If you have driven around the courthouse square in the last year and a half, you have watched the Rogers Hotel wear plywood over half its windows and assumed, reasonably, that it was still recovering from hail damage. That assumption was correct as far as it went. What most people driving past never saw was the fight happening behind those windows over whether a 113-year-old building would be repaired the right way or the fast way. That fight just ended, and the proof is a new Italian restaurant that quietly started serving dinner inside the hotel on August 26.
What the Storm Actually Broke
The damage traces back to a hailstorm that hit Waxahachie on March 8, 2025, throwing half-dollar-sized ice at a four-story brick building that has stood on the northeast corner of the square since 1913. More than fifty windows were broken or rotted badly enough to need replacement, along with sections of the roof's waterproofing membrane and parts of the HVAC system. For a building this old, that is not a simple contractor call. The Rogers is listed as a historic resource within Waxahachie's historic overlay district and sits inside a nationally registered historic district, which means any exterior repair has to clear the city's Heritage Preservation Commission before a single pane gets touched.
Here is the timeline, because the order matters more than any single date:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| March 8, 2025 | Hailstorm damages more than 50 windows and sections of the roof and HVAC system |
| July 3, 2025 | Heritage Preservation Commission approves repairs with strict conditions on materials and salvage |
| December 2025 | Window replacement begins on the building's west side, the section hit hardest |
| January 2026 | Preservationists raise concerns after photos show salvaged material being discarded in bulk |
| February 5, 2026 | Contractors and the property owner host a walkthrough to address the concerns and show progress |
| August 26, 2026 | John's Place opens for dinner service inside the hotel |
The Fight Over 113-Year-Old Glass
The Heritage Preservation Commission did not just wave the Rogers Hotel through. Its July 2025 approval came with four specific conditions: only the windows identified as damaged could be replaced, every replacement had to match the original configuration, any leaded glass had to be replaced with leaded glass rather than standard modern clear panes, and any salvageable wavy glass from the original 1913 construction had to be preserved and donated to a local architectural salvage organization instead of thrown out.
That last condition is where things got tense. In January 2026, members of the Ellis County Historical Commission, Historic Waxahachie Inc., and the Heritage Preservation Commission itself raised concerns after photos surfaced showing what looked like architectural salvage being tossed into a construction debris container in bulk, where it risked getting broken before anyone could preserve it. Tenants in the building also noticed plaster being stripped away around the new window frames, exposing brick underneath, with no clear plan from the crews for patching it back.
The property owner, Dallas-based Jim Lake Co., along with contractors United Reconstruction and Excel Construction Group, responded by hosting a public walkthrough on February 5 with the Heritage Preservation Commission and local press present. The total scope turned out to be larger than the original estimate: roughly 87 windows across the building, many requiring crane installation because of how much the century-old structure has shifted over time. Excel Construction Group's estimate put the full repair project at $969,600. The walkthrough also clarified that the exposed plaster was intentional and temporary, with specialists set to come in after all windows were replaced to patch it in a historically accurate way.
That is the part of the story that never made it onto a passing driver's radar. What looked like a slow, disorganized repair job was actually a small, real preservation dispute, resolved in public, over whether a building standing on a lot where two earlier hotels had already burned down would keep its original glass or lose it to expediency.
What Opened While the Scaffolding Came Down
The payoff for anyone who lives downtown is that the building is finally doing something again. John's Place, a new Italian restaurant, began service on August 26 inside the historic hotel at 100 N. College Street. The chef built the menu around Genovese and Sicilian family recipes, the kind that get passed down at a crowded table rather than written in a cookbook, and he still travels each year to Cogoleto and Varazze in Italy to cook alongside relatives who taught him the same way. The restaurant runs Wednesday through Saturday, with lunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., bar bites from 3 to 5, and dinner from 5 to 9. It is closed Sunday through Tuesday.
This is not the first tenant to move into the Rogers since Jim Lake Co. took over the property, but it is the first one to open its doors in the same season the exterior work is finally winding down, which means it is the first time in over a year that the building has looked like something other than a construction site from the sidewalk.
The Square's Real Fall Calendar
The timing lines up with a run of events that will put more people on that stretch of the square than at any point since the storm. On September 19, the 11th annual C10s in the Park brings more than 1,200 restored GM trucks to Getzendaner Memorial Park, free for spectators, with a Friday night cruise-in the evening before at The Avenue Church parking lot. After the show wraps at the park, the Party on the Square runs from 5:30 to 10 p.m. right downtown, close enough to the Rogers that anyone at John's Place for a late dinner will hear it.
Later in October, the Texas Country Reporter Festival returns to the courthouse square for its annual celebration of live music, Texas-made crafts, and food from around the state, drawing the kind of crowd that fills every bench around the courthouse and spills onto the same block where the Rogers sits.
Neither event is new to Waxahachie. What is new is that for the first time in over a year, the building anchoring that corner of the square is not wrapped in plywood while it happens.
What This Actually Changes
If you have lived downtown through the last year and a half, you already know the Rogers as the building that was always half under repair. That version of the corner is done. What replaces it is a working hotel building with a new restaurant serving Sicilian and Genovese cooking on a block that is about to host a truck show and one of the town's biggest annual festivals within six weeks of each other. The preservation fight that most people never saw is the reason the windows still look right, and that fight is also why the building is only now ready for its next chapter instead of a year ago.
Waxahachie's square has weathered worse than a hailstorm and come out the other side looking like itself. This fall gives residents a reason to notice.
If you love watching this town change as much as we do, or if you're weighing what a corner like this one means for property values and long-term livability, Quentin Crayton would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
