For the Love of Place: Ruminations
Kevin Shanley

Twenty-two years ago, my first experience of Houston was a descent through the clouds from 30,000 feet. With expectations of seeing a dry western landscape, I was surprised and delighted by the carpet of treetops that rose up to meet my feet: a marvelous sea of green lapping to the edges of distant islands of urbanity that poked above the verdant waves. I did not know then that this cover of trees was the western edge of the great southern piedmont forest that extended in pre-Columbian times all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. A ragged line, a division of soils and ecosystems, separated the forest from the Gulf Coast prairie, a line that is still visible if you know the evidence to look for: northwest to southeast across the urban landscape near US 290 to the West Loop and along US 59 into town. Fingers of riparian forest extended westward into the prairie, watered and protected by the tracery of streams and bayous that drain this flat landscape.

In an experience that all air travelers to the city must endure, I was soon submerged below the treetop garden and exposed to the mercantile jungle of the Houston freeway scene. Miles of aggressive concrete, uninhibited by any living green thing, decorated by galvanized steel barriers, lights, and signs; glitter flags calling attention to displays of shiny new and used cars or to heaps of used construction equipment and remaindered industrial parts; motels and ammo shops, girlie joints and medical clinics—the Houston freeway landscape was an urban crust that resembled the ugly discolored tissue of a bad scar across clean skin.

But if you are fortunate in your choice of destinations, as I was, you will soon breach this excrescent brim and enter one of Houston’s neighborhoods, which are the lifeblood of the city. I settled into the leafy Heights, where my San Francisco-based firm had opened an office the year before to practice land planning and landscape architecture. The Heights neighborhood was a garden oasis after the freeway experience: its central boulevard with its huge live oaks; the mix of cottages, bungalows, and aging but still proud Victorians; and the small town feel of its old commercial center. Gardens that ranged from elaborate mixtures of azaleas and perennials to a simple trimmed lawn with garlands of coral vine draped over a waist high chain link fence spoke to a diverse mix of backgrounds, ages, incomes, and life styles in the neighborhood. There was a salt-and-pepper mix of owner-occupied homes and businesses, and rental or speculative properties, too often differentiated by the level of care taken of the house or business. Sadly, even in the heart of the neighborhood, bits and strips showed the same disease that so scarred the freeway corridors.

Having arrived in the early fall, I experienced only the tail end of the summer, amazed by the thickness of the humidity and entertained by the sound and light of almost daily thunderstorms. In the wetness I could appreciate the fecund lushness of the landscape. The St. Augustine grass that needed to be mown more than once a week if it were to be kept neat and trim was like Mickey Mouse’s out of control sorcerer’s apprentice brooms, compared to the mincing and reluctant way grass grows in the dry Mediterranean climate of northern California. I was perversely fascinated by the massive branches, trunks, and roots of the southern live oaks as they cracked, tilted, and swallowed sidewalks and streets, the muscled branches cantilevering across the street to shade pavement and pedestrian.

Weekends and holidays I ventured to the edges of the city and beyond, staking out exploratory transects emanating from the Heights. The landscape I found was beautiful in a subtle and fragile kind of way: early morning light streaming through misty, humid air at the cut edge of a forest along one of Texas’ marvelous farm-to-market roads, so easily disfigured by rusting billboards and abandoned cars by the side of the road; pasture land framed by mature oaks whose lower foliage has been trimmed to an exact horizontal line by the nibbling lips of the tallest range land steers, a vista marred by cell phone repeater towers and portable marquee signs with blinking lights advertising “Dairy Queen Sno Cones H mile”; dancing reflections of sky and setting sun off smooth water interlaced with marsh sedges along a coastal tideland, blemished by a cacophony of wind-damaged power poles and a blue-and-white striped bait shop perched on fill expeditiously pushed into the wetlands.

Conditioned by my childhood in the mild northern California climate, I scraped and pried open the windows of my garage apartment during that first fall in Houston, unhooked the rusty fly screens, and carted off two ancient window air-conditioning units that blocked my view of the trees and sky. After a delightful fall and winter listening to the birds through open windows and basking in fresh air drifting through the apartment, it was time for me to learn about the other part of Houston’s climate. When winter began turning to spring, the first things to return were the window screens as the mosquito population stirred and swarmed out of warming puddles and the little pests found their way into my house to disturb my sleep. As the average temperature rose, so did the humidity. By early summer, my apartment sported two new window air conditioners, and with sealed up windows and doors, and the hum and whir of window units, I joined the rest of middle-class Houston in relative isolation from the great out-of-doors.

My first years as a professional in Houston were consumed with the challenge of creating special places in the rapidly growing urban fabric of the city. As a young designer, I was thrilled to play a small part on big teams building projects in a highly competitive development marketplace. I worked on new towers and plazas and parks downtown in a very urban environment, struggled to find scale for projects and environments in that middle ground between the Loop and Beltway, and participated in the planning of some of our edge-city communities, where a large percentage of the region’s growth has occurred. Almost all this work involved understanding, defining, and creating a sense of place. Although most of the projects were open and accessible to the public, their sense of place was driven by the needs and programs of the development project, its users, and its investors. Over time I began to question the nature of the larger place and whether, and how, our collective idea of the place could influence the city’s transformation.

