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Title: Houston: The Feast Years
An Illustrated Essay
Author: George Melvin Fuermann (1918-2001)
Release Date: March 15, 2019 [EBook #59068]
Language: English
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HOUSTON: THE FEAST YEARS
BY
GEORGE FUERMANN
Houston: The Feast Years (1962)
Reluctant Empire (1957)
Houston: Land of the Big Rich (1951)
An Illustrated Essay
By
George Fuermann
With Woodcuts by Lowell Collins
Modern Photographs by Owen Johnson
Historic Photographs and Sketches by Various Hands
The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city. Euripides
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city. C. C. Colton
Urbes constituit: hora dissolvit. Seneca
1962
Press of Premier
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-20819
Copyright © 1962 by George Fuermann
Woodcuts Copyright © 1962 by Lowell Collins
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
PREMIER PRINTING COMPANY
First Printing
Houston, the reporter for the London Daily Mail wrote, “has caused me to lift my ban on the word fabulous.”
The next year, 1956, the London Times speculated that America might “eventually be based on a quadrilateral of great cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.”
That year, too, the New York Times quoted Lloyd’s of London: “Within 100 years Houston will be the largest city in the world.”
Houston: one of “The 12 Most Exciting Cities of North America,” said Holiday in 1953—one of the dozen, from Quebec in the north to Mexico City in the south, possessing “that rare combination of qualities which has always spelled greatness.”
Few Houstonians see their city in such remarkable terms. Few understand why their city provokes such estimates by others.
The first known sketch of Houston was made by a British artist, who never saw the place, to illustrate a book written by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, an Englishwoman who did see Houston in the early 1840s. The artist apparently took her description of Buffalo Bayou’s big banks to mean hills.
Years later, perhaps in 1868, a French artist seems to have used the Englishman’s sketch as a model for one of his own, below, making mountains of the hills.
Roughly the size of Warsaw, Stockholm, Singapore, and Naples, of Bucharest and Brussels and Munich, Houston is prosaically listed in the Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia—the Soviet Encyclopedia—of 1957 as a “Railway and airline junction. Important industrial, commercial, and financial center in the South of the USA.” Even an American encyclopedia is hardly expected to describe the city’s festival atmosphere, its spirit of play, which derives in part from a surprising characteristic described by Arthur C. Evans, a man well seasoned in life, who wrote:
“I tried to think of Houston as being masculine. It wouldn’t do. Houston is not a masculine city in the sense that New Orleans or San Francisco is masculine. And so, for me, at any rate, it is Miss Houston, a beguiling, vibrant, radiantly healthy adolescent—and I love her.”
Houston, Promised Land or New Golconda or whatever writers say of it, is a city of great expectations. Ambitious, confident, it moves swiftly, restlessly. Its profile, a transfiguring skyline moored to the flat Gulf plain, vaguely resembles other modern skylines, but Houston resembles nothing in the world except itself. Ever since World War II the city has beguiled observers, who often approach it with preconception, and often leave it with surprise.
“Air conditioned Tower of Babel, anchored on gold, gall and guts,” the author James Street wrote of it. “An adolescent Amazon with a little gland trouble.”
“It is plain Simon-pure American inspiration,” the American Magazine said of it.
It “has a strength and power and rude majesty all its own,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said. “In time, perhaps, it will achieve greatness.”
What arrests the visiting journalist, what does he sense about Houston that residents often fail to feel?
Let us see.
President John F. Kennedy standing beside a full-scale model of the Apollo lunar landing vehicle, which was shown for the first time during the President’s inspection of the Manned Spacecraft Center in September, 1962.
City Seal
(Enlarged)
The ship channel, Oil, and Two World Wars made Houston what it is. The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age.
In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, the city began an identity with the old ports of western Europe that played leading roles in the great adventures of two, three, and four centuries ago. Technical direction of America’s effort to put the first man on the moon will come from Houston.
The government is spending well over a hundred million dollars—it may come to far more than that in the end—to build office buildings, laboratories, and massive test communications and control facilities on range land near Clear Lake. The millions of dollars to be invested by industry to serve the center are incalculable. Slowly the character of the city will change as the migration of space scientists merges with Houston and with oil, the city’s mover and shaker for half a century. “It is likely,” the Dallas News said in 1962, “that even many Houstonians have no conception of what is happening and what it may mean to their community.”
Salvador Dali’s surrealistic impression of Houston was a result of his visit to the city in 1952. The flaming giraffes symbolize oil derricks, at which a woman, her face covered with camellias, looks with eager expectation. The port and the pioneers are shown in other symbols.
This, apparently painted in the 1920s, is an unknown artist’s conception of Houston in 1980.
The new Els: Speedways for amateurs
When the astronauts moved to Houston in 1962, their presence gave breath to what had seemed a fantasy to many Houstonians, who more than most Americans will experience vicariously the most extraordinary adventure in history. How far Houston has come since two New Yorkers paid $9,428 for a townsite and named it for the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto! The interval between that date and the arrival of the astronauts was but 125 years. What is Houston that it has become so much?
Beginning life three thousand years after Athens and two thousand after London, beginning two centuries after Boston and New York, fifty years after Los Angeles and at nearly the same time as Chicago, Houston suddenly joined the family of metropolises midway in the twentieth century. Its likeness in history, however, is to none of those cities, but to Carthage of North Africa, one of the most famous cities of antiquity, whose beginning preceded Houston’s by twenty-six centuries.
Carthage, like Houston, was above all a commercial city, its people vigorous, practical. At one time Carthage was famous for the great wealth of its leading families; Houston was once known as the Land of the Big Rich. And the sea, or access to it, was the key to the rise of both. As Carthage became the richest city of the western Mediterranean, Houston became the richest of the Gulf of Mexico. Carthage lived for fifteen centuries and died abruptly, disappearing from history.
The largest of twenty-one places named Houston in the United States, not counting Houston City and Houston Junction, both in Pennsylvania, Houston is the seventh American city in population and the second, after Los Angeles, in land area. But to call Houston the seventh city in population, though correct, is unrealistic. The true population of a modern city is shown not by the number of people living within its legal limits but by the number living within its metropolitan area, which for Houston is Harris County. By that measure, Houston ranks sixteenth in population.
Whatever its rank, Houston is often said to be a small town with an enormous population. Such a notion becomes increasingly hard to support except for one aspect, which was shown by B. D. (Mack) McCormick, a collector of folk 7 music. He described the city in a pamphlet accompanying each of two recordings, produced in England in 1960, of the Houston area’s folk music.
The crowd, the buzz, the murmuring
Of this great hive, the city.
Abraham Cowley
Houston is “less a city than it is an amalgam of villages and townships surrounding a cluster of skyscrapers,” he wrote. “Each section of the city tends to reflect the region which it faces, usually being settled by people from that region. Thus the Louisiana French-speaking people are to be found in the northeast of Houston; the East Texas people in the northern fringe, which itself is the beginning of the Piney Woods; the German and Polish people are in the northwest Heights; and so on.... Each area surrounding the city has gathered its own, and 8 each group has in turn established a community within the city.... And so the city, which in itself has no cultural traditions, is rich in those it has acquired.”
