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Alive
with energy and rich in diversity, Houston
is a dynamic mix of imagination, talent and
first-class attractions that makes it a
world-class city. Home to a vibrant economy,
beautiful surroundings and a population full
of optimism and spirit, it's no wonder that
Houston is a popular international
destination.
In
this section we provide you with options
that will give you a good idea of what
Houston is all about. You can also view our
Calendar of Events to see more than 400
events in the Houston area throughout the
next 12 months.
And be
sure to visit the Exploring Houston page for
quick links to many more featured places to
go and things to do which celebrate the
uniqueness of our City.
You
can enjoy Houston's outstanding performing
and visual arts venues. Try one of the
countless restaurants available, offering
cuisine in everything from Tex Mex and South
American to Middle Eastern and Vietnamese.
For sports fans we have local teams
representing all major sports. Do some
shopping; Houston offers something to fit
every budget - from the exclusive shops in
Houston's Uptown area to the outlet malls
just outside the City.
And
that's just the beginning.
Houston, Texas City
Seal
Houston,
Texas History
Houston was an
entrepreneurial place from the moment of its
founding. In 1832 two brothers from New York
State-John K. Allen, a shopkeeper and
dreamer, and his brother Augustus, a
bookkeeper and a pragmatist-joined hundreds
of Americans who gobbled up cheap scrip
offered by Galveston Land Company and
authorized by Mexico. It conveyed the right
to settle the wide-open Mexican state of
Coahuila-Texas. The Allens headed for
Nacogdoches, a town of intrigue on the
border between Mexican Texas and American
Louisiana, where talk of revolution against
Mexico fermented. They befriended Sam
Houston, a giant of a man who had served as
Tennessee governor and a U.S. congressman
before he countrified and rode to Texas to
stir up trouble on behalf of President
Andrew Jackson. That unrest would explode
into rebellion and the nitrous slaughter of
William Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and
about 140 other men at the Alamo in San
Antonio in late February and early March
1836. A month later on the San Jacinto River
in East Texas, Houston wreaked revenge,
leading Texas forces to kill more than six
hundred Mexican troops and capturing their
commander, General Antonio Lopez de Santa
Anna.
With victory came independence for the
rough-hewn Republic of Texas. The Allen
brothers, who had been busy scouting for
land on which to build a speculative city,
purchased 6,642 acres along the west bank of
Buffalo Bayou, a muddy, meandering stream
that lolled southward to the bustling port
of Galveston.
Every nation needs a capital, the Allens
realized. Why not this barren place they had
grandly named in honor of their friend? They
even built a two story, wooden capitol
building to house a government. Sure enough,
in April 1837 the new Texas Congress moved
from Columbia to this muddy frontier town.
The coastal prairie was soon dotted with log
cabins, taverns, and shacks passing for
shops-but mostly lean-tos and crude tents-so
anxious were people to get a foothold in
this wild and wooly place. A theater went up
in a matter of weeks, but it was three years
before Houston saw its first church.
The flat land was easy to subdivide, and the
Allens made a killing selling lots. But
Houston soon lost its standing as state
capital. In 1839 Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar,
who succeeded Sam Houston as Texas
president, moved the capital to yet another
town, Waterloo in the Texas Hill Country. It
was soon renamed Austin in honor of the
"father of our country."
To everyone's surprise, Houston flourished
anyway. Freight wagons and railroad from the
fertile Brazos River country converged on
the little town, carrying cotton and hides
bound for Galveston. Before long, the
chamber of commerce began advertising
Houston as the place "where 17 railroads
meet the sea." Never mind that the Gulf of
Mexico was 50 miles away. The first
automobile, proudly purchased by the Houston
Left Hand Fishing Club, sputtered into town
in 1901. Air passenger service would arrive
with a Braniff Airlines flight in 1935.
Houston did indeed become the Texas
capital-of commerce. So fast would it grow,
in such scintillating fashion and with such
a profusion of ideas, dreams, wealth and
schemes, that one astonished observer dubbed
it "Babylon on the Bayou."
From the moment a steamboat first made its
way up Buffalo Bayou to Houston in 1844,
city burghers magnanimously dubbed their
humble docks the "Port of Houston." The
community's business leaders beseeched the
U.S. Congress to pay for widening and
deepening the bayou so it could truly become
a deep-water channel. In 1910 they won the
day, after promising to foot half the bill.
Four years later, just in time to profit
from the war in Europe, the 36-foot-deep
Houston Ship Channel was completed, leading
into a huge turning basin in the old town of
Harrisburg, by then a part of fast-growing
Houston on the east.
