T oday, James Bute Park on the northeastern edge of downtown Houston is a mostly empty green space with fields, a couple of benches and a great view of the city’s mammoth freeway interchanges.
But nearly two centuries ago, it was Frost Town, a working-class settlement founded in 1836 along Buffalo Bayou, one of Houston’s earliest neighborhoods.
First developed by the Frost family, led by a veteran of the Texas Revolution and slaveowner named Jonathan Benson Frost, it evolved over more than a century into a layered community shaped by German immigrants, Black Americans and Mexican Americans drawn by nearby industry and railroads…