San Juan Hotel
San Juan, Hidalgo County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The San Juan Hotel was completed and opened for business in 1920. Its construction reflected the plans of the town's early business leaders to establish San Juan as a Rio Grande Valley commercial center. Originally constructed with little ornamentation, the Mission Revival details were added in 1928. These included the red tiled parapet along the roofline and the curvilinear parapet over the entryway. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1985.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The San Juan Hotel opened in 1920 as the town's business leaders bet on San Juan becoming a commercial center of the booming Rio Grande Valley. Plain at first, it gained its Mission Revival flourishes in 1928 — a red-tiled parapet along the roofline and a curving parapet over the entry — the fashionable style of Valley building in that era.
Why it matters
The hotel reflects the early-20th-century land boom that filled the Rio Grande Valley with new towns and the Spanish-inspired architecture that gave them their look.
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Nearby & related markers
San Juan Townsite
San Juan, TX
The town of San Juan sprang up in 1910 when Rio Grande Valley entrepreneur John Closner sold 406 acres to a townsite company that named the new community for him. Sitting on the rail line, San Juan quickly grew a business district along Fifth Street, and in 1911 raised its first two-story building—home to the San Juan State Bank and, over the decades, an irrigation office and other ventures. Today the surviving fragment of that pioneer building houses the city library.
Old Pharr City Hall
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Completed in 1911 by the Pharr Townsite Co. under co-founder John C. Kelly, this Rio Grande Valley building first packed in the town's bank, post office, a confectionary, a drugstore, and the irrigation and canal company that made Valley farming possible. It became Pharr's first City Hall when the town incorporated in 1916. During the Depression, short on policemen, the city mounted a rooftop light to summon officers to trouble.
City of Pharr
Pharr, TX
The land around Pharr passed from the nomadic Coahuiltecans to Spanish colonization in the late 1700s, becoming Texas soil when the Rio Grande was fixed as the boundary in 1848. In 1909 the Pharr Townsite Company platted the town, whose founders donated church lots and organized irrigation that shifted the economy from ranching to citrus and produce farming. Served by the railroad and two major highways, Pharr incorporated in 1916 and grew into the self-styled "Hub City of the Valley."
Kiwanis Club of Pharr
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