HOUSTON: SAME AS IT EVER WAS

From the Houston Chronicle:

Peering into Allen's Landing's murky history

It's a story worth mulling over as we approach the annual celebration of Houston's birthday, a date generally cited as Aug. 30, 1836 — the day a newspaper ad first touted the new city. That ad was, famously, a pack of lies.

The Allen brothers Augustus and John, a pair of New York-bred land speculators, declared their parcel of land an excellent place for ambitious settlers. "There is no place in Texas more healthy," they wrote, "having an abundance of excellent spring water, and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness."

The sea breeze?

The Allens proclaimed they'd held back this excellent land until they could offer it "with the advantage of capital and improvement."

That, too, was hooey. They'd bought the land only days before the ad first appeared and hadn't yet spent a dollar to develop it. There wasn't a single building on the 8,850 acres.

The ads ran in the United States and Europe. One showed a drawing of Houston: a pretty little lake, rolling hills and, off in the distance, blue mountains.

Mountains?

J.K. Allen, the outgoing brother, wasn't just a developer; he was a fast-moving political operator, too.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I'm no architect, or urban planner, or civil engineer, or anything along those lines. Keep that in mind as you read a few of my impressions of my hometown after living for a year in the New Orleans area.

What if you wanted a city to be as much like a shopping mall as possible? Houston is what you'd get. The city was created by real estate developers to favor their interests, and continues to be owned and run by real estate developers. To favor their interests. That's probably the biggest reason it has no heart or soul.

Houston has no vibe, no culture. The only people who love Houston are necessarily from Houston. It has all the personality of a model home in a new suburban development. That's what H-Town is. A development. I mean, it feels weird even using such a nifty nickname as "H-Town." Where the fuck did that come from? Not from history because Houston really has no history--indeed, local developers just can't wait to demolish the city's past in order to erect new prefab condos and strip shopping centers. Not from street culture because Houston has no street culture--I mean, sure, there's a sort of street culture in certain neighborhoods, but it never breaks out of those neighborhoods to the rest of the city. Not from the city's art scene because most of its serious artists leave town as soon as they are able--the grafted store-bought arts scene, the Alley Theater, the Houston Ballet, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, all that shit was brought in by developers simply to enhance the city's image; what grass-roots arts scene actually exists suffers and dies year after year without any serious support from the powers-that-be.

The name "H-Town" is nothing more than a t-shirt slogan, probably created by advertising execs in New York, which is where the Bayou City recruits most of its creative class, existing only to suggest that Houston has a soul, when it is in fact not much more than a zombie controlled by banking interests.

If there is one real culturally unifying theme in Houston it is making money and fucking everybody who can't make money themselves. Houston is a city all about capitalism--of course, I understand that all cities are about capitalism, but almost always this mandate co-exists with some kind of organic civic vibe transcending cash.

You know, the real reason Houston flooded so badly during Tropical Storm Allison's intense rainfall back in 2001 was because developers weren't interested in providing enough runoff to properly drain the water. It cost too much and wasn't really necessary. For them. When the flood waters receded, the developers weren't hurting, either: this was a new opportunity to tear down old shit and build more strip malls.

So Houston is great for the well-to-do, but fucking lame for everybody else, and most of the people there don't know any better, so they love it, and call it "H-Town," and go to Texans games, and get into fights with anybody who rightly says that Houston sucks.

It is fitting, then, that the city began 170 years ago as an image-based business venture aimed at draining money from unsophisticated rubes: that's what it continues to be to this very day.

Happy birthday Houston.

Oh god, I'm going to get nailed so hard for writing this.

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