  Pine branch 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 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 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; The Democratic National Convention Hall, 1928. |
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