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National Geographic : 1967 Sep
Contents
Houston, Prairie Dynamo Texas's afterdeck. Outraged cries of "Sacri lege!" brought hasty removal of the snack bar. On another day I rode a small tug from the Turning Basin, the head of deepwater navi gation, up the undredged stretch of Buffalo Bayou. Our goal was Allen's Landing, for years a neglected, weed-grown vacant lot under a viaduct, now landscaped into a small park (map, page 357). Here, 131 years ago, the Allen brothers launched their city. Coiling between narrow, eroded banks, with overhanging trees forming a dark-green tunnel, the bayou looked much as it must have to the Laura's passengers. Spotted tur tles slid off logs as we passed, and we saw a swimming snake that may have been a water moccasin. We went under freeway and rail road bridges and passed small chemical plants and cement factories where barges unloaded lime-rich oystershell from Galveston Bay. As we rounded a bend and the viaduct marking our objective came into view, we felt a bump and a shudder. We were stuck, just like the Laura's boat. Reverse power pulled us off the mudbank, and we headed back to the Turning Basin. Later, I found it easier to visit Allen's Landing on foot. Theater Group's First Endowment: $2.14 A stranger looking at the seedy buildings around Allen's Landing would find it hard to accept author James Street's words about Houston: "Her pulse beats so fast that last month already is history and last year almost is antiquity." This neighborhood reflects the blight afflicting many American cities, and an all-out rehabilitation program has begun under Mayor Louie Welch's administration. The Houston of the racing pulse begins a few blocks away. Here, in another area once threatened by blight, rises Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts (pages 340-43). The hall was built on city land by a foundation created by the late Jesse Jones, financier, publisher, Cabinet Member, and Democratic Party leader, and his wife. Jones Hall has become the home of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, ranked as one of the Nation's finest. With its flexible stage and seating arrangements, the hall quickly adapts itself also to grand opera, ballet, tour ing Broadway musicals, jazz groups, and inti mate chamber-music concerts. By late 1968 Jones Hall's across-the-street neighbor will be the striking new home of the Alley Theatre, a professional repertory group that was founded two decades ago on an in vestment of $2.14. Since 1962 it has received the largest theater grants ever made by the Ford Foundation, $3,500,000 for a new build ing and ten years of assistance. Nina Vance, producer-director, told me how the Alley Theatre started on its way to national acclaim. "Some of my theater-loving friends and I were sitting around one night," she said, "dis cussing ways and means of launching a first rate drama group. The only way, we decided, was to enlist some of Houston's civic-minded citizens. We made up a list of prospective supporters. As it happened, I was the only one at the meeting who had any money. I had $2.14. With it we bought 214 penny postcards and sent off our appeal. It worked." Perfume Flows From a Golden Derrick It seemed to me that Houston had acquired, along with its affluence, a new character that was both sophisticated and gay. This impres sion registered strongly when I took my wife on a tour of the beautiful department stores and specialty shops along Main Street. One big store, Sakowitz, had decked itself out in turn-of-the-century style. On the first floor we found a miniature oil derrick, a working model about two feet high covered with gold leaf. The liquid that flowed through its recirculating pump was not petroleum, but an expensive French perfume. Soon we came to the Houston branch of Dallas's famous Neiman-Marcus. When the branch was opened in 1955, local shoppers tended to regard it as an upstart intruder-"a Dallas outfit." Then they began buying so eagerly that the firm started plans for a subur ban store much bigger than the downtown one. We went in, mainly to browse but also to buy a tieclasp to replace one I had lost. Just inside the door was the jewelry department, and here we paused to gaze at treasures a maharaja might have coveted. An obliging clerk let my wife fondle, and even try on, a 12-carat emerald ring ($110,000), a platinum necklace with two heart-shaped diamond pendants the size of thumbtips ($117,000), and another necklace of imperial jade beads ($110,000). I stopped at men's furnishings, rejected a gold tieclasp shaped like an oil derrick, and bought a plain silver bar for $6.50 plus tax. With prosperity and growth, unzoned Houston has seen the spread of architectural chaos, including vast stretches of motels, 375
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