  Tower 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. |
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