The Old Sixth Ward: Houston's Victorian Streetcar Suburb

Just northwest of downtown Houston, on a tidy grid of narrow streets, sits the Old Sixth Ward — the city's oldest surviving residential neighborhood and the largest concentration of Victorian houses anywhere in Houston. William R. Baker platted these blocks in 1858, and by the 1870s and 1880s the streetcar had turned the ward into a walkable suburb of working families, corner stores, and gingerbread-trimmed cottages. Listed on the National Register in 1978, it became a City of Houston Historic District in 1997 and, a decade later, the city's very first Protected Historic District. This walk threads the edge of the ward and the historic ground just beyond it — a pioneer city cemetery, an Art Deco hospital, an early Coca-Cola bottling plant, and a bayou bridge — to show how a Victorian streetcar suburb grew up beside the young city. Bring comfortable shoes and look at the porches, brackets, and shotgun rooflines; the details are the point.