Main Street/Market Square Historic District (Boundary Increase)

Main Street/Market Square Historic District is an area of historic commercial buildings in downtown Houston, Texas. This entry covers a boundary increase to the district, which was listed in February 1984. The nomination form, photographs and map are missing from the file, so the available pages say little about the district's architecture or the reasons for its significance. What remains is correspondence from 1992. In it, the Texas Historical Commission reported that the John Baker Building, a contributing property at Travis and Preston streets, was demolished on April 13, 1992, and asked that it be removed from the Register. A newspaper account from the same period describes the building as about 124 years old and empty. It reports that federal architects had warned city officials that further losses of historic structures in the district could put its historic district status at risk. The city had adopted a moratorium on demolishing historic structures in the district.