The Main Stem: The end of the Salt Grass Trail.
McCormick quoted Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins, a Negro folk singer, who spoke of a Houston unknown to many Houstonians: “The idea of it is that everybody ’round here plays music or makes songs or something. That’s white peoples, colored peoples, that’s them funny French-talking peoples, that’s everybody, what I mean. They all of ’em got music.” McCormick himself has said, “More Englishmen than Houstonians see Houston as a rich source of traditional lore, though otherwise the British think of Houston in clichés.”
Much of the area’s past is deep-etched in folk music. One song was sung by Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter, a Negro convict and perhaps the most famous 9 of colored folk singers. The song, titled “The Midnight Special,” begins:
If you ever go to Houston,
You better walk right,
You better not stagger,
You better not fight.
Sheriff Binford will arrest you,
He will carry you down;
If the jury finds you guilty
You are Sugarland bound.[1]
Many “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds,” Gerald Ashford wrote in 1951. Such a fancy formed a dominant theme of Houston appraisals during a brief and a bizarre period. The myth that Houston’s population consisted mainly of the rich was absurd, but the millionaire legend, though arresting to the world, was a liability to Houston. For one thing, it obscured the city’s reality, which was itself exceptional enough.
The Shamrock Hilton Hotel, built by the wildcatter Glenn H. McCarthy at a cost of $21,000,000, opened on St. Patrick’s Day of 1949 with what turned out to be a spectacle. Conrad Hilton took control of the hotel in the spring of 1955. The two dates roughly mark the period of the legend’s vigor.
Still, it was in some ways an exhilarating time, and it left Houston with an extravagant folklore. The goose hung high. The legends die reluctantly: An oilman was said to have offered his daughter $5000 for every pound she lost; a Houston man who sent a new Cadillac to Europe to have a $5000 custom body put on its chassis was said to have told the craftsmen to “Throw the old body away;” wanting to play a joke on a colleague who was traveling in Europe, another Houstonian had a fair-sized roller coaster built in the traveler’s wooded yard.
But the maybe-so stories are less remarkable than many of the authentic ones. A Houston oilman well known for eccentricity and boyish hedonism was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles one night in 1955. He wished to awaken at a certain early hour the next day, so he made a long-distance call to a man on his staff in Houston and told the man to call him in Los Angeles at the specified hour the next morning. In 1957 a Houston high school girl received a graduation gift from her father, an oilman: wrapped and tied in her school colors, it was a map and a legal assignment of the overriding royalties in a lease near Odessa, in West Texas. A memorandum said a geologist expected the lease to produce oil for at least fifty years.
Roy H. Hofheinz, the mayor of Houston in 1953, disclosed at a press conference that he had recently made his first million dollars, though he was unsure of the exact date. “You just don’t notice things like that,” he said. The oilman Robert E. Smith has described newspaper estimates of many fortunes as “paper profits.” But some fortunes were as surprising as they were real. In 1957, when a Houston oilman’s former secretary died at the age of eighty, her estate was found to be worth $790,031.
A query by a New York matron, visiting Houston for the first time, showed America’s credulity in Houston’s millionaire legend. Passing the Rice University campus—three hundred acres of lawn; buildings in Byzantine, Moorish, Italian, and Spanish architectures—she said, “Tell me, who lives there?”
Lords’ Cycle Club at 109 Chenevert Street, probably in 1898, when cycling was one of Houston’s chief pastimes. The first bicycle run to Galveston, in 1892, took ten hours; the cyclists were so exhausted that they returned by train.
Three of six sketches made in Houston by an artist accompanying the journalist Edward King, of Scribner’s Monthly, in 1873, when the city was recovering from Reconstruction. “Houston,” King wrote, “is one of the most promising of Texas towns.” The sketches show:
Two Negroes racing their drays.
A magnolia seller, a common sight at the time.
An auctioneer’s street-hawker.
In spite of the lingering legend, Houston is in fact a city of working people. They came en masse during World War II, more than forty thousand to the shipyards alone, and most remained. Unlike the state, whose population has grown mainly from the excess of births over deaths, Houston has grown also from people moving in from the rest of Texas and other states.
The city’s population differs widely from that of most other American urban areas, having proportionately fewer industrial workers and more professional, technical, and white-collar workers. The difference is caused by automation and by the technical nature of the four dominant industries. Processing oil, natural gas, and especially petrochemicals requires fewer but more highly trained workers than many industries, as does the work to be done by concerns allied with the space center. Such workers get comparatively higher pay, which has made Houston a city with more houses and fewer apartments than older American cities of comparable size.
No city is all of a piece, and Houston’s oneness is relieved by the variant peoples merging with it since the beginning.
A Greek kaffeneion, a large room, nearly bare, with a ceiling of ornately stamped tin, is a walk-up reached through the unmarked door of an old downtown building. There the city’s Greeks, and only Greeks, drink the coffee of their homeland—a strong brew, neither sweet nor bitter, of a strange, nearly syrupy consistency.
The oriental mysteries of the shrine room of the On Leong tong—the word tong is shunned now, and they call it a Chinese Merchants Association—is on the second floor of the tong’s modern building on the northeastern fringe of the skyscrapers. The first Chinese, three hundred of them, came in 1870. Two thousand now live in Houston—two thousand of the city’s most exemplary citizens.
The Houston Turn-Verein, founded in 1854, is one of the oldest organizations in the city. The Germans, immigrating to Texas in great numbers in the nineteenth century, came early to Houston and were a dominant element in the city from the 1850s until well after Reconstruction. Edward King, a Yankee journalist who visited the city in 1873, wrote that “the Germans, who are very numerous and well to do in the city, have their Volks-fests and beer-absorbings, when the city takes on an absolutely Teutonic air.” Gradually the Germans have merged with all Houston, one loss of which was the virtual extinction of their magnificent singing societies.
Frosttown, Chaneyville, Freedmantown, Chapmanville, and Jourdeville, local names for parts of an older city, have vanished, but a newcomer called Frenchtown still lives. Its street names are lyrics—Deschaumes, Delia, Roland, Adelia, Lelia—and the tiny Creole oasis is seasoned with music and dance rituals unknown in the rest of Houston. Frenchtown’s people, coming from Louisiana during hard times in the early 1920s, settled in a few blocks off Liberty Road, and there they have remained as one family, little altered in forty years by the changing city surrounding them.
Houston’s Mexican group lacks the color and ritual of San Antonio’s, but it is the second largest national group in the city. Western Slavs, mainly Czechs and Poles, have lived in Houston for many decades, especially the Czechs. A few Japanese, most of whom excel as truck farmers and rice growers, live outside the city. Many foreign traders, scientists, and executives have been drawn to Houston by cotton and oil and chemicals.
