The red brick and white limestone Houston Cotton Exchange Building is an exceptional survivor. The Cotton Exchange was the most important economic institution of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Houston when the cotton trade was the foundation of the city's economy. The exchange building is located two blocks from what was in the 1880s the public wharf at the foot of Main Street and the cotton transit sheds on both sides of Buffalo Bayou. The Cotton Exchange shares its block with another nineteenth-century survivor, the three-story, former W. L. Foley Dry Goods Company Building of 1889 at 214–218 Travis Street, also by Heiner. In between the two at 204– 212 Travis Street is the eight-story Hermann Lofts (Hermann Estate Building) of 1917 by F. S. Glover and Son, built to provide office space for cotton exporters.