Houston 2000: Looking Back
Stephen Fox

The twentieth century brought enormous wealth to Houston, dramatic expansion of its population and urban territory, and the construction of imposing economic and cultural institutions. Yet during the second half of the century, a civic ethos developed that interpreted the social contract exclusively in terms of the accumulation of wealth. Economic success is the greatest good. Those who achieve it are the elect. Those who fail to achieve it are deficient. This is consistent with other myths popular in the twentieth century that have had special resonance in Houston: individualism, exceptionalism, wealth as a guarantee of virtue.

Houston exalts these myths because they are thought to provide a more secure route to the social good than proscriptive political arrangements. Public decision-making is deeply suspect because it might lead to the suppression of individual initiative. For example, Houston stands alone among major U.S. cities in refusing to adopt a zoning code. According to the Houston ideological formulation, zoning will exterminate liberty and institutionalize corruption and favoritism. As a result, the urban landscape of Houston is squalid, when compared to other twentieth-century boom cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles, and even restricted neighborhoods have limited legal means to challenge adjacent development. The consequent urban instability and real estate volatility frustrate efforts to conserve community.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, a different urban ethos prevailed. Key members of Houston’s business elite endorsed Progressive Era notions of urban planning and civic enhancement. Between 1909 and 1924, when Houston had a population of fewer than 250,000 people, these individuals created a coordinated civic landscape along Main Boulevard that encompassed Hermann Park, Rice University, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Planting live oak trees in allées along Main and surrounding streets reflected a consensus on the value of shaping public space. So did the construction of cultural institutions within this landscape, such as the university and museum. The 1920s also saw the construction of park and parkway boulevard corridors along Buffalo, White Oak, and Brays Bayous. Had this vision not dimmed during the Depression of the 1930s, Houston, despite its lack of zoning, today would possess an armature of tree-lined streets.

Exceptional individuals—Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of the Rice Institute; J. S. Cullinan, the founder of Texaco; and Will C. Hogg and his sister Ima—were involved in efforts to project images of how Houston might define, and refine, itself in the new century. During the 1910s, with Lovett’s support, the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram projected an exotic, neo-Byzantine architectural identity for Houston, expressed in the first buildings of Rice University, which were set in a spatial arrangement of live oak trees. Because of Cullinan’s advocacy, the City of Houston retained the St. Louis landscape architect George E. Kessler in 1915 to lay out Main Boulevard and Hermann Park, amplifying Cram’s vision of Houston as a garden city in which voluptuous vegetation compensated for the flat topography. Because of the Hoggs’ fascination with constructing identities based on historic American, especially southern, architectural prototypes, a middle class suburban landscape evolved in Houston in the 1920s and ’30s that embodied a sense of urban spatial coherence and decorum.

These genteel images of cultural identity and suburban propriety were rejected after World War II when the postwar enthusiasm for modernization and suburbanization failed to elicit a new consensus on how to shape public space in Houston. The evolution of the Texas Medical Center, beginning in 1945, charts the dissolution of that earlier sense of civic responsibility. The dissolution began with the decision to build the Medical Center in Hermann Park and accelerated as the Medical Center’s authorities sought to achieve urban density by employing suburban patterns of spatial organization. By failing to use public space to define a center that could accommodate growth and change, the Medical Center became a microcosm of the devaluing of shared public space characteristic of Houston after 1950. The Astrodome, NASA, the Galleria, and The Woodlands of the 1960s and ’70s were based on a model of insularity, internality, and closure, defining itself against the rest of the city. None constructed a public landscape that could serve as a model for the development of adjacent landscapes. The social vision implicit in each was premised on the assumption that the ideal individual was a consumer, not a citizen.

Two exceptional Houston individuals who opposed this trend and instead promoted a critical social vision were Dominique and John de Menil. Their vision differed from the genteel consensus of the first half of the century. It externalized and problematized such issues as racial injustice, religious conflict, and aesthetic conservatism and conformity. It promoted ethical engagement, a modernist poetics, austerity, and restraint. Although they exerted an appeal primarily to the privileged, the Menils sought to connect with a democratic constituency that included African-Americans. They formulated a cultural discourse that engaged the local and the international, rather than preferring one and excluding the other. Their vision was explicitly critical of the attitudes that produced the characteristic landscapes of postwar Houston.

