4100 Montrose, Houston Texas 77082 ,1986–2019
By Jim Towers photojournalist HIHI
Duke. “ Where a man can have a pint and a pipe in peace!”
The chess board is still there. That's the thing I keep coming back to. UST bought the building, hung flower baskets where the tankard wall used to be, painted over the last of it — but out on the patio, under a corridor of trees that don't care whose name is on the deed, the tiles are still set into the concrete. The pieces are gone. The board isn't.
I found that out the hard way, riding back seven years after the doors closed for good, camera in hand, trying to figure out what I'd lost.
Stand Too!
The Black Labrador was a sight to see from the outside — a red door, a wrought sign with a dog painted on it, ivy doing what ivy does to brick. It was beautiful and magnificent inside. Inside it was England, or somebody's very convincing memory of it: a Queen's Guard mannequin standing sentry in the foyer, a grandfather clock keeping time nobody checked, a red phone box out front that worked about as well as English weather. Pewter tankards hung from the ceiling in a solid rack, monogrammed, mine among them. I still have it. I still have the coffee mugs too.
Make way for the queen's guard!
Queen's guard standing sentinel.
God save the Queen!
The bar was hopping, the pints were flowing, the food was delicious and the games were outstanding. They had it all. You could play rings, darts, Chess, checkers, playing cards, a couple of pool tables as well. There was even a few students playing GO now and then. I actually learned Pai Gow( make nine) Chinese backjack, here,. from Hong Kong of course. It was not uncommon to see people sitting by the fire drinking tea or a pint reading the paper or a book, men talking politics, the good Sergeant from the University Police Department off duty out of uniform would come in and have a pint with us. Coats of Arms from the different regiments on the wall. The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, 5th Regiment of Foot. Her Majesties 11th Devonshire and Dorset Regiment ,124th infantry of foot. The Duke of York and Albany's 91st Royal Marines Regiment of Foot.
Christmas in the pub.
A Russian ran the place — a Muscovite expatriate who'd built an English pub in the middle of Houston and staffed it with the daughters of other expatriate families, Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian. I spoke Russian with them across the bar more nights than I can count, which is its own kind of strange when you think about it: a lawman from South Texas, ordering a ginger ale in a language that wasn't his, in a pub that wasn't English, in a city that wasn't either one.
Regulars could have their own pint made with their name on it and hanging for them.
what was served at the bar.
I went for the fire and the books, mostly. Winter nights with Hawthorne or Eliot or Dostoevsky, tea going cold, the hearth doing the work. I rode my motorcycle over after classes and played timed chess with colleagues from St. Thomas at the indoor tables — the kind of games where you're not really playing chess, you're playing the clock, and somewhere in there you stop noticing the difference. Sunday nights were amateur Irish folk songs. Thursdays were Irish rebel republican songs, the real ones, the kind that mean something specific to the people singing them.
Shepherd's pie was the best!
And of course fish and chips!
it was a strange place of contradictions. The pub hosted fundraising on those nights, I met a guy from Ireland , nice man, neither of us drank. We stood there, two teetotalers, each holding a glass we weren't going to finish, in a Russian-owned English truly British themed pub in Texas, playing Irish folk music and Irish rebel songs, while a room full of strangers sang songs about a war none of us had fought.
I've thought about that a lot since. I don't think it was a coincidence that a place built entirely out of borrowed identity — Russian owner, English theme, Irish nights, American , Texas city — was the one place where that moment could happen without anybody remarking on it. The Black Labrador didn't ask you to explain yourself. It just handed you a tankard, a pint of bitters and assumed you'd earn your spot on the wall eventually.
I earned mine.
There's a thread in my own history that runs oddly parallel. My stepfamily's Irish, and some of my summers as a kid were spent up there. I lived in Marblehead later, went to games at Fenway, and grew up in South Texas aware of the San Patricio Battalion — Irish soldiers who deserted the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American War and fought, and largely died, on the other side. Irish-Mexican solidarity isn't an abstraction where I'm from. It's a fact you grow up knowing the way you know the tide.
So maybe I was always going to end up a regular at a pub that made no sense on paper. The Black Labrador was a room full of people who'd each brought something borrowed and made it theirs. I brought a badge, and an adjunct university professor job and a fondness for Dostoevsky. It fit fine.
The University of St. Thomas closed it on December 15, 2019. They canceled the lease, Took over the building and converted it to offices, took down what needed taking down. I don't fault them for it — buildings changed, cities change shape, that's the whole business I'm usually documenting when I go out with a camera. But I didn't go back for a long time.
When I finally did, this past July, I went looking for the chess board specifically. I knew the tables were gone. I wanted to see if the patio itself remembered anything.
It did. The tiles are still embedded in the concrete where the board used to sit — the grid intact, the game abandoned mid-thought, the pieces swept away years ago by someone who had no idea they were clearing a chessboard and not just tidying a patio. I shot it close, and I shot it wide, and I stood there a minute the way you do at a grave that isn't quite a grave.
what is here now.
That's the image this piece ends on. Not the red door, not the tankards, not the mannequin standing guard over a room that doesn't need guarding anymore. Just a board with no pieces, still waiting on a game that ended without anybody agreeing it was over.
what replaced it.
The players moved on. The board didn't.
All that is left.
I drive by now and remember the good times. The friends made, and how people would sing the parting glass as they would walk into the cold night after two in the morning closing. I look at it and think about what we have lost, which always, is more than people realize. Between an office, or a neighborhood University pub, as a local, a University faculty professor, and loyal patron, I know what I would choose.
The Black Labrador operated at 4100 Montrose Boulevard in Houston from 1986 until its closure on December 15, 2019.
By Jim Towers, photojournalist, Houston Heights Independent.
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