EaDo, the East End and the Third and Fifth Wards

The wards were Houston's political divisions. The 1840 charter split the city into four wards meeting at Main and Congress, a Fifth Ward was created north of the bayou in 1866 and a Sixth in 1876, and after the city moved to a commission government an ordinance formally abolished the wards in 1915. The names outlived them as neighborhoods whose edges people still argue over. The Second Ward, early German and now mainly Mexican American, runs east along Buffalo Bayou. The Fifth Ward was settled by freedmen after the Civil War, and by 1925 forty Black-owned businesses lined Lyons Avenue; Interstate 10 was later built through it. The Third Ward holds Texas Southern University and Emancipation Park, bought around 1870 to commemorate the end of slavery, and its super neighborhood takes in the University of Houston. EaDo, between downtown and the East End, holds the older of the city's two Chinatowns. 4 guides are listed below.

This is the part of the city changing fastest. Artists began moving into the Third Ward in the 1990s and new building followed, the Second Ward has been drawing new residents from the suburbs and from the more expensive neighborhoods inside the Loop, and in the Third Ward a redevelopment authority has bought land and written deed restrictions to keep some of it for low-income housing. So what the restrictions on a block say, and who owns the lots around it, belongs in the offer. EaDo sits inside the East Downtown Management District, whose levy on commercial property comes on top of the usual taxing units, and the City's Office of Preservation is proposing a four-block stretch of Lyons Avenue in the Fifth Ward for the National Register of Historic Places, a listing that honors a place rather than adding the City's own review of exterior work. The flood map for the exact address is worth reading too, with Buffalo Bayou along the Second and Fifth Wards.