City guide
26 buildings worth a detour, each with what to look for. Open them on the map, or walk them with the iPhone app, which collects each one you photograph.
The buildings that define the city's architecture.
The Alhambra Theatre, also known as the Palace Theatre, opened August 1, 1914, designed by Henry C. Trost of Trost & Trost in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with a Moorish theme, ahead of the Moorish Revival wave that swept the 1920s. Construction cost $150,000. It was built flexible from the start, ready to host live playhouse productions or run as a movie house.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author , Public domain
Anson Mills hired Henry C. Trost of Trost & Trost to design this building on the original site of the 1832 Ponce de León ranch, built 1910–1911. At 145 feet and 12 stories, the Mills Building was the tallest building in El Paso when completed, and it was only the second concrete-frame skyscraper in the United States, and one of the largest all-concrete buildings of its time.
St. Patrick Cathedral is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of El Paso, built after Catholic leaders in the early 1910s set out to raise $150,000 for a new church to serve the waves of Catholic immigrants drawn by the mining industry. In 1913, the first group to raise $10,000 won the right to name the building, and a group of Irish-Catholic women chose "St. Patrick." Designed by the St. Louis firm Barnett, Haynes & Barnett and built in the form of a Byzantine basilica, groundbreaking came in April 1914 and the cornerstone was laid that July.
Photo: Lyricmac at English Wikipedia , CC BY 2.5
El Paso High School, nicknamed "The Lady on the Hill," is the oldest operating high school in El Paso, built by Trost & Trost at a construction cost of about $500,000. It sits on a mountainside at the foot of the Franklin Mountains, overlooking the city and its border with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and its Greco-Roman features made it a unique landmark when built.
Photo: Bobbobbb , Public domain
Hotel Paso del Norte, a 351-room hotel less than a mile from the Mexico border, opened on Thanksgiving Day 1912, designed by Trost & Trost for wealthy El Paso businessman Zack T. White at a cost of $1.5 million. After watching a fire destroy another El Paso hotel, White and architect Henry Charles Trost traveled to San Francisco to study how buildings there survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, and built accordingly to make this one of the sturdiest, most ornate structures in the city.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author , Public domain
The House at 912 Magoffin Avenue began as a two-story house built in 1898 on the site of an earlier one-story house, then was redesigned between 1903 and 1905 in the Queen Anne style. It was the home of Margaret Conerton, an Irish immigrant who died in the house in 1908, and by 1935 belonged to the Stubbs family. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since June 23, 2003.
Photo: Treecholla , CC BY-SA 3.0
This five-story downtown building was built in 1911 by the J. Calisher Realty Company and known as Calisher's, a store first opened in El Paso in 1881. Early tenants included the YMCA on the two top floors and the Border National Bank. It was later renamed for the J.J. Newberry five and dime store chain, and designed in the Chicago School style by Trost & Trost.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
The O. T. Bassett Tower, an Art Deco skyscraper at 303 Texas Avenue, was built by Charles N. Bassett and named for his father. Designed by Trost & Trost and completed in 1930, it was one of Henry Trost's last commissions. It briefly held the title of tallest building in the city before being surpassed later that same year by the Hilton Hotel.
The Plaza Hotel, formerly the Hilton Hotel, was built by Conrad Hilton on the site of the Sheldon Hotel, which had burned down on April 9, 1929. Construction began in the fall of 1929 and continued through the stock market crash nineteen days later; the hotel opened November 30, 1930. At 239 feet, it surpassed the O. T. Bassett Tower to become the tallest building in El Paso, a title it held before later becoming the city's fifth tallest.
Photo: The original uploader was Camerafiend at English Wikipedia. , CC BY-SA 3.0
The Plaza Theatre opened in 1930 on Pioneer Plaza, where a produce warehouse belonging to Bernard and Ben Schuster once stood. Louis L. Dent, owner of El Paso's principal theaters, bought the property in February 1927 telling the El Paso Times, "El Paso has been good to me, and I am going to put something everybody will be proud of." Dallas architect W. Scott Dunne, credited with more than 30 theaters across Texas and Oklahoma, designed the Spanish Colonial Revival building, construction of which began in 1929.
Photo: Donitza Marie , CC BY-SA 3.0
The Popular Department Store was built in 1917 for The Popular, a chain of department stores founded by Adolph Schwartz in El Paso in 1902. Designed by Trost & Trost in the Chicago School style, the building was inherited by Schwartz's heirs, who sold it in 1995; it later became the Fallas Department Store.
Photo: Donitza Marie , CC BY-SA 3.0
The Singer Sewing Company Building went up in 1928 for the Singer Corporation on land formerly owned by Ervin H. Schwartz, Manuel Schwartz, and I. Weiss. Trost & Trost designed it in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, giving the sewing-machine giant's local outpost a facade in step with El Paso's downtown commercial architecture of the era. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since September 24, 1980.
