COURTESY OF CARNEGIE HISTORY CENTER
The iconic Ice House on Main
Then
The story of the Ice House on Main dates back to 1912 , when it first opened as the Bryan Ice Company . Back in the day before air-conditioning , refrigerators , and the make-it-at-home ice cube , ice houses like the one at the far north end of Main Street along Martin Luther King Street in Downtown Bryan provided a mo dicum of yearround comfort for customers , particularly in the sweltering summers common to the Central Texas region .
The ice trade began in the latter half of the 1800s along the United States ’ East Coast with the large-scale harvesting and transport of natural ice . By the beginning of the 20th century , the practice of creating artificial ice had been perfected and large blocks of ice were commonly transported by rail to places like the Bryan Ice Company . From there , ice was sold to commercial
Story by TIM GREGG
and residential customers for use in coolers and ice boxes .
Through the years , the iconic brick building with the Mission Revival façade , and the interior cork-lined rooms ideal for storing ice , has also been home to a grocer , a furniture manufacturer , a trade school , a John Deere dealership , and in the early ‘ 80s , a nightclub called Cell
Through food , relationships are formed ,
ones that often transcend geopolitical and cultural boundaries and which
bring people together unlike anything else .
That ’ s what we want the ice house on main to be for our community .
— Jose Quintana
Block 5 . The building was abandoned in the late 1990s , and the City of Bryan purchased it in 2007 . Then , in 2014 , the city gifted the venue to the community and economic development consulting firm , Advent GX . The deal was contingent on the ability of the company ’ s owners , Jose and Joan Quintana , to bring in the funds needed to restore the historic structure . Familiar with this sort of challenge through his consulting work , Jose Quintana established what he calls a communitydevelopment partnership .
“ That was really our only option to save the place ,” he says . “ We created the partnership in two phases and in loan amounts from $ 5,000 to $ 100,000 . In the end , we secured 43 investment partners who had seen the successful redevelopment of Downtown Bryan south of our
30 July 2021