The state’s largest concentration of Negroes lives in Houston, which ranks ninth in the nation in the proportion of Negroes to the total population. Nearly a quarter of a million Negroes live in the metropolitan area, or roughly one in five persons. In an article about Negro millionaires in Texas, Ebony Magazine said in 1952, “Houston is sometimes called the ‘Bagdad of Negro America.’” It is said also that Houston Negroes have a higher per capita wealth than those of any other American city.
What a change in one century! Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the most important historical figures to have written about Houston, came to the city in 1854. Writing in The Cotton Kingdom, he said of Houston: “There is a prominent slavemart in town, which holds a large lot of likely looking negroes, waiting purchasers. In the windows of shops, and on the doors and columns of the hotel, are many written advertisements, headed ‘A likely negro girl for sale.’ 'Two negroes for sale.’ ‘Twenty negro boys for sale,’ etc.”
In his book The Great South, Edward King said Negroes “have had something to do with the city government [of Houston] during the reconstruction era, and the supervisor of streets, and some members of the city council, at the time of my sojourn there [in 1873], were negroes.”
Houston has proportionately few native Houstonians. The board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce, where natives might be thought to dominate, reflects the newness of the population. Of the board’s twenty-nine members in 1956, eleven moved to the city after 1945, seven in 1951 or later. Only one of the twenty-nine was born in Houston, only eleven more were born elsewhere in Texas.
Yet a fleck of truth still lingers in what Alexander E. Sweet and J. Armoy Knox wrote of Houston in 1883: “After you have listened to the talk of one of these pioneer veterans for some time, you begin to feel that the creation of the world, the arrangement of the solar system, and all subsequent events, including the discovery of America, were provisions of an all-wise Providence, arranged with a direct view to the advancement of the commercial interests of Houston.”
A bayou baptism, late in the 1890s, at the foot of what is now White Street. The photograph is one of many made by Frank R. Hutton, Sr., a gifted amateur photographer, who came to Houston in 1893.
Fifty miles inland, Houston is one of the nation’s principal world ports. Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space.
Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston Ship Channel to give Houston its One Million. The city got a foretaste of its oil destiny thirty-five years before the Spindletop gusher roared in when Richard W. Dowling, the Confederate hero of the Battle of Sabine Pass, and John M. Fennerty formed a company in 1866 for “Mechanical operations in mining and boring for oil....” Their project was ridiculed, and its outcome is unknown.
The historian Andrew Forest Muir has shown that two critical periods in the growth of Houston were the half-decade from 1857 to 1861, when it became the 16 rail center of Texas, and the decade beginning with the Spindletop gusher in 1901. Two others are the decade after the Houston Ship Channel was opened late in 1914—a period further stimulated by World War I—and the fifteen years beginning just before World War II. The inception of the federal space laboratory begins a fifth cycle of growth.
The Houston Post Office, completed in 1890, at the southeast corner of Franklin Avenue and Fannin Street.
Houston’s quick growth between 1940 and 1960, when its population rose from twenty-first to seventh place among American cities, owed to the linking of 17 three benefits: the ship channel, which gave the city access to the world; immense resources of oil, natural gas, sulphur, lime, salt, and water; and the fact that the product of one chemical plant is often the raw material of another. This combination created on the banks of the ship channel one of the world’s greatest concentrations of petrochemical industries—chemical plants dependent on the by-products of refining oil. The tempo increased in the early 1960s, when the Monsanto Chemical Company began building the world’s largest ethylene plant at a cost of fifty million dollars. Du Pont began building a hydrofluoric acid plant, and an important polypropylene plastic and film plant was being built.
The Houston Post Office, completed in 1962.
During the 1950s Houston was a leading example of the new urban America caused by the economic impetus of World War II and the increased post-war migration of rural people to cities. No period in the city’s history approaches the importance of World War II and the years after. Before the war Houston was an ambitious small city. A few years afterward, its former hopes lying in the shadows of sudden and preposterous growth, the city was altered in character, aspirations, and appearance.
Houston’s formidable roles in the oil and gas industries, in the manufacturing of oil-field equipment, and in the nationwide distribution of gas are widely understood but seldom comprehended. The metropolitan area alone, which has seven oil refineries, produces nearly eighty thousand barrels of oil daily. Two major oil companies, the Humble Oil and Refining Company and the Continental Oil Company, and hundreds of smaller ones have their headquarters in Houston, most of whose downtown skyscrapers were built by or for oil, gas, and banking.
The Tennessee Gas Transmission Company was organized in 1944; twelve years later its assets passed a billion dollars, a speed of growth that may never have been equaled in American business. Paul Kayser, president of the El Paso Natural Gas Company, was asked at a press conference in El Paso why his company, 18 which owns El Paso’s tallest building and supplies West Texas gas to western states, has its headquarters in Houston. He answered that the only place in America to keep in touch with the oil business is Houston.
Freighters docked in the Port of Houston.
In 1960 most of the nation’s sulphur deposits, around 6 per cent of its petroleum reserves, and around 10 per cent of its refining capacity were in a nineteen-county area surrounding Houston. An estimated three-quarters of the nation’s petrochemicals production comes from the Texas Gulf Coast area. Shipbuilding, an integrated steel mill, and paper mills are other important aspects of the city’s economy.
It is a paradox that the Houston metropolitan area, which is hundreds of miles from the state’s chief cattle-raising areas, has more cattle than any other county in Texas. Irrigation has made the county a rice producer of importance; within a hundred-mile radius of Houston is grown 28 per cent of the nation’s rice. And Houston, which is the headquarters for Anderson, Clayton & Company, the largest cotton concern in the world, is one of the world’s leading spot cotton markets.
Houston’s gusto in the 1950s was epitomized by “M” Day, as July 3, 1954, was called. When statisticians divined ahead of time that the city’s metropolitan population would reach one million on that date, a festival was planned to welcome the millionth citizen. Houston Bucks were printed in a denomination of $1,000,000. A huge thermometer, its peak registering 1,000,000, was put at the Rice Hotel corner and the reading raised a notch a day. Thousands of auto-bumper signs said “I’m One in a Million—Houston.” Many concerns changed their postage-meter messages to read “Houston’s a Million Strong.”
At a town meeting held in Hermann Park on July 3, Mr. Million was identified as B. C. McCasland, Jr., who moved to the city the day before from Clinton, Mississippi. Aged thirty-six, a geologist, and the father of five children, he typified the city at that moment. Receiving gifts said to be worth $10,000, he was flown to the eleven cities then larger than Houston—to talk about Houston. He moved away some time afterward, but “M” Day may not have been premature. A year and a half later, when the Bureau of the Census estimated the populations of Houston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington, the population of Houston was put at 1,077,000.
One of the earliest known sketches of the Port of Houston, probably in 1866, showing approximately the same area as the previous photograph.
The Satilla, inaugurating ocean commerce at the Port of Houston in August, 1915, attracted crowds of sight-seers. The deep-water Houston Ship Channel was completed the year before.