The El Paso U.S. Courthouse was completed in 1936 as a courthouse of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas and a government office building. Designed by architects Percy McGhee, Guy L. Frazer, and Thomas P. Lippincott, its Neo-Classical Revival facades and blocklike, durable exterior were meant to give the federal government a strong, tangible presence in downtown El Paso, similar in size and style to government buildings raised across the country in the mid-1930s.
Photo: General Services Administration - they list photographer as n/a , Public domain
The W.S. Hills Commercial Structure is a Neoclassical commercial building in downtown El Paso designed by the firm Trost & Trost. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of many downtown commissions the firm produced during El Paso's early twentieth-century commercial building boom.
Photo: Larry D. Moore , CC BY 4.0
Wells Fargo Plaza opened as the State National Bank Plaza on October 25, 1971, a 302-foot International Style skyscraper at 221 North Kansas Street designed by Charles Luckman. It was originally El Paso's tallest tower until surpassed by the WestStar Tower in 2021. Ground broke on January 30, 1971, with construction handled jointly by two local firms, C. H. Leavell & Co. and Robert E. McKee, Inc., who split the contract two-thirds and one-third after a coin flip settled an identical tie bid.
The Woman's Club of El Paso traces its origins to 1894 and was, for a time, the only women's organization in El Paso, giving women in the city a channel into community service and activism. The clubhouse at 1400 N. Mesa Drive was erected in 1916 in the Beaux-Arts style. The organizing social circle began meeting in 1881 around Mary Hamilton Mills, who arrived in El Paso with her husband William Wallace Mills on March 8, 1869, along with a group of prominent local women including Flora Hague, Octavia Magoffin, and Olga Kohlberg, first known as the Child Culture Study Circle.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
Worth a stop when you're nearby.
The Henry C. Trost House is a historic Prairie School house in downtown El Paso, built in 1908-1909 for architect Henry C. Trost of Trost & Trost, who designed it himself and lived there with his two brothers and a sister.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
The Hotel Cortez is a historic eleven-story hotel in downtown El Paso, built in 1926 as the Hotel Orndorff for Alzina Orndorff DeGroff, who put up $1 million of her own money toward the $1.4 million cost and died just a month before it opened. Designed by Trost & Trost, it passed through several names — Hussmann, then Cortez in 1935 — and hosted President John F. Kennedy overnight on June 5, 1963.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
Landmark
The Magoffin Home is a historic 1875 adobe house in El Paso built by pioneer Joseph Magoffin, who lived there with his wife Octavia until their deaths; family members occupied it for 109 years. It combines the local adobe tradition with Greek Revival details in what is known as the Territorial style.
Photo: Larry D. Moore , CC BY 4.0
The Richard Caples Building is a historic seven-story building in downtown El Paso, built as a five-story structure for Richard Caples in 1910 and billed as the first reinforced concrete structure erected in El Paso. In 1910 it served as the Francisco I. Madero Headquarters during the Mexican Revolution and base for the revolutionary newspaper La Regeneración.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
Fine buildings that fewer people seek out.
The Martin Building is a historic seven-story, 25.91-meter Chicago School office building in downtown El Paso, built in 1916-1917 by Brauhton & Leibert for M.D. Roberts and William Martin Banner.
Photo: Susan Barnum , CC BY-SA 4.0
The Old Bnai Zion Synagogue, also known as the Sunset Palace, is a historic 1912 synagogue at 906 North El Paso Street built for El Paso's first Jewish community, serving as a synagogue until 1917.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
Victorian architecture
Old Fort Bliss, also known as Camp Bliss, is a pair of two-story adobe buildings in downtown El Paso built in the 1850s in the Victorian style. Originally army barracks, they were later remodeled into apartment buildings. The structure has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since February 23, 1972, and by 2017 was considered endangered.
The Toltec Club is a Beaux-Arts clubhouse in downtown El Paso, built for an all-men's club founded in 1902 by W.H. Burges, T.M. Wingo, Felix Martinez, W.W. Turney, A.P. Coles, Britton Davis, J. Arthur Eddy, and C.B. Eddy. The club bought the land in 1908 and opened the building in 1910 for about $100,000, designed by architect John J. Huddart.
Photo: Susan Barnum , CC BY-SA 4.0
The U.S. Post Office is a Beaux-Arts building in downtown El Paso, completed in 1916. Its lobby is topped by a massive, paneled, saucer-shaped dome and finished in polished marble, with huge, rounded bronze ornamental grills. The building has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 19, 1984.
Photo: Rogelio Rivero Cagigas , CC BY-SA 3.0
The White House Department Store and Hotel McCoy is a historic 1912 Chicago School building in downtown El Paso, designed by Henry C. Trost of Trost & Trost. The department store itself was founded in 1900 by Felix Brunschwig and three nephews, Myrtil, Gaston, and Arthur Clobentz, and incorporated in 1904 as Felix Brunschwig & Co.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author , Public domain
