Here at 1100 Texas Avenue, you face the Magnolia Hotel Houston in downtown Houston. This building was built in 1926 as the Houston Post-Dispatch Building, the home of the Houston Post-Dispatch newspaper. For a brief moment after it opened, until the following year, it held the distinction of being the tallest building in Houston.
In 1932 it was renamed the Shell Building when it became a regional operations headquarters of the Shell Petroleum Corporation, a predecessor of the Shell Oil Company. Today the structure carries a new name and a long civic biography: newspaper headquarters, a regional petroleum office, and now the hotel you see before you. As you stand here, you are literally facing layers of Houston history - a 1926 purpose, a 1932 chapter tied to Shell Petroleum, and the address 1100 Texas Avenue that anchors all of it to downtown Houston.
Imagine the comings and goings tied to those names and dates, and how a single block can gather so many functions. Listen for the city around you and notice how the site links newspaper work, corporate operations, and hospitality under one roof. Newspaper headquarters, Shell offices, now a hotel: one building on Texas Avenue has held all three.