Simon Gugenheim House
Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This structure was built at 1101 North Chaparral for Simon and Lila Belle (Soloman) Gugenheim. Simon Gugenheim (1861-1942) was a native Texan who came to Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars in his pocket and remained to become wealthy. He and a friend formed the Gugenheim and Cohn Drygoods Co. In 1891, the year of his marriage, he acquired a great deal of property when he helped rescue the city's economy during a recession in 1896, and later was a successful investor in the petroleum industry. The Gugenheims had this house built about 1900. They moved into a modest apartment and sold their home in 1924. Among their philanthropies was a gift of four lots on South Broadway as the site for a YMCA building, where Gugenheim's portrait was hung. Their Victorian house of the early 1900s was moved to its present site during a period of city growth. The turret on this house survived all others in the domestic architecture of the city. The builder adorned the house with bay windows; a lunette in the front pediment; and gables faced with shingles; ornamenting the porches with columns, brackets, and banisters, and with cornices displaying wooden beads, spindles, lattices, and other Victorian gingerbread. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1976
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Simon Gugenheim arrived in Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars and built a fortune, first through the Gugenheim and Cohn drygoods firm and later as a petroleum investor who helped steady the city's economy in the 1890s. Around 1900 he and his wife Lila Belle built this exuberant Victorian house, crowned by a turret that outlasted every other in the city's domestic architecture. The couple's philanthropy included donating land for a local YMCA.
Why it matters
The house is both a rare survivor of the city's turn-of-the-century Victorian streetscape and a monument to the immigrant-merchant success stories that built Gulf Coast Texas.
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Related people
- · Simon Gugenheim
- · Lila Belle Gugenheim
Themes & tags
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