Ben Milam Hotel – Houston

Address	1717 Texas Ave., Houston TX
Year Built	1926
Status	Demolished December 9, 2012
Style	Neoclassical
Architect	Joseph Finger
Notes	Originally planned to be named the Crooker Hotel, after owner/builder John H. Crooker, the Ben Milam was built in 1926 and served as a popular hotel through the 1960s, being across the street from Union Station (now renovated and Minute Maid Park’s main lobby). With the decline of passenger rail travel and Amtrak ceasing use of the station in 1974, the hotel had also seen significant decline. The hotel, which had been mainly used for events in its last years, closed by the mid-1980s. It continued to deteriorate until its demolition in late 2012, and is now the site of apartments.

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Articles and Advertisements:

New pool, c. 1957-1958, Houston Magazine:

Famous waters from all over the world – the seven seas, lakes, rivers, puddles and ponds – flowed into Houston in a steady stream all summer long until the city could truly be called a blue-sky pool of sky-blue waters.

At least, Ben Milam Hotel’s new pool – shimmering in the middle of a roof-top’s tiles and windscreened terrace – belongs to the world. It became the world’s most international body of water during three-day opening ceremonies in August.

Festivities featured some 18 bottles, jugs, jars, urns and ewers of water poured into the first hotel swimming pool in downtown Houston by Hotel Manager Charles Perry, Hotel-Owning Corporation Officers John Crooker, Sr. and John Crooker, Jr., and architect John Freeman, Jr.

Bringing the waters to the pool (actually, there are two pools – children’s and diving – connected by a spillway) was the most glamorous part of the hotel’s $200,000 hotel addition and modernization project (including new garage facilities and a new drive-in entrance along with the roof-top pool-terrace).

Co-operating Chamber of Commerce officials and hotel managers from all over the world scooped up cascading water from Niagara Falls, leaned out of a gondola to gather Venice’s Grand Canal water in a Grecian urn, or captured spray falling from the world’s tallest fountain in Switzerland. And not to be outdone – even though the French government will not allow shipment of any waters out of the country – the French consulate (if the water shortage is still acute) is expected to send a bottle of light wine.