The Port of Houston quickly prospered, in
part through the misfortune of rival
Galveston, which had been devastated by the
killer hurricane of 1900. At the time,
Galveston boasted the nation's second
largest per capita number of millionaires,
virtually all of whom made their fortunes in
shipping. Galveston dallied in rebuilding
its port and when it did, it found that it
had lost much of its business to the upstart
port upstream. Houston dangled cheaper
prices, abundant fresh water, and before
long, docks and refineries protected from
the direct brunt of gulf storms. By 1930
Houston's port facilities at the end of what
folks in town called "our little ditch" had
already become the nation's eighth largest.
Prosperity for the Port of Houston and the
rawboned town as a whole was assured after
1901. In that year, the monumental
Spindletop gusher blew at Gladys City near
Beaumont. Soon wooden derricks filled the
prairies of East Texas, fortunes were made
and lost and oil refineries sprang up along
the Houston Ship Channel feeding the
nation's insatiable appetite for gasoline
and oil. Giant oil companies set up shop in
Houston, sophisticated chemical operations
evolved and the World's Energy Capital was
born.
Houston's shipbuilding, oil production, and
steel manufacturing were critical
contributors on the home front during World
War II. These were the days of idiosyncratic
giants such as "Mr. Houston" Jesse Jones, a
lumberman-turned-banker who financed a
skyscraper a year in downtown Houston and
hosted a weekly high-stakes poker game in
suite 8F at the Lamar Hotel. More than once,
Jones would start the game by announcing,
"Boys the United Way drive (or another
worthy undertaking) is running a little
behind. All the money we bet here tonight
goes to the united way, and it costs $5,000
to get in." Each player would write a check
for $5,000 before the first deal.
Houston nurtured other legendary figures as
well. There was Will Clayton, who had been
president of the world's largest cotton
company. Soon after he took office as the
nation's first undersecretary of state for
economic affairs in 1946, he wrote a long
memorandum proposing massive aid for
war-ravaged Europe; the memo inspired much
of the language of a June 6, 1947 speech by
his boss, Secretary of State George C.
Marshall, that heralded the sweeping
Marshall Plan to rescue Europe.
Roy Hofheinz was a page in one of Jesse
Jones's hotels. As a cantankerous mayor in
the 1950s the former Harris County judge
fought constantly with the city council and
was nearly impeached. But his administration
refurnished downtown and in 1965, as head of
the Houston Sports Commission, he brought
the city the "eighth Wonder of the Modern
World," the 76,000-seat Astrodome, the first
gigantic, domed baseball and football
stadium.
Sophistication, incredible generosity and
civic selflessness permeated the coarse
commercialism of the emerging megalopolis on
the East Texas plain. A prime example is the
altruism of M.D. Anderson, an assiduous
partner with Will Clayton in Houston's
biggest cotton brokerage. When Anderson, a
bachelor who lived alone in a downtown
hotel, died in 1939, he left most of his
substantial fortune to a foundation to be
dedicated in part to hospitals "for the care
of the sick, the young, the aged, the
incompetent and the helpless among the
people." Three years later his executors
approved the expenditure of funds to locate
the University of Texas' new cancer
treatment center, named for Anderson in
Houston. Soon Baylor University would move
its medical school from Dallas to the
budding medical center complex. Combined
with the existing Memorial Hermann Hospital
on the city's new outer belt road, and the
Texas Dental College, the M.D. Anderson
hospital and Baylor College of Medicine
formed the core of the revolutionary Texas
Medical Center, now more than 40 independent
institutions in 100 buildings on 670 acres
in the world's largest medical center
complex.
Excerpts from the book Houston, Deep
in the Heart by Carol M. Highsmith and
Ted Landphair
Houston, Texas
An
Abbreviated Timeline
1836
Brothers Augustus
Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen found
Houston
1845
Texas becomes the
28th state in the Union
1870
Congress
designates Houston a port
1899
Houston's first
park opens. The site, now Sam Houston
Park, contains several of Houston's
earliest buildings
1948
Voters first
reject proposed zoning ordinance. It's
rejected again in 1962 and 1993.
1932
First Houston
Livestock Show and Rodeo held
1943
Texas Medical
Center founded
1947
Alley Theatre
established
1969
"Houston" is first
word spoken from the lunar surface
1971
Shell Oil Co.
relocates corporate headquarters to
Houston. More than 200 major firms move
headquarters, subsidiaries and divisions
here in the years following.
2000
Census finds
Houston MSA has no racial or ethnic
majority
2004
First modern light
rail line-7.5 miles-begins operations.
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