, and Rice declared the mansion would be lab offices for lunar scientists. Once again, it was a place of extravagant dreams.

 

 

The Space Age coexisted uneasily with the Jazz Age. In 1969, the Lunar Science Institute's head, William Rubey, groused that the mansion was "a bit gaudy, highly ornamented, and not what most scientists are

 

GRAY: Obscure restriction gives mansion reprieve

 

 

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accustomed to."

 

Family bedrooms became offices, as did the steam room, its black-and-gold tiles covered with carpet. A luggage closet was used to study lunar maps; a sleeping porch, to read microfilm. Acoustic ceiling tiles interrupted the soaring spaces and hid their carved, hand painted beams.

 

The world around the West mansion changed, too. Its farm road grew into eight-lane NASA Road 1, a nerve-jangling agglomeration of strip centers, apartments and hotels. When schoolteacher Linda Sansing drove that road, she loved glimpsing the mansion.

 

But she worried about it.

 

 

After the moon shot's glory faded, Rice chose not to renew the space institute's claim to the site. In 1992 the university sold the mansion and 41 acres to the Pappas restaurant family. Once again, the house sat empty.

 

Four years ago, the Pappases put the property on the market. Sansing and two friends dreamed of saving the mansion, restoring its glamour, and renting it out for weddings and parties. They incorporated themselves as a nonprofit, Preserved in Time, and did research in the basement of Rice University's library. All they needed were millions of dollars.

 

In October the Pappas’ sold the property to Olajuwon Farms, a company owned by former Rocket Hakeem Olajuwon. His brokers announced plans to subdivide it, maybe for waterfront . condos. The Greater Houston Preservation Alliance and Preservation Texas pronounced the mansion endangered, and in February, rumors flew that demolition was scheduled.

 

Alarmed, Sansing e-mailed the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance.

 

She described something her group had found during its library research: a hint that a deed restriction might protect the mansion. ,

 

 

The alliance's David Bush looked up the deed of sale at the county courthouse and found that the long-shot hint checked out.

 

A 1992 amendment stated that the house must be preserved for the next 20 years. It can't be razed until 2012.

 

 

The preservation alliance quickly informed Olajuwon's brokers and the city of Pasadena.

 

 

The brokers say they're waiting for their client's decision, but Bush is hopeful the five-year reprieve means the mansion can be saved.

 

Developers hate to have capital lie fallow.

          _

Maybe Preserved in Time can raise the millions it needs to buy it. It seems highly unlikely - but as Sansing and her friends know, that mansion is a place for big dreams.

 

lisa.gray@chron.com