The downtown building boom of 1927, which was unequaled until the first years of the 1960s: In various stages of construction are the Niels Esperson Building, the Lamar Hotel (lower left corner), the Gulf Building, an addition to what was then the Second National Bank Building, and, on the right, the West Building. The building with three white domes, on the left, is the old Carnegie Library; next to it is the old First Presbyterian Church. In 1947 the F. W. Woolworth Company bought this half-block for $3,050,000, or at the rate of $2,000 a front inch.
The first Houstonian to fly an airplane, one he built himself, was L. L. Walker, in 1910. The plane, above, was a Bleriot-type with a forty-horsepower engine; it flew at a peak altitude of three hundred feet and had a top speed of nearly thirty miles an hour. The photograph—Walker, at the controls, is hidden by the wing—was made at the start of an attempt to fly to Galveston late in 1910. He reached La Marque, well over half way, and prudently decided to return. Walker died in 1960, aged seventy-one.
The history of Houston’s material success is to some extent the history of its port and the bayou it was to make into a ship channel. Buffalo Bayou was once the mouth of the Brazos River, though the Brazos long ago cut its present course to the southwest. A traveler who wrote of the bayou nearly ten years before Houston existed found it an exceptional stream. “... this most enchanting little stream [has] the appearance of an artificial canal in the design and course of which Nature has lent her masterly hand,” J. C. Clopper wrote in 1828. Other 23 early travelers were to comment on Buffalo Bayou’s “strong resemblance to a canal.”
Moreover, Andrew Forest Muir has written, “Buffalo Bayou had another peculiar advantage.... Unlike most significant Texas streams, it flows almost due east and west. With the Brazos [River] extending in a general northerly direction, this meant that the head of navigation on the Bayou was but twenty miles or so from the heart of the fertile agricultural region of the Brazos.”
Indeed, Buffalo Bayou was the principal reason the founders of Houston chose the area for their city. They wanted the most interior point of year-round navigation in Texas. Unable to buy the town of Harrisburg, they went upstream for their site.
A vessel of size first succeeded in reaching a boat-landing at Houston in 1837. It was a former warship, the Constitution, a forty-four-gun frigate in 1797 but then a merchant vessel, whose captain chanced the voyage to win $1000 offered by the new city’s promoters. Within ten years vessels were making daily runs between Houston and Galveston.
The improvement of the bayou channel was begun in 1839 with funds raised by public subscription and lotteries. The Port of Houston was established by city ordinance in 1841. Widening and deepening of the channel was begun in 1869 and continued into the 1960s, by which time the minimum depth of the channel was thirty-six feet and the minimum width was three hundred feet. The port is linked with the Intracoastal Canal. “Probably the greatest, most farseeing project ever consummated in Texas was the deepwater channel to Houston,” the Dallas News said in an editorial in 1955.
One price of the project’s material benefits was the loss of one of the area’s chief natural beauties, a beauty remarked by many travelers in the nineteenth century. “... this most enchanting little stream,” Clopper wrote in 1828. Edward King foresaw in 1873 what was to happen to the lovely bayou.
“The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston ... is overhung by lofty and graceful magnolias; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for miles along the channel with the heavy, passionate fragrance of the queen flower drifting about him,” he wrote nearly a century ago. And then: “This bayou Houston hopes one day to widen and dredge all the way to Galveston; but its prettiness and romance will then be gone.”
So it goes.
Airships at aviation meet in Houston, January, 1911. The meet was held at what is now the corner of Main Street and Holcombe Boulevard. From family papers of Lenore Bland Pfeiffer
The Kellum-Noble House
With a median age of 27.5 years, Houston’s population is the youngest of America’s big cities. The city itself seems younger than it is, for since the 1920s Houston has given the impression of being always new. Few structures stand long enough to become old. When the lovely patina of age does get a chance to form, it is scrubbed away as though it were an embarrassment, or so it was removed in 1962 from the bronze of Sam Houston’s equestrian statue in Hermann Park. Houstonians have shown little compassion for their city’s past.
No structure has been preserved from Houston’s early days except a two-story brick trading post, built in 1848, on Congress Avenue; the Kellum-Noble house, the main part of which was built in 1847; and the Rice-Cherry house, which may date from 1850. The two houses now stand behind the City Hall in the small Sam Houston Park. “What one misses most in Houston are old things,” a Swiss journalist 25 wrote after visiting Houston in 1951. “After a few days one sings the praise of the past.”
Some old things, obscure trifles, evoke a period when Houston was a Main Street town. A city slogan of the early 1900s—“Where the Mock Bird has no sorrow in his song, no winter in his year”—suggests municipal aspirations inconceivable in the Houston of half a century later. Now it is “Space Center, USA.”
And some old things evoke a period when tenacious civic pride fed on delusions that were privately understood but never confessed. Judge an extravagant sentenceful of wishful thinking in the Houston edition of The Standard Blue Book of Texas for 1907: “Nowhere are the flowers fairer, the skies bluer or the trees greener than in the beautiful residence environs of this city, and nowhere in this great and powerful Southland is a more gracious and unbounded hospitality dispensed by more attractive and winsome chatelaines than adorn the handsome homes of Houston.”
But Houston’s past may be suggested by other than old things. The Southwest and the frontier are recalled by the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and its annual prelude, the Salt Grass Trail, on which hundreds of city people ride horseback for three days to retrace a pioneer cattle trail. Silky stalactites of Spanish moss, dripping from oaks and sweet gums, faintly evoke Houston’s role in the old South. But the primitiveness and individualism of the wild west and the relaxation of the Southern mood have been shed. Though Houston was shaped to a large extent by the South and the Southwest, it has come to be lightly marked by those regions.
“It is partly an unconscious romanticism and it is partly a conscious cult that one still thinks of Houston as pre-eminently a Texas city,” Hubert Mewhinney wrote in the Houston Post. “But it is not. Houston since the (Second World) war ... has not been so much Texan as generalized American....”
In becoming so, it gained in a way that has been concealed by the city’s more arresting millionaire legend. Slowly, perceptibly, Houston is becoming cosmopolitan. With its interest in music, art, and the theater, with its universities and medical schools, Houston is becoming an important center of culture. But nearly all is new: the organization dates of only the symphony, one art museum, and the universities precede World War II, those of only the symphony and one university 26 precede World War I. No cultural institution dates from the nineteenth century, though a tradition of opera and theater goes far back.
Houston’s musical life has long been centered in its symphony, which gives the city much more than symphony music. From its first and second chairs come most of the musicians in the chamber music groups, which are the most remarkable new development in the city’s cultural life. Sir John Barbirolli succeeded Leopold Stokowski in 1961 as conductor of the symphony, which was organized in 1913.
The Music Guild, organized in 1948, is the oldest of three chamber music groups of distinction, and the J. S. Bach Society, one of the few performing Bach groups in America, gave its first concerts in 1954. The Houston Grand Opera Association was organized in 1955. During the six years Stokowski led the symphony he organized the Contemporary Music Society, which gave its first concert in 1959.
