The avenue is where Harlingen's entrepreneurial class of the 1920s and 1930s built their residences in a wide variety of styles along a tree-lined roadway. The Hornaday, or “Pink House” (1921), at 614 E. Taylor Avenue, a Southern Colonial Revival building with a steeply pitched roof, was the first house built on the block. The Oscar Joyner House (1926) at number 613 is a stuccoed Italianesque villa with a two-story central pavilion topped by a shallow-pitched red tile roof influenced by the fashionable residential designs of Addison Mizner in Florida. Set amidst lush vegetation, the John Morris House (1930) at number 917 effusively brings California's Monterey style to the neighborhood, with its dark-stained, multipaned wood windows, trim, and decorative tile motifs set into the roughly textured pink stucco exterior walls.
Serving the houses of Taylor Avenue and other Anglo-American neighborhoods, Harlingen High School (1929) at 125 S. 13th Street was designed by DeWitt and Washburn of Dallas in Spanish Renaissance. Despite alterations, the large-scale, expertly executed cast-stone ornamentation in the central block of the two-story building still captures the eye.