Southside Place, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a 1925 townsite became one of the smallest cities in Texas
More about this in Southside Place
Southside Place is easy to miss. It covers only 0.2 square miles, entirely surrounded by Bellaire, Houston and West University Place, and its roughly 1,800 residents live inside a city small enough to walk end to end. This page is a plain guide to that place — small, self-governing, and older than it looks. For the full record, the Southside Place page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
How a poor farm became a planned townsite
The land that became Southside Place once housed the Harris County Poor Farm. The Haden and Austin company bought it, and eventually sold it on to the E. L. Crain and Company, which had a specific plan: build a subdivision people would actually want to move to. Developer Edlo L. Crain opened the townsite on Easter Day in 1925, and rather than just platting streets, he put in a pool and a park first, to draw residents in before the houses were even finished. The first section to open sat south of that park, close to Bellaire Boulevard and a streetcar line locals called the "Toonerville Trolley." A second section followed in 1926, stretching from Harper Street to University Boulevard, before the Great Depression slowed everything down.
A small city makes itself official
Southside Place incorporated in June 1931 with just 600 residents, and its city council held its first meeting on June 15 of that year. A formal incorporation resolution followed in 1934, which kept the young city out of Houston's annexation reach even as Houston absorbed the unincorporated land around it. On April 12, 2025, the Texas Historical Commission marked the milestone with a plaque honoring the 100th anniversary of the city, a full century after Crain first opened the gates on Easter Day.
An oil company's research hub, then a bowling alley
For decades, Shell Oil Company ran its Bellaire Technology Center out of a 310,000-square-foot facility inside Southside Place, opened in 1936 as a geophysical processing center where scientists and engineers studied oil and gas science for most of the 20th century. Shell closed the facility in 2008 as its lease came up. Elsewhere in the city, the Palace Bowling Lanes ran for decades out of an 80,000-square-foot building put up in 1955, until it closed in October 2016 and was redeveloped into Southside Commons, a mixed retail, restaurant and office complex.
A wealthy city run on a dollar a year
As of the 2000 census, Southside Place ranked as the 13th-wealthiest location in Texas by per capita income, yet its city government runs on almost nothing: Texas law requires city officials to be paid something, so the Mayor and each council member collect exactly one dollar a year for the job. It's a small detail that captures the city itself — a place wealthy enough to not need the money, small enough that nobody expects it.
A city built to stay small
Southside Place has never tried to grow beyond its original footprint. At just 0.2 square miles, it remains one of the smallest incorporated cities in the Houston area, hemmed in on every side by Bellaire, Houston and West University Place. That tight footprint is by design as much as by geography — a century after Edlo Crain first laid out a pool and a park to attract residents, the city he built is still recognizably the same size.