The Alley, one of three Houston theaters operating the year around, is one of the premier theaters of America. Directors, actors, and writers from many countries have come to Houston to study the arena theater’s work. Directed by Nina Vance since it opened in 1947, the Alley has received substantial grants from the Ford Foundation. The Playhouse, whose arena theater was the first in America to be built for professional use, has operated under various managements since it was opened in 1951. Theatre, Inc., occupying the proscenium hall of the old Houston Little Theatre, has mostly produced musicals since it was organized in 1953.
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, directed by James Johnson Sweeney since 1961, developed into an important art center under the long direction of James Chillman. Growing from an art league organized in 1900, the museum opened in 1924; it was the first art museum in Texas. Two wings were added in 1926, the Blaffer Memorial Wing in 1953, and the beautiful Cullinan Hall—the Big Room—in 1958. The last, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, gave the museum a new entrance and made it one of the city’s architectural distinctions. The museum is strongest in paintings of the European Renaissance. Important collections have been given by Edith A. and Percy S. Straus and Samuel H. Kress, of New York, and the Robert Lee Blaffer family and Miss Ima Hogg, of Houston.
The Contemporary Arts Association, organized in 1948, conducts an exhibitions museum. One of the few American museums devoted solely to the art of the twentieth century, its beneficial effects on the city’s art life have been far out of proportion to its budgets or the size of its exhibition hall, both small.
A notable omission in Houston’s cultural life has always been a satisfactory natural history museum, but one is to be built at last. The Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium is to be built in Hermann Park at a cost of $2,500,000, possibly by 1964.
The principal universities are Rice University, chartered in 1891 but opened for instruction in 1912; the University of Houston, established in 1934; the Baylor University College of Medicine, which opened in Dallas in 1900 but was removed to the Texas Medical Center in Houston in 1943; Texas Southern University, established in 1934 as the Houston College for Negroes; and the newer St. Thomas University, a Roman Catholic school.
Sweeney and Coombs Opera House, on Fannin Street opposite the Court House, which opened in 1890.
The superlative of the city’s exuberance is the Texas Medical Center. But for one hospital the area, lying just south of Hermann Park, was a forest within the city in 1946. A decade later, at a cost of more than $50,000,000, most of it paid by Houston oil and cotton philanthropies, one of the nation’s leading medical research, educational, and hospital centers was well on the way to completion.
The Texas Medical Center
Though hospitals and universities and the arts help measure a city’s culture, so do department stores, restaurants, and sports. The last is big business in Houston.
Houston’s years of stars are one reason: Eddie Dyer and Dizzy Dean in baseball, George Blanda and Billy Cannon in professional football, Pete Cawthon, college football player and coach, Jimmy Demaret and Jack Burke in golf, the great hurdler Fred Wolcott, Wilbur Hess in intercollegiate tennis, A. C. Glassell, Jr. in fishing, Grant Ilseng in skeet shooting. But the big reason is the mild climate; Houston sports are a year-round activity.
Golf to yachting, hunting to deep sea fishing, Houstonians can span the calendar as participants. And as spectators they have Southwest Conference and University of Houston sports and the noted track teams of Texas Southern University; they have major league baseball and football—the Houston Colt .45s in the National Baseball League and the Houston Oilers in the American Football League; in tennis they have the nationally famous River Oaks Country Club Tournament and in golf the Houston Classic Invitational Tournament; and they have the annual Pin Oak Charity Horse Show, one of America’s leading horse shows.
On one side of the wall, the Coliseum and the rodeo; on the other side, the Music Hall and Sir John Barbirolli.
The Houston Academy, 1859.
Houston’s character and personality are by no means revealed merely by ticking off oil, a bewildering chemicals complex, a seaport, and an exaggerated reputation for materialism. Consider some enigma variations on an urban theme:
Metropolitan, urban, big-city Houston—where E. H. Marks has one of the largest herds of Longhorn cattle in the world, where cattle rustling still flourishes, where wolves still thrive and a few mountain lions still roam in the bottoms.
The evangelist Billy Graham, exhorting a crowd of forty thousand in Rice Stadium in 1952, called Houston “a more wicked city than Hollywood.” He said earlier “that less people probably go to church in Houston than in any other city in Texas.” Yet the city has more than twelve hundred churches.
Houston is said to be well planned. Yet it is the largest city in America without zoning and more than three hundred of its streets have duplicate names. Main Street, or so the legend goes, is the longest in the world, sometimes merely the longest in the country. No doubt it is neither; still, from end to end within the city limits, the Main Stem measures 19.1 miles.
In Houston a prudent pedestrian looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. Houstonians, a safe-driving expert said, are the most zealous horn-blowers in the land. In 1961 another expert told the City Council that Houstonians lead all Americans in shunning public transportation to drive their own cars.
Main Street, 1866; the east side of the street between Congress and Preston Avenues. What may have been the city’s first three-story building, on the left in the row of five, was built by William Van Alstyne. J. R. Morris soon built the city’s first four-story building, the one in the center, which was the first iron-front building in Houston.
Main Street, 1878; looking north from Texas Avenue.
Main Street, 1885; looking north from Preston Avenue. Though the street was still unpaved, the piles of what seem to be rubble are the paving blocks with which it was at last covered.
Main Street, 1900; looking south from Congress Avenue. Only buggies and a streetcar are seen, but three years earlier a horseless carriage appeared on the street for the first time.
Main Street, 1912; looking north from Capitol Avenue. The steel skeleton rising on the left is the first two wings of the Rice Hotel; construction of the third wing was begun in 1926. The owner was a young man who would eventually own more of Main Street than anyone else—Jesse H. Jones.
Main Street, c. 1920; looking north from McKinney Avenue.
In Houston, the U.S. Department of Labor disclosed in 1961, a retired couple could live more cheaply than in any other of twenty big cities. Other years, other distinctions: Houston won two municipal championships in the early 1950s, when it led American cities in murders in 1951 and was chosen the cleanest city in the United States in 1953. It was to learn later that it had held another distinction for decades, being second to none in using the word “chocolate” to name things. “The Houston list is far beyond anything possessed by any other place in the world,” a college professor wrote to Mayor Lewis Cutrer. Small wonder: Chocolate Bay, Chocolate Bayou, Old Chocolate Road, and Chocolate Springs, to list four of ten such names he found. And in Houston, surely only in Houston, the city garbage dump came to smell like a rose—to the city treasurer. Eleven oil wells drilled at the dump in the 1950s paid the city more than $250,000 in royalties before they were shut down.
Houston, where it is against the law to make “Goo Goo Eyes,” to give the title of the ordinance, or for women to wear slacks, though the courts have refused to uphold the last. Where enough coffee comes into the port annually to give every American more than forty-three cupfuls. And where Roman Catholic nuns ride the city buses free, a tradition believed to date from the nuns’ heroic work during a yellow fever epidemic in the nineteenth century.
