In October of that year, the stock market crashed, foretelling the Great Depression. Farmers saw cotton prices plummet. The town’s major employer, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, implemented layoffs and pay cuts. Four of Temple’s five banks closed. Temple’s population remained static at 15,000 throughout the 1930s. Yet the Kyle and other high-rise Texas hotels like it held on for decades as towering symbols of something larger. Soldiers huddled in them during World War II. Community groups met for lunch. High school kids held proms.
The Kyle was the third “skyscraper” in Temple. The 113-room Doering Hotel—later sold and renamed the Hawn Hotel—had celebrated its opening in 1928 with a different human fly ascending its nine levels. The six-story Professional Building came second and housed a grocery, stenography school, barbershop, law office, flower shop and cigar store.
New Yorkers might argue whether any building with fewer than 20 stories, or perhaps even 50, could be billed as a skyscraper, but architect T.J. Gottesdiener, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor decades after the firm he worked for designed Chicago’s iconic Sears Tower, perhaps put it best: “What is a skyscraper? It is anything that makes you stop, stand, crane your neck back and look up.” In the late 1920s, high-rise buildings began to ascend in Texas, and they became a symbol of good times, progress and optimism in tough times ahead.
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