The JPMorgan Chase Building, formerly the Gulf Building, is a 37-story

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

skyscraper A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition. Skyscrapers are very tall high-ri ...

downtown Houston Downtown is the largest central business district in the city of Houston and the largest in the state of Texas, located near the geographic center of the metropolitan area at the confluence of Interstate 10, Interstate 45, and Interstate 69. The ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

. Completed in 1929, it remained the tallest building in Houston until 1963, when the Exxon Building surpassed it in height. The building is the Houston headquarters of

JPMorgan Chase Bank JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., doing business as Chase Bank or often as Chase, is an American national bank headquartered in New York City, that constitutes the consumer and commercial banking subsidiary of the U.S. multinational banking and fi ...

, and was formerly the headquarters of

Texas Commerce Bank The Texas Commerce Bank (officially Texas Commerce Bank N.A., with its parent bank holding company known as Texas Commerce Bancshares, Inc.) was a Texas-based bank acquired by Chemical Banking Corporation of New York in May 1987. The acquisiti ...

History

Jesse H. Jones Jesse Holman Jones (April 5, 1874June 1, 1956) was an American Democratic politician and entrepreneur from Houston, Texas. Jones managed a Tennessee tobacco factory at age fourteen, and at nineteen, he was put in charge of his uncle's lumbery ...

arranged to have the Gulf Building constructed; it was built in 1929. Designed by architects

Alfred C. Finn Alfred Charles Finn (July 2, 1883 – June 26, 1964) was an American architect. He started in the profession with no formal training in 1904 as an apprentice for Sanguinet & Staats. He worked in their offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston. H ...

Kenneth Franzheim Kenneth Franzheim was an architect in Chicago and Boston in the early 1920s with C. Howard Crane. He started an independent practice in New York in 1925 and specialized in the design of large commercial buildings and airports. Franzheim became ...

, and J. E. R. Carpenter the building is seen as a realization of Eliel Saarinen's second-place-but-acclaimed entry in the Chicago

Tribune Tower The Tribune Tower is a , 36-floor neo-Gothic skyscraper located at 435 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Built between 1923 and 1925, the international design competition for the tower became a historic event in 20th-ce ...

competition. The

Gulf Oil Gulf Oil was a major global oil company in operation from 1901 to 1985. The eighth-largest American manufacturing company in 1941 and the ninth-largest in 1979, Gulf Oil was one of the so-called Seven Sisters oil companies. Prior to its merger ...

sign was erected in May 1966 and dismantled in March 1974.

initiated the restoration of the building in 1989, in what is still considered one of the largest privately funded preservation projects in American history. Recent preservation work included restoring the

terrazzo Terrazzo is a composite material, poured in place or precast, which is used for floor and wall treatments. It consists of chips of marble, quartz, granite, glass, or other suitable material, poured with a cementitious binder (for chemical bind ...

floor in the building's Banking Hall, but keeping the hollows worn into the marble border where generations of customers stood to conduct their banking business. Largely through the efforts of JPMorgan Chase, the former Gulf Building was designated a City of Houston Landmark in 2003. The structure was already a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

. Texas Commerce Bank also owned another history-making skyscraper in downtown Houston, the neighboring 75-story Texas Commerce Tower, completed in 1982, and now known as the JPMorgan Chase Tower. In 2010, JPMorgan Chase sold the former Gulf Building to the Brookfield Real Estate Opportunity Fund. Chase will be leasing space from the tower on a long term basis. Chase, as of February 12, 2010, occupied about of space in the building. Chase planned to remove about from its lease agreement, saying that it does not need the space anymore. After the Chase relinquishment, the building will be 75% leased, and of space in the JPMorgan Chase Building will be available for lease.

Building features

The building has a total of of space. On the ground floor the building has a retail banking center. The banking center has ceilings, floors and walls made of marble, and large stained glass windows. The building once had a rotating illuminated Gulf sign on the top, which was removed in March 1974. On August 30, 2010 the 27th floor of the building caught fire. The fire quickly escalated from one, to two, to three alarms within 30 minutes as firefighters tried to battle the blaze with low water pressure.

2010 fire

On August 30, 2010, an alarm was called at about 8pm for a fire on the 27th floor. The Houston Fire Department responded with 3 alarms and 270 men.Cause Not Yet Known In 3-Alarm High-Rise Fire
The fire was officially extinguished at 11:20 pm. Due to a broken pipe, HFD had to pipe water directly into the building. During the course of extinguishing the blaze, six firefighters were injured. They were taken to a local hospital and later released. File:JP Morgan Chase Bank in Houston, Texas.jpeg, Illustration of Gulf Building, 1929 File:Gulfchasehouston.jpg

References

External links

* * {{Houston skyscrapers Skyscraper office buildings in Houston National Register of Historic Places in Houston Office buildings completed in 1929 Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks Art Deco architecture in Texas JPMorgan Chase buildings Buildings and structures in Houston 1929 establishments in Texas Office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Texas Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks Alfred C. Finn buildings Kenneth Franzheim buildings

History

Building features

2010 fire

See also

References

External links