Few figures have shaped the form and fortunes of a city as much as Jesse H Jones moulded Houston’s. From the early 1900s, the lumberyard owner turned real estate developer, turned banker and Democrat politician, built more than 35 skyscrapers across the Texan “bayou city”. Known as “Mr Houston”, Jones was instrumental in securing funds to build the shipping channel that connected the city to the sea, creating an inland port linked to 17 railway lines, transforming its prospects.
As Fortune magazine put it in 1940: “He built Houston up from a one-night stand on Buffalo Bayou into the second-largest and fastest growing metropolis in the south.” It is now the fourth biggest city in the US, its port the second busiest in the country. Jones’s legacy still towers above the streets: if all of his buildings were placed on top of each other – from the elegant Rice Hotel to the art deco Gulf Tower – they would extend two miles into the sky.
