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 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 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.