Houston's University of St. Thomas was founded by the Basilian Fathers in 1947 and started life inside a grand 1912 Montrose mansion. In the 1950s collectors John and Dominique de Menil brought in Philip Johnson, who laid out a modernist Academic Mall of steel-framed, rose-brick halls and returned forty years later to crown it with a gold-domed chapel. This walk moves from the mansion down the mall to the library and chapel, then steps across the street to the Rothko Chapel, the Menils' most famous gift to the neighborhood. The whole loop is well under a mile on flat, shaded streets.
About this site
University of St. Thomas is a private college or university in Houston, Harris County. It is one of 22 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Harris County.
The site sits at 29.7381, -95.3915 near Houston. The nearest cataloged historic site is Link-Lee House (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Blue Bird Circle, The, Fondren Mansion, and Stevenson, Joseph R. and Mary M., House.
The University of St. Thomas grew out of a 1944 agreement between Galveston's Bishop Christopher E. Byrne and the Congregation of St. Basil, a teaching order of priests already running St. Thomas High School in Houston, to open a Catholic university in the city once World War II ended. Named for the philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas, it held its first classes on September 22, 1947, with a small freshman class and eight faculty members, all housed in the T. P. Lee mansion, today's Link-Lee House, at Montrose Boulevard and West Alabama. Architect Philip Johnson drew up the campus plan, and his Academic Mall, a formal row of rectangular buildings, became its organizing spine. The school graduated its first class in 1951 and added a School of Theology for St. Mary's Seminary in 1968, followed by graduate programs in education, business, philosophy and, later, nursing. In 1997 Johnson's Chapel of St. Basil, a cube bisected by a granite plane and crowned by a dome, was completed at the north end of the mall and has since won several architecture awards. Today UST is the only Catholic university in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, a liberal arts-centered school whose campus neighbors the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel.
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