At the University of St. Thomas in the 1950s, the Menils sponsored a new campus plan and buildings designed by Philip Johnson. Johnson’s campus incorporated elements of the existing landscape in the residential neighborhood of Montrose, even though the architecture of the buildings he designed was uncompromisingly modern. When in the 1970s and ’80s, Dominique de Menil planned The Menil Collection museum, she directed that the bungalow houses around the museum site be preserved and that Renzo Piano, the architect of the museum building, defer architecturally to this humble domestic landscape. As Johnson had done at the University of St. Thomas, Piano demonstrated that exceptional new architecture could coexist with an ordinary Houston landscape, rather than entailing its destruction. At the Rothko Chapel, the Menils sought to shape a public space where mortality could be contemplated, religious ecumenism practiced, and spiritual reconciliation pursued.

A constituency developed for the Menil vision—a vision of inclusiveness that encompasses high and low, the extraordinary and the commonplace, the exotic and the familiar. The Tin House movement in Houston architecture in the 1990s emerged in a racially and ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood called the West End. It was an intentional effort to construct a Houston urban neighborhood that was socially, economically, and demographically diverse. For the first time in Houston’s history, architectural culture was focused on the local landscape, seeking to derive inspiration from it. Yet, paradoxically, the “success” of this effort led to the destruction of that very diversity, including the displacement of low-income people of color. The West End’s historic landscape was replaced by a new landscape of suburban housing targeted to upwardly mobile professionals, installed by real estate developers seeking to profit from the visibility the Tin Houses had given the area. The fragile consensus on which the Menil-derived social vision in the West End depended was overwhelmed by the entrepreneurial, economically deterministic ethos of Houston in a period of about three years.

Despite the powerful example of the Menil vision, the destruction of traditional communities has persisted in Houston. This destructive course was pursued with a vengeance in Fourth Ward, Houston’s oldest African-American neighborhood and demographically the poorest in the city, during the 1990s. When the central section of the neighborhood was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, Fourth Ward was one of the most intact “freedman town” neighborhoods in a southern U.S. city. Ironically, it had been saved because Houston’s lack of zoning had prevented the city from qualifying for urban renewal funding in the 1950s and ’60s, which had financed the destruction of similar communities in other large southern cities. What was culturally significant about Fourth Ward were its rich array of vernacular house types and the survival of southern lifeways typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although almost all of the property was owned by absentee landowners, many Fourth Ward residents had lived in the neighborhood as renters for several generations. Yet business and development interests could not allow Fourth Ward to remain: it was the last low-income, African-American neighborhood on the “good” side of downtown. Thus, at public expense but with no assistance to the low-income families who lived there, the City of Houston systematically destroyed Fourth Ward in the late 1990s, using federal funding just as other southern cities had done in the 1950s and ’60s. Racism and greed did their dirty work. No one was scandalized. No one was disturbed. With the exception of a small grass-roots protest, no one seemed to take notice.

In contrast, Project Row Houses in Third Ward is an exceptional project that vindicates the Menil social vision. The preservation and restoration of a complex of two rows of rental housing, carried out since 1994 by the artist Rick Lowe and others, suggests that Houston’s social vision can be broadened—as demonstrated by the contributions of corporate volunteers to the effort—and can connect with the grass-roots experience of working class people of color. What makes Project Row Houses so Menil-like in one respect is that it engages Houston as found. It privileges spaces of poverty, as well as a history of injustice and lack of opportunity. The cultural space it occupies is democratic, inviting non-African-Americans to participate imaginatively in the customs and ways of life of Third Ward and the African-American South.

Other Houston artists and architects have extended this vision. Mel Chin has engaged a “tradition” of conceptual art that echoes, in its transformation of the effluvia of the petrochemical industry, the early work of Robert Rauschenberg. Chin imaginatively externalizes issues of environmental contamination and degradation to make art out of toxic refuse. The architecture of Carlos Jiménez makes connections with Latin America that underscore the changing demographics of Houston. Jiménez’s architecture is also premised on a reurbanization of Houston, pulling loose parts together to make new wholes.

Whether these signs of promise can deflect or redefine Houston’s culture of economic determinism remains in question. Can Houston’s ideology of individuals empowered by the pursuit of wealth be projected beyond an economic framework into social, political, even spiritual dimensions? Can the myths of individualism, exceptionalism, and wealth as a guarantee of virtue be problematized and negotiated rather than dogmatically asserted and imposed? Can intellectual and artistic culture attain parity with material culture in Houston? These are the civic challenges of the near future. Their resolution will determine whether Houston can maintain the fortuitous status it achieved in the twentieth century as a major American city.

Copyright©2000 Stephen Fox