Vick’s Park, around 1900, an area now covered by the cloverleaf at Waugh and Memorial Drives and the Allen Parkway.
Houston, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Al Smith for the presidency in 1928, is said to be dominated by conservatives who give the welfare state no quarter. Yet William S. White, writing in Harper’s in 1959, said Houston “was ... the first large community in the United States to feed the depression hungry 35 with no questions asked, no kind of means test, no social worker’s cross examination, no stigma, and no nonsense.”
Longhorns at E. H. Marks’s ranch, near the western edge of the city limits.
Nothing about Houston is more enigmatic than its weather. The weather long ago made Houston the site of one of its principal experiment stations.
W. D. Bedell has written that Houston, more than any other big Texas city, is a crossroads of weather. “Here we can have Dallas weather or Caribbean weather or Colorado weather or Arizona weather,” he wrote. “Houston gets more Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico weather than any other major Texas city. That is the steam bath kind of weather.”
Houston gets more steam bath weather than any other kind. In 1952, when the Prudential Insurance Company transferred scores of employees from New Jersey to its new Southwestern Home Office in Houston, it prepared an immigrant’s 36 guide. The question “How’s the Climate?” was answered: “To be perfectly frank about Houston’s weather, even a Texan wouldn’t brag about it in the summertime. It’s hot and it’s sticky.”
On February 14, 1895, Houston received what may have been the heaviest snow in its history—twenty-two inches. The old Burns house, shown on the day of the snowfall, occupied the site of the twenty-one story Texas National Bank Building.
After the St. Louis Cardinals played their first games in Houston in 1962, Stan Musial said the city has only three seasons—“Summer, and then July and August.” Members of the British diplomatic service are paid an extra allowance when they serve in such equatorial places as Aruba, Burma, Indonesia, Panama, the Persian Gulf—and Houston.
Houston’s Christmases, on the other hand, are mostly mild and green, a climate’s benedictions, decorated by nature with holly, yaupon, and roses. Houston nearly got a White Christmas in 1929, when 2.3 inches of snow fell on December 21 and 22, but in fact the last White Christmas appears to have been in 1859. A legend says Houston gets really cold only once every ten years, and many big storms do come in that pattern. Of modern cold spells, the big ice show of 1951 was the most severe. From January 29 to February 3, Houston had 123 hours—more than five days and nights—of below-freezing temperatures. Most of the city’s few freezes last less than a day.
Sometimes it rains and rains. And sometimes you despair that it may never rain again. Rarely does it rain a gentle rain; rarely does it rain just right. The rain in Houston falls mainly all at once. July, August, and September are the months of the hurricane season, but modern warning systems have much diminished the peril of the storms. The most destructive modern storm affecting Houston was Hurricane Carla, which struck the Texas Gulf Coast early in September, 1961.
A snowy palm frames the entrance to the Houston International Airport after the snowfall of 1958.
In late fall, winter, and early spring cold winds blow down across the top of Texas, pushing fast across most of the state, sometimes reaching down into the lower Rio Grande Valley in southernmost Texas. Texans call these cold waves “northers”—blue northers or wet northers or dry northers. What distinguishes a norther from a plain cold wave is the sudden, dramatic drop in temperature, sometimes 20 to 30 degrees in two hours.
Most northers are preceded by heralds: the still, sultry air; the scent of sulphur or burning hay or charcoal; the haze, slowly, ominously obscuring the sun. Birds and beasts almost always know beforehand; often man can tell. Then, suddenly, the temperature falls and sounds break the stillness, first a low soughing of the wind, then bedlam as the fury commands the city.
Arriving in Houston in 1873, Edward King instantly experienced his first norther, “which came raving and tearing over the town.... It was glorious, exhilarating, and—icy.” The infrequent northers are confined, like the oyster, to months with an “r,” but mostly to November, December, and January.
Nothing about Houston is harder to pin down than its weather. A magazine published for employees of the Humble Oil and Refining Company’s Baytown refinery printed a full-page warning in January, 1957: “Although the weather may be warm when you go to work, it’s a good idea to take a top coat along to guard against a sudden drop in temperature.” The simultaneous variety of the state’s weather was shown by a headline on Page 1 of the Houston Post of September 11, 1955:
Cold Wave in N[orth] Texas;
Tropical Storm in Gulf
The Democratic National Convention Hall, 1928.
Augustus C. Allen
John K. Allen
The brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, the founders of Houston, were neither heroes of the Texas revolution—they did not fight in the Battle of San Jacinto or in any other—nor were they distinguished in other ways. They were land speculators, New Yorkers who came to Texas in the summer of 1832. Augustus had just turned thirty, John was twenty-six when they bought the land for Houston.
Though the Allens’ town would become one of the leading cities of North America, though it would one day be abashed by a legend of riches, neither profited much for his pains. John Allen died in Houston two years after buying the land. Augustus lived until 1864, but he left Houston in 1850 after signing over to his wife Charlotte most of his remaining interests. Of this trio, only Charlotte was to profit from the Texas city conceived by New Yorkers. Living to a great age, she still owned Houston land when she died at her home, now the site of the Gulf Building, on August 3, 1895.
Augustus Allen lived always on the verge of success. In poor health most of his life, he was early a bookworm, a taste which may have led to his first job, when he was seventeen, as a mathematics teacher in upstate New York. In 1827, when he was twenty-one, he moved to New York City, where he was first a bookkeeper 40 and then a partner in H. and H. Canfield Company. Five years later he and John, who had joined him in New York in 1829, moved to Texas, eventually settling in Nacogdoches. With other speculators, the pair dealt in Mexican land titles. They began their Houston venture soon after Texas won its independence.
The capitol of the Republic of Texas, 1837-39, now the site of the Rice Hotel.
Little seems to be known of Augustus’ life during the fifteen years he lived in Houston. No doubt that owes less to mystery than to the prosaic nature of selling real estate. But some mystery does surround his separation from Charlotte in 1850.
The land for Houston had been bought with money Mrs. Allen had inherited from her father, and in time she became dissatisfied with her husband’s management of the property. They separated but did not get a divorce, “both husband and wife pledging to keep the details of their troubles secret,” Amelia W. Williams has written. They seem to have succeeded.
Ill, and surely once more disappointed in his luck, Augustus moved again, this time to Mexico, where he and the Mexican leader Benito Juarez became friends. In 1852 he was appointed United States consul for the Pacific port of Tehuantepec, and in 1858 he was also given the same post at the port of Minatitlan 41 on the Gulf side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During these years he and a Briton developed what is thought to have been a successful shipping concern.
In 1864, apparently realizing that he was critically ill, he went to Washington to resign his consulships. There he died of pneumonia on June 11, less than a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. He died without ever returning to the city he and his brother conceived. Augustus was buried in Brooklyn; only one of the city’s founders, John Allen, is buried in Houston.
