Holy Rosary Church, a Catholic parish at 3617 Milam Street in Midtown Houston, became a home for Vietnamese Catholics within months of the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The parish had been founded by Dominican friars in 1913. In September 1975 it received two Vietnamese refugee priests who had been staying at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, one of the federal camps that processed arriving refugees, and on September 14, 1975, it held its first Mass in Vietnamese, with about 35 people attending. By the parish's own account it was the first church in Houston to welcome the Vietnamese newcomers, and it became a gathering place for Vietnamese Catholics from across the city.
By the end of the 1980s a Vietnamese commercial district had grown along Milam Street, drifting west from an earlier cluster near the present George R. Brown Convention Center, though few Vietnamese families lived in it. In 1991 Texas Monthly listed its restaurants, hair salons, car shops and travel agencies. A resolution sought by My Cao Nguyen, then president of the Vietnamese Community of Houston and Vicinity, put Vietnamese-language street signs along Milam, and in May 2004 the city designated Milam between McGowen and Holman streets as Little Saigon. By then rising Midtown land prices were pushing many businesses to Bellaire Boulevard in southwest Houston.
In January 2026 the parish unveiled a 70-by-54-inch painting of Our Lady of La Vang by the Virginia artist Henry Wingate, commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Vietnamese Dominican friars and Catholic families.
Getting there
29.7395, -95.3806
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