The former Francis Levy House lies in Sixth Ward, the most intact of Houston's fragile nineteenth-century neighborhoods. Sixth Ward was a working-class neighborhood with a substantial immigrant population. Like the Near Northside in Fifth Ward, its economy was tied to the car shops and repair yards of Houston's oldest railway, the Houston and Texas Central Railway, whose main line parallels Washington Avenue. The Levy House is the oldest house in Sixth Ward for which a probable construction date has been ascertained. It is a Gulf Coast cottage, one of the most pervasive vernacular house types of nineteenth-century Houston. Other examples can be seen throughout the forty-three-block Sixth Ward Historic District. Across the street at 1909 Decatur is a fine example of a double-house version of a Gulf Coast cottage from about 1870, rehabilitated in 1994.