The area now covered by Houston was first settled by Anglo-Americans before 1826, when a townsite was surveyed for John Richardson Harris, who named the place Harrisburg. An upstate New Yorker who was a member of Stephen F. Austin’s first Texas colony, Harris was granted a league of land—4,428 acres—at the junction of Buffalo and Brays Bayous. One of the first steam sawmills in Texas was built at Harrisburg in 1829, and by 1836 the hamlet also had perhaps twenty houses, most of which were log cabins.
the Original Plan of Houston
Harrisburg might have succeeded, and what was to become one of the principal American cities might have been called Harrisburg rather than Houston, but for at least two events besides the death of Harris in 1829. On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna, in hot pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army, rode into the almost deserted hamlet and burned it. The second event, the decision of those other upstate New Yorkers, the Allens, to start a town at the most interior point of 42 year-round navigation in Texas, joined with the first to overcome Harrisburg’s ambitions.
The Allens and others had eyed the Harrisburg area with shrewd expectations. It was early seen that Buffalo Bayou would become important as an exit route for cotton and other crops grown in the rich agricultural lands along the Brazos River. The Allens first tried to buy the Harrisburg property. But its title was involved in fraudulent claims made against Harris’s estate and they chose a site a few miles farther up the bayou. On August 24 and 26, 1836, they bought the bulk of the John Austin survey, paying $5,000 for half a league and $1 an acre for a league.
Thus the original townsite—6,642 acres south of Buffalo Bayou—cost the Allens $9,428. A Main Street corner a few blocks south of the original city was sold in 1940 for $1,150,000; seven years later, or 110 years after the Allens sold the first lots in Houston, Woolworth bought the corner for $3,050,000—or at the rate of $2000 a front inch.
On September 30, 1836, the Allens advertised their nonexistent town in the Telegraph and Texas Register, saying Houston would become “beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” In October, when Houston was still but a prairie, John Allen made a proposal to the congress of the Republic of Texas, then meeting at Columbia. Move the government to Houston, he said, and the Allens would build a capitol for it. “Capitalists are interested in this town,” the brothers’ petition to congress said of the vacant land, and congress voted to move the government to Houston temporarily. The Allens, having made their town the capital of the republic before the town existed, began building in fact what had succeeded in fancy.
They had already hired Gail and Thomas Borden, publishers of the Telegraph and Texas Register and also surveyors, to stake out the town. Gail, a notable figure in early Texas history, would later make his fortune by inventing a process for condensing milk. But the Bordens were busy in Columbia, where their newspaper was then published, and most of the surveying was done by Moses Lapham, a young Ohioan who worked for the Bordens. He began staking out the town early in October, 1836. When he finished seven weeks later, the Bordens announced in their newspaper, “We have at length, and almost without the use of mechanical instruments, completed a plan for the City of HOUSTON....”
The historian Joe B. Frantz could find no record of what the Allens paid Lapham or the Bordens for surveying Houston. “From the extant record,” Frantz wrote, “it would appear that Lapham received only a bad case of chills, for which he drank ‘heavy draugts (sic) of black pepper and sassafras tea.’”
Two years later, while surveying near San Antonio for Samuel Maverick, Lapham was scalped by Indians. Like one of the city’s founders, the man who laid out Houston is buried elsewhere, in San Antonio.
The original city was laid out from Buffalo Bayou on the north to, but not including, Texas Avenue on the south, and on the west from the bend in the bayou behind the Music Hall to, but not including, Crawford Street on the east. The east-west streets were laid out roughly parallel with the bayou and thus do not lie on a true east-west line but are many degrees off the compass.
Writing in 1958, Andrew Forest Muir showed that January 19, 1837, marks the beginning of Houston. “With the exception of one lot that had been sold on January 1, 1837, the first purchases were made on January 19, which is probably the most reasonable date to mark the beginning of the city of Houston as such,” he wrote. “Early in January, 1837, the town was so devoid of an existence that Francis Richard Lubbock with a party in a yawl passed the townsite without realizing it.”
Neighbors: the First Methodist Church, completed in 1910, and the Texas National Bank Building, completed in 1955.
Even in the beginning the property was astonishingly valuable, so much so that some land was sold in 12½ foot lots. Indeed, lots are said to have been sold for as much as $10,000, but Muir found nothing during the town’s first six months to substantiate that. Examining all the conveyances of record through June 20, 1837, he found only one lot that sold for $5,000 and another for $3,000. Most of them sold for no more than $500. But $500 was a considerable price for a small piece of virtually unimproved village land in 1837, even in a new republic’s temporary capital.
The government moved to Houston in May, 1837, before the building to house it was finished, and the city was incorporated in June. Houston remained the capital of the republic until January, 1840, and it was again the capital, briefly, in 1842. Muddy and beset by recurring yellow fever epidemics, it grew slowly after the capital was removed to Austin.
Looking south on Main Street in 1910, when the street still ended at Buffalo Bayou, from the point where the Main Street bridge now spans the bayou.
One of the best early descriptions of Houston is that of Mary Austin Holley, who saw the town in December, 1837: “The Main street of this city of a year extends from the landing foot of Main Street into the prairie.... On this main street are two large hotels, 2 stories, with galleries (crowded to overflowing) several stores 2 stories—painted white—one block of eleven stores (rent $500 each)—some 2 story dwelling houses—& then the capitol ... painted peach blossom about ¼ mile from the landing. Other streets, parallel, & at right angles, are built on here and there, but chiefly designated by stakes. One story dwellings are 45 scattered in the edge of the timber which forms an amphitheatre round the prairie.”
The early Houston seems to have been distinguished for its wickedness. In January, 1838, the diarist John Hunter Herndon called it “the greatest sink of disipation (sic) and vice that modern times have known.” After living in Houston two and a half months longer, he wrote. “What a den of villains must there not be here?”
Francis C. Sheridan, a young Irishman in the British diplomatic service, saw Houston in 1840, when he wrote: “The most uncivilised place in Texas is I believe Houston the former Capital—I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town ... than throughout the whole of Texas.”
However all that may have been, the early Houston shared one characteristic with the city of a century and a quarter later. Gustav Dresel, a young German who came to Texas in 1838, wrote in the autumn of 1839: “Nine months only had gone by since I had left Houston, but how different did it all look! I discovered more than twice the number of houses. Whole squares had been added, and I noticed new streets.” The population then numbered between two and three thousand.
Early Houstonians had the good fortune to be spared the Indian raids and massacres that harassed some of frontier Texas. But Indians were no novelty in Houston. On March 18, 1838, Herndon wrote, “Many Indians in town who made much noise. A squaw drunk, the first I ever saw.” Muir has written, “To the best of the writer’s knowledge, there were never any Indian raids, battles or massacres in the Houston area during the time Anglo-Americans have lived here. Certainly there were Indians, however, for as late as 1846 a priest from St. Vincent’s [Roman Catholic] Church baptized a crowd of them.”
