Wolfson House

San Antonio, TX

Rising three stories of concrete and masonry in 1913, the Toltec was built for Dr. Augustus Maverick, who was murdered before it was finished. The Maverick family, long central to San Antonio's downtown growth, retained ownership until 1996. With its U-shaped plan, white stone detailing over red brick, and a cast-iron staircase climbing from basement to top floor, the building preserves its early twentieth-century classical revival design almost intact.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1890 for San Antonio business and civic leader August Thiele, Jr., this high Victorian raised cottage came from the drafting table of noted architect James Riely Gordon. Its most striking feature is an unusual porch crowned by a distinctive wagon-bow arch with radiating spindles set beneath a triangular gable. Modest in scale yet singular in design, the home stayed in the Thiele family for eighty years.

San Antonio, TX

In 1876, salesmen Pete McManus and young John Warne Gates staged a theatrical demonstration in San Antonio's Alamo Plaza, penning thundering longhorns inside a corral of Joseph Glidden's newly patented barbed wire. Skeptical cattlemen watched the flimsy-looking fence hold, then rushed into the Menger Hotel to place orders. Gates, later nicknamed "Bet-A-Million," rode the sale into a fortune and helped found the company that became Texaco.

San Antonio, TX

Completed in 1928 at a cost of $3 million, the Majestic Theatre was designed by John Eberson for theater magnate Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate chain. Its lavish Spanish Colonial Revival design, with paired columns, an ornate marquee and a courtyard-like interior, made it one of Eberson's celebrated "atmospheric" theaters, built to feel like an open-air plaza under a starry sky. It survives as one of the finest remaining examples of that flamboyant 1920s movie-palace style.