As historian Craig M. Peters notes in his neighborhood history, El Paso’s Manhattan Heights (2011), El Paso’s population doubled during each decade of the early twentieth century. In response, new development spread northeast away from the river, covering gently sloping land between the mountains and Fort Bliss. Manhattan Heights was platted in 1912 by A. P. Coles and Brothers on a tract occupied for nine years by the Federal Copper Company’s smelting plant. Long blocks bracketed by Louisiana and Piedras streets quickly filled with bungalows for middle-income Anglo-American buyers. The south edge was platted as the elite Castle Heights addition, adjacent to what became Memorial Park, planned by landscape architect George E. Kessler of St. Louis. A reminder of how automobiles made suburbs like this popular is a Texas Company Gas Station (1919; 2008, Rod Davenport) at 2885 Grant Avenue. The station’s octagonal brick pavilion form with a broadly cantilevered green tile roof seems derived from an Ottoman fountain.
The first house built in Manhattan Heights was for C. H. Leavell (1914; 3037 Federal Avenue). Designed by Otto H. Thorman (1887–1966) the two-story Georgian Revival house is constructed of an unusual black brick. Thorman worked extensively in this neighborhood and in Castle Heights.
Opposite, the L. K. Hoard House (1929; 3038 Federal) by Mabel C. Welch is one of her early Spanish Colonial Revival designs. Welch worked with Elizabeth Reese Coles on the design of the two- and three-story Coles House (1928; 3012 Silver Avenue), and she also designed the house (1928) for physician George Turner at 3009 Silver. Common features of Welch’s designs—stuccoed walls, red tile roofs, arched openings, metal grilles, asymmetrical plans, and irregular massing—give the appearance of having been built over time, as is also the case with her much later design for the Sam Guido Jr. House of 1951 at 3101 Gold Avenue.