The city grew slowly until the Civil War, when Houstonians voted overwhelmingly for the secession of Texas from the United States. During the war Houston was a lair for blockade runners, and on January 1, 1863, using two small vessels fortified with bales of cotton, it mounted a sea attack down Buffalo Bayou and helped recapture Galveston Island from Union forces that had seized the island three months earlier. In the same year Houston became the headquarters for the Confederate district of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The period of Reconstruction lasted from June 20, 1865, when Houston was occupied by Union troops, until January, 1874. The city’s growth between then and World War I owed first to its importance as a railroad center and then to the Texas oil boom.
Each of four wars, and even a fifth catastrophe, served Houston well. Its beginnings arose from the Texans’ victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. Though its people suffered to some extent from the Civil War and much more from Reconstruction, Houston got an economic stimulus from the presence of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi headquarters. The city prospered during Reconstruction because many who abandoned the South moved to Texas. The greatest proportional growth of the city’s population, 111.4 per cent, came in the decade of the 1920s, largely a result of the impetus given by World War I. World War II led to the most successful period in Houston’s history. The city took a decisive lead in its long competition with Galveston after the Galveston flood and tidal wave of September 8, 1900, in which an estimated six thousand lives were lost and half the city was destroyed.
The city’s most effective leaders in the first half of the twentieth century were Jesse H. Jones, a Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance 46 Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Oscar F. Holcombe, mayor of the city for eleven two-year terms between 1920 and 1957. Its most gifted, and anonymous, leader was Will C. Hogg, a son of James Stephen Hogg, the great governor of modern Texas. In 1926, at a personal cost of more than $50,000, Hogg organized the Forum of Civics with these words from Pericles as its motto: “No Athenian should ever confess that he neglected public services for the sake of his private fortune.” Hogg, an altruist and a man of wealth, died too soon to fulfill his dreams for the city.
Four benefactors of indelible importance were William Marsh Rice, who endowed Rice University; George Henry Hermann, an eccentric who was born in Houston in 1843 and later gave the city a great hospital, Hermann Park, and Hermann Square downtown; and M. D. Anderson and Hugh Roy Cullen, the philanthropists.
Houston’s good fortune during its first century and its extraordinary rise afterward have tempted some to call it a city of destiny. But the cliché signifies an irrevocable fate in spite of man’s successes or failures. And man, not fate, decisively controls the fortunes of cities.
How is one city more or less than another? What is Houston compared with such whole or complete cities as Amsterdam and San Francisco? Only a prophet could say, for this hopelessly vigorous city is incomplete, unfinished; it cannot yet be judged as a whole city. Until then, Houstonians possess the rare excitement of living in a city during the springtime of what may become greatness, a city budding and shooting with the extravagance of nature’s annual renewal, a city in its feast years.
Richard W. Dowling, Confederate Hero
Mule-drawn streetcar, 1890
Piano van, 1917
The San Jacinto Monument
Houston, an inland port city of southeastern Texas, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, is joined by the Houston Ship Channel with the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles distant, at Galveston. The ship channel joins the Port of Houston with the Intracoastal Canal.
Houston’s corporate limits of 349.4 square miles, including the 22 square miles of Lake Houston and a canal leading to it, surround fourteen of twenty-eight municipalities in its metropolitan area, Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat. The county’s total area is 1,747 square miles, of which the land area is 1,711 square miles.
The city’s lowest altitude is 25 feet; the highest is 75 feet. The county’s altitude runs from close to sea level to 310 feet near Tomball, on the north.
The annual normal rainfall is 45.3 inches.
The annual average temperature is 70.0° F.
The excess of births over deaths in the metropolitan area is around 24,000 a year, and each year around 21,000 more persons move to Houston than move away from it. Thus the metropolitan area’s population increases by an estimated 45,000 persons a year—a conservative figure.
Of the 1,243,158 persons living in the metropolitan area at the time of the 1960 census, 634,522 were females and 608,636 were males, giving females a lead of 25,886.
In 1960, 94.5 per cent of the population was urban, 5.5 per cent was rural.
The density of population was 726.6 persons a square mile.
| Population of Houston (Corporate Limits Only) U.S. Census | Percentage of Increase | |
|---|---|---|
| 1850 | 2,396 | |
| 1860 | 4,845 | 102.2 |
| 1870 | 9,332 | 92.6 |
| 1880 | 16,513 | 76.9 |
| 1890 | 27,557 | 66.8 |
| 1900 | 44,633 | 61.9 |
| 1910 | 78,800 | 76.5 |
| 1920 | 138,276 | 75.4 |
| 1930 | 292,352 | 111.4 |
| 1940 | 384,514 | 31.5 |
| 1950 | 596,163 | 55.0 |
| 1960 | 938,219 | 57.3 |
| Population of Metropolitan Houston (Harris County) | Percentage of Increase | |
| 1850 | 4,668 | |
| 1860 | 9,070 | 94.3 |
| 1870 | 17,375 | 91.5 |
| 188 | 27,985 | 61.0 |
| 1890 | 37,249 | 33.1 |
| 1900 | 63,786 | 71.2 |
| 1910 | 115,693 | 81.3 |
| 1920 | 186,667 | 61.3 |
| 1930 | 359,328 | 92.5 |
| 1940 | 528,961 | 47.2 |
| 1950 | 806,701 | 52.5 |
| 1960 | 1,243,158 | 54.1 |
Cullen Center
Domed Sports Stadium
Manned Spacecraft Center
Jetero Airport
Natural Science Museum, Planetarium
Five important Houston building projects, in various stages of development late in 1962, totaled a minimum completion cost of $347,500,000. Construction of a sixth, a new City Auditorium to be built on the site of the old one, which was opened in 1910, will begin in 1963 or 1964; money for the new auditorium was given by Houston Endowment, Inc., a foundation created by Jesse H. Jones.
The eventual cost of Cullen Center, which is being built on a six-block site downtown, will be more than $100,000,000. The first two buildings, which were nearing completion late in 1962, are a twenty-five-story office building and the Hotel America. Cullen Center eventually will include an office building of fifty stories or more, two high-rise apartment towers, and other structures.
The other projects, and their estimated final costs, are an air conditioned domed stadium for baseball and football games, $20,000,000; the Houston Intercontinental Airport, called Jetero, $125,000,000; the Manned Spacecraft Center, $100,000,000; and the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium, $2,500,000.
NOTE: Page numbers in boldface type refer to pictures and captions. All other page numbers refer to the text.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The photographs and sketches of earlier Houston reproduced in this book are from the author’s collection of Houston historical material, which includes around nine hundred pictures of Houston subjects from the 1840s to 1900.
The woodcut shows the east side of Main Street between Congress and Preston Avenues in 1866. A photograph of the same scene appears on Page 31.
The woodcut shows the yards at the Southern Pacific Lines’ Grand Central Depot in 1894, when cotton was to Houston what oil was to become; the four-story structure with the tower, at the right, is the old Lawler Hotel.
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