Building the Temple · 1930
The marble that made the temple late
Fall 1930
From the source
“Some delay in finishing the building has been experienced because of slow shipments of the pink marble from Knoxville, Tenn.”
“This huge structure of brick and pink marble” is “the latest and most imposing structure in Houston Heights.”
Houston Chronicle, October 19, 1930, p. 25. Research archive.
The stone deserves its billing. Tennessee pink marble has been quarried from the ridges around Knoxville since the 1830s, long enough to earn the town its nickname, the Marble City. It is the stone of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and of finish work in Grand Central Terminal. A suburban Houston lodge specifying it in 1930 was ordering the most prestigious American decorative stone of the day for a neighborhood corner.
It cost them their deadline. The building was announced in March with completion promised by Thanksgiving; the marble came slow out of Knoxville, and the opening slid to December 21. The Chronicle reported the delay in the same October feature that crowned the rising building the most imposing structure in the Heights, which suggests nobody minded much.
The ledger around the stone: $140,000 announced, $105,035 on the permit, roughly $110,000 on the contract, $110,700 carried as the completed cost. Every life the building has lived since has passed through that marble entrance, and it has outlasted all of them so far.