The history of Houston's Rice Hotel

Click through the slideshow above to see the property over the past century of development...

The Rice Lofts in downtown Houston is one of the most iconic structures in the Bayou City. It's undergone numerous changes over its lengthy history and has stood firm as the area surrounding it has evolved.

Houston icon Jesse Jones opened the Rice Hotel on May 17, 1913, following a number of demolitions and new construction on the site.

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Well before the 1913 completion of the building we know today, the land at 909 Texas Ave. was the site of the old Capitol of the Republic of Texas from 1837 to 1839, before it moved to Austin.

That building was razed in 1881 and a new structure was built. That building was purchased in 1883 by Rice University founder William Marsh Rice. He added a five-story annex and renamed it – naturally -- the Rice Hotel.

In 1911, Rice University sold the building to Jones, who leveled it and constructed an impressive $2.5 million, 17-story building shaped like a C. About a decade later a third wing was added, turning the C into an E.

Over the following decades the building played a part in many important Houston events. Mick Jagger, Shirley Temple, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon are among the guests who stayed there.

In 1922 the Rice Hotel Cafeteria became the first air-conditioned public room in the city. Guests in town for the 1928 Democratic Convention bunked at the hotel and partied at night on the roof when they aren’t verbally sparring at Sam Houston Hall a few blocks away.

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Some say these days that the roof is haunted.

In the 1940s it became one of the first hotels in town to tout fluorescent lighting and plastic upholstery. In 1946 it was the first one with an escalator and within two years every room was air-conditioned. Later renovations in the 1960s sadly removed or destroyed all traces of its Roaring ‘20s allure.

In 1962 NASA’s Astronaut Group 2 had its first meeting inside the hotel to plan the next decade of space travel. Among that group was Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Pete Conrad.

President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy spent the day there on November 21, 1963, just a day before the president was shot and killed in downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy delivered a speech to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Spanish at the Rice's ballroom the night before her husband's death.

The Rice Hotel closed by court order in 1977 after Houston’s new stringent fire codes caused it to be declared unsafe. It was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

It remained vacant for more than 20 years as pie-in-the-sky development schemes piled up and it escaped demolition. Transients got more enjoyment out of it than anyone else. It sat unloved as the rest of downtown evolved around it.

In 1997 a plan was hatched that would convert the structure into apartments by developer Randall Davis and Atlanta-based Post Properties.

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The next year the luxury apartment community the Post Rice Lofts opened after a $28 million renovation with 25,000 square feet of retail space, including the Sambuca Restaurant, La Madeleine Restaurant, Amy's Ice Cream, Jamba Juice, Mission Burrito, the Rice Valet and a grocery store.

Rents ranged from $700 to $3,500 a month. Ninety percent of the space was occupied or leased by October 1998. Rents are considerably more now, especially with the current boom in downtown Houston’s popularity.

The building, now known simply as The Rice, was sold by Post Properties to Crow Holdings Capital Partners of Dallas in 2014.

Sambuca is still there, by the way, and the Mission Burrito is now a Chipotle that kept Houston Chronicle staffers working next door alive for years, along with Minuti Coffee. The old Chron building is now just a fancy parking lot for area partiers and workers.

With additional reporting by Darla Guillen