Our collective idea of place is like a tapestry woven of string that has been dragged through the woods, picking up bits of twigs, leaves, and soil. Each of us contributes to this tapestry, some with more string than others. For those of us that live in the same place at the same time, all our string shares the same bits of twigs and leaves from common trees and the same residue from common soil. When we come together as we do in a city, we weave the string together into a tapestry of laws and ordinances, expectations and assumptions, and plans and visions. This complex tapestry is our shared idea of the place. In the weave of this tapestry are three patterns that have intrigued me, three common elements that seem to strongly influence how we see and respond to the physical city and to the nature that supports it.

The first is the subtlety and fragility of the beauty of the natural landscape. From the arc of the Gulf sands to the northern boundary of the coastal plain, the landscape is one of subtle shifts in shape and topography, green on green contrasts of canopy to understory foliage, changes from upland grasses to prairie grasses to wetland sedges, and ecosystems that shift and intertwine based on soil beds and subsurface hydrology defined when the shallow seas retreated from the area millions of years ago. Delight comes from finding a spray of early dogwood leaves in an otherwise monochromatic forest, from long shadows in the beach cast by the mounded castings of burrowing sand creatures, or from watching a night heron stalking a meal in the shade along the banks of a stream. If you are in a rush, you can slip right by what it has to offer.

The Gulf Coast plain around Houston has no remaining undisturbed natural landscapes. Even where there are no buildings, you find artifacts of agriculture, past and present; ranch trails, country roads, and superhighways; pipelines, wellheads, and tank farms; drainage channels and irrigation canals; telephone wires, power cables, and high tension pylons. While small pieces of landscape are pristine (often by chance, sometimes by neglect, rarely by intention), the natural landscape is compartmentalized, weakened by its fragmentation at the large scale that ecological systems need to properly function.

The second pattern of the tapestry is the climate and weather of the upper Texas coastal plain. These portions of the tapestry are made limp by the humidity and high temperatures during our summer months. The dampness that once made life difficult for early settlers in the region, with its myriad mosquitoes and their attendant parasites and diseases, today constrains our outdoor activities during much of the year. The dampness also supports a rich and diverse community of chewing insects and molding fungi that will reduce any fallen tree or abandoned wooden structure to humus in very short order. The forest itself produces few trees that live much beyond our own short life span. High water and powerful winds will topple any tree that has the hubris to try to outlive the periodic tropical storms that rampage in from the Gulf of Mexico. These same tropical storms regularly wreak havoc where we have foolishly built in the historic natural floodplains. Although we have spent billions to control these floods, we are only just beginning to understand that we have to manage our own activities in the watersheds to reduce human loss and destruction.

The third pattern in the tapestry has to do with human nature. Why, I struggle to understand, are we so mincingly cheap when it comes to creating or setting aside public lands and parks here on the upper coastal plain of Texas? The State of Texas has less public land than any other large state in the union, and most of it is in the far west corner of the state. The area in and around Houston is all but bereft of public land for its population of millions to use for recreation and fresh air. What is it in the fabric of our history and contemporary culture that dissuades our political leaders from securing greenbelts, parks, and open space for the benefit and enjoyment of the people of Houston?

Are we just too young and immature a city to recognize that we need adequate dedicated open space before we can call ourselves a great city of the world? Why can we not recognize the shared importance of open space? Is there nothing of intrinsic worth in open land that justifies protecting it as a common good? What was different in other parts of the country where rivers and forests and beaches are set aside as public space for present and future generations? Is it that we will only recognize what we can extract from it, its incidental and extrinsic value?

The Houston landscape has a very real physical structure, the warp and woof that ties together all three of these tapestry patterns: our natural drainage system. Our flat, coastal landscape is laced with a network of streams and bayous, like the veins in a leaf, that lead from the uppermost reaches of the county all the way to Galveston Bay. In their natural state, these streams offer glimpses of sublime beauty, but as we have built a city around them, we have choked them and straightjacketed them, turning many of them into huge urban sewers. The streams are the geophysical manifestation of our wet climate; the morphologies of the streams are a function of the flatness of the coastal plain, the softness of our alluvial soils, and the richness of the riparian vegetation that graces and shelters all of our natural stream banks. And the decisions we make as we build a city in, around, and on top of this delicate lacework reflect the values we hold, not just about the value of land, but also about the values we place on community.

Can we dream of recovering and restoring the one continuous aspect of nature that reaches into and connects all parts of the county? Can we dream of finding a fragile beauty in all of our neighborhoods? Can we imagine celebrating the irrepressible irregularity of our storms and the often placid but occasionally rambunctious water that comes with them? Can we dream of setting aside enough land on each side of our streams and bayous to provide them with the room they need to function as natural rivers, while providing open space for tree-shaded trails and wildlife habitat throughout the city?

A big dream? Too much to imagine? Perhaps. But building a city is a project of generations; if I can just add a couple of small stones toward building the idea of this place, this city, I might have helped to make Houston something more than just a place for jobs and family. I might have helped to enrich it as a place we can love on its own merits.

Copyright©2000 Kevin Shanley