dht@druri.UUCP (Davis Tucker) (04/05/85)
Being a 5th-generation Houston area native (and coincidentally a Son Of The Texas Revolution), it is incumbent upon me to point out that the slander against the city of my birth is an extreme exaggeration of what Houston really is. Yes, Houston has its bad points, serious ones. But unlike many other major metropolitan areas, Houston doesn't hide its warts and its blemishes - in some cases, it revels in them. The traffic on the freeways can be terrible, but the in-town traffic is usually pretty good, even downtown. Yes, Houston has virtually no zoning - which has led to much less excess than you might think of a city whose citizens are supposed to be such money-grubbing rednecks. And in some cases, it's led to the craziest mix of businesses and homes and just plain weirdness in any city in the U.S., barring New Orleans. Where else can you see the "Owner Has Brain Damage Used Car Lot" right next to a modern 20-story office building? There's a strange, mondo dynamic at work in this city, and you can see its effects at every turn. At worst, it's horribly disgusting. At best, it's sublimely weird. But I can guarantee that you will always know that you're in the *real* world, not some gingerbread-yuppie-condomania idea of heaven. It has always struck me as incongruous that the very things that Houston is downgraded for are also present in every other major city. Yet the things about it which are good are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Houston has the best local civic support of the arts of any city except for New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston (D. C. doesn't count - that's not local money being spent). It has a nationally recognized ballet company, symphony orchestra, and a world-renowned opera company. It also has an extremely vigorous and talented regional theatre environment, from the Alley Theatre to Chocolate Bayou to a host of others. It has the only zoo in any city of any size which is still free to the public and supported solely by donations and private fundraising - and it's a great zoo, by and large, one that is quickly moving every animal it can into open environments. Houston had the very first public television station in the U.S. It has the most vigorous blues tradition of any Gulf Coast City (and I do include New Orleans, which is still primarily jazz and funk), and has some of the finest restaraunts of all kinds of cuisine. There are few cities in the U.S. where you can sample Ethiopian, Thai, Cuban, Tex-Mex, Salvadoran, Vietnamese, Nigerian, Hunan, Cajun, French, Creole, Gulf Coast Seafood, Oaxacan, Moroccan, Indonesian, German, Indian, Italian, South American, Jewish, Greek, and a wealth of steakhouses and continental restaraunts. Not to mention that Houston has the finest single medical complex in the world, and Baylor Medical School is considered a world-class institution of medical research. Houston also has a very large number of small galleries in addition to its museums, galleries which will introduce you to new art in a way no museum can. There's much more, but this should give you some hint that Houston isn't as bad as its reputation - which is a good thing. I can state categorically that you will not find a greater collection of new and exciting architecture in any major city in the U.S. In Houston, for some strange reason, it is a corporate asset to have a wild building for your headquarters. Skyscrapers by Phillip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Alfred Jahn, and many very capable local architects dot the skyline. Its skyline is dedicated to the death of the International Style - you won't find many boxes. The smaller scale architecture is often very exciting and imaginative - especially the Architectonica houses and condominiums, and various other little office buildings and renovated houses. You can virtually do anything you want with your dwelling in Houston - and this has not led to mass mimicry, of cardboard houses and numbing tackiness, but to exciting and diverse home architecture as well as large building architecture. Houston also has grand boulevards and beautifully quiet neighborhoods. Main Street is lined with live oak trees on both sides and down the esplanade, making a virtual tunnel of green, which is echoed by the grounds of Rice University and its surrounding neighborhood, Southampton. Essentially, Houston is a city of trees, and greenery, and flowers, of simple and elaborate brick houses and sumptuous wood frame mansions. The Heights and Montrose areas are well-known for the renovation efforts that took them from semi-slum to showcase neighborhoods (this gentrification was forced by the incredible explosion of the traffic problem - these areas are very close to downtown). And the Azalea Trail every spring is fantastic. Houston has a large, diverse population of around a hundred ethnic groups, from Nigerian to Salvadoran to Cajun to British to Italian to Vietnamese to New Yorker. And unlike other cities, these groups aren't in hermetic enclaves or enforced ghettos. Houston has always had a large population of blacks and Chicanos, and these areas, while often poor and neglected by the city administrations until recently, have their own special charms, especially if you like music. To give you an example of what it's like to live in this kind of stew, I once lived in the Montrose area with Salvadorans on the right, a group of Nigerian students on the left, two New York artists across the street, down the road from a British pub and up the street from La Taqueria Jaliciense, the 24-hour taqueria with 12-hour mariachi. The Houston area has produced some of the finest blues musicians of all time, men like Gatemouth Brown, Lightnin' Hopkins, Clifton Chenier (the King Of Zydeco, a Houston-Lafayette commuter), Johnny Winter (from Beaumont originally - "just down the road a piece"), Janis Joplin (Port Arthur), Archie Bell, ZZ Top, and at all times has been a place where blues and jazz musicians could make a living. Every year the Juneteenth Festival (to celebrate June 19th, the day the slaves in Texas were freed - after the cotton harvest) showcases the finest of blues, outdoors, for a week, all free. I remember one year seeing a lineup of Koko Taylor, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Clifton Chenier, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Arnette Cobb and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, all topped off with Muddy Waters at his best. Please bear in mind that I could have spent just as much time on the subject of Houston's faults - its pollution, its traffic, its murder rate, its 10,000 unit apartment blocks, its weather, its inability to conquer the mass transit conundrum, its flooding, its cavalier attitude toward the homeless, its nagging problems with racism and busing, its public school system, its lack of direction, its problems with city services. Believe me - I know them all too well. Houston is not clean - it's a dirty, alive, gritty, exciting place. It's a port town, an oil town, an industrial city, and it has more Achilles heels than a spider. It has endured much too much growth in too short a time to ever look finished, to ever get the look of a Boston or a San Franscisco - it will be lucky to ever get the semi-complete look of Los Angeles. It is surrounded by square mile upon square mile of ridiculous suburbia, treeless wastes of mediocrity, serviced by strip centers and monster malls, beset by ugly billboards at every turn. It is a place where people come to make money, where refugees from the Snowbelt come to recoup, where the rural poor of Texas, Lousiana, and Oklahoma come to make a living working in the refineries. It is a town that until recently never gave a damn about its image with the rest of the U.S. It is silly to even think that Houston is a "tourist town", in the sense of San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and many others - what treasures Houston has are not easily discovered. But they are worth the effort. I could give you a number of cities which fail miserably as urban centers, either from decrepitude, or suburbanization, or just plain dullness. But a city should stand on its own, without comparison to the failings of others. I think Houston succeeds in providing an exciting urban environment with everything that you expect out of a big city, and still has not lost its sense of place in its region, of being a part of Texas. It is a good place to live and work, and a good place to visit. Davis Tucker AT&T Information Systems Denver, CO