The Heights Waterworks: From 1890s Water Plant to 19th Street Landmark

At the corner of West 19th and Nicholson, just west of the main shopping district, sits one of the Heights' most quietly remarkable landmarks: the Heights Waterworks. Built in the 1890s to supply water to the young town of Houston Heights, the site served the community for over a century before being reborn as apartments, restaurants, and retail. Here is the story of the water plant that helped build the Heights, and what stands there today.

Water for a New Town

Houston Heights was founded in 1892 by the Omaha Syndicate as one of Texas' first planned communities, a suburb connected to downtown by its own streetcar line. A town needs water, and the syndicate built a water works near the corner of what is now West 19th and Nicholson almost from the start, establishing the plant in the 1890s. For more than a hundred years the facility pumped and stored the water that filled Heights kitchen sinks, watered Heights lawns, and fought Heights fires, long after the town was annexed by the City of Houston in 1919.

Three structures from that long working life survive on the site today, and each one tells part of the story. The most distinctive is the 1928 reservoir, a brick-clad concrete tank that holds 750,000 gallons and wears an unusual grass roof, making it look less like infrastructure and more like a small green hill in the middle of the block. Beside it stands the 1939 pumping station, a handsome Art Deco building constructed by the Works Progress Administration, and a 1949 pump building completes the trio.

A Recognized Historic Landmark

The Heights Waterworks earned its preservation credentials the hard way. The reservoir was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 22, 1983, as part of the Historic Resources of Houston Heights multiple-property listing, and in December 2015 the entire plant was designated a City of Houston Protected Historic Landmark. That protection mattered, because by then the plant had been decommissioned and the site faced an uncertain future. Instead of demolition, the Heights got a careful redevelopment.

Today the property is alive again. Alliance Residential built the 10X Heights Waterworks apartment community, a 309-unit complex at 515 W 20th St that opened in 2020, while Braun Enterprises redeveloped the historic waterworks buildings themselves into retail and restaurant space. The landmark structures now anchor the west end of the West 19th Street shopping district, which means you can grab a bite or a drink in a building that once pumped the neighborhood's drinking water.

Why It Matters

The Waterworks is a reminder that the Heights was never just a collection of pretty houses. It was a fully planned town, with its own utilities, its own streetcar, its own schools, and its own identity, built by people who thought carefully about how a community should work. When you walk the 19th Street district and see the old reservoir rising behind the storefronts, you are looking at the infrastructure that made all of it possible.

It is also a lesson in what good preservation looks like: old buildings kept, new uses found, and a neighborhood landmark woven into daily life instead of roped off behind a fence. For more of the neighborhood's built history, stroll the Heights Boulevard esplanade and our guide to 19th Street shopping to see the district the Waterworks anchors.

Next time you are on West 19th, take a moment to look at the low brick building with the grassy roof. It has been holding up its end of the neighborhood for over a century, and it is not done yet. This story is part of the Houston Heights Guide's neighborhood history series, curated by the Shawn Manderscheid Team as a community resource.