HOUSTON, TEXAS. In 1990 Houston, covering 540 square miles,
ranked as the fourth largest city in the United States with a population
of 1,630,553. The city passed Philadelphia in 1984 to take a position
behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The consolidated metropolitan
population of Houston, which encompassed Galveston, Fort Bend, Harris,
Brazoria, Liberty, Waller, and Montgomery counties, amounted to
3,711,000, ranked tenth in the nation, and was second in Texas to
Dallas-Fort Worth. When first formed in 1949 the Houston Standard
Metropolitan Statistical Area covered only Harris County and had a
population of 806,701 people. Over 100 ethnic groups now shape the
population; the major components in 1987 were 56 percent white, 17
percent black, 17 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian. This
spectacular growth developed as a result of the construction of
transportation systems, the fortuitous nearby location of useful natural
resources, and an entrepreneurial spirit. The city began on August 30,
1836, when Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen ran an
advertisement in the Telegraph and Texas Register for the
"Town of Houston." The townsite, which featured a mixture of
timber and grassland, was on the level Coastal Plain in the middle of
the future Harris County, at 95.4° west longitude and 30.3° north
latitude. The brothers claimed that the town would become the
"great interior commercial emporium of Texas," that ships from
New York and New Orleans could sail up Buffalo Bayou to its door, and
that the site enjoyed a healthy, cool seabreeze. They noted plans to
build a sawmill and offered lots for sale at moderate prices. In the
manner of town boomers the Allens exaggerated a bit, however. The
forty-three-inch annual rainfall and temperatures that averaged from a
low of 45° F in the winter to 93° in summer later inspired Houston to
become one of the most air-conditioned cities in the world. Moreover, in
January 1837, when Francis R. Lubbock arrived on the Laura, the
small steamship that first reached Houston, he found the bayou choked
with branches and the town almost invisible.
The Allen brothers named their town after Sam Houston and persuaded
the Texas Congress to designate the site as the temporary capital of the
new Republic of Texas. The promoters offered lots and buildings to the
government. On January 1, 1837, the town comprised twelve residents and
one log cabin; four months later there were 1,500 people and 100 houses.
Gail and Thomas H. Borden surveyed and mapped the town in typical
gridiron fashion, with broad streets running parallel and perpendicular
to the bayou. The legislature first met in Houston on May 1, 1837, and,
despite the efforts of Masons who greeted one another in 1837 and the
Presbyterians and Episcopalians who formed churches in 1839, the town
remained infamous for drunkenness, dueling, brawling, prostitution, and
profanity. The legislature granted incorporation on June 5, 1837, and
James S. Holman became the first mayor. The same year, Houston also
became the county seat of Harrisburg County, which was renamed Harris
County in 1839. During the nineteenth century, aldermen elected by wards
directed the city government. In 1905 the city began to use a modified
commission form with aldermen elected at large. Houston switched to a
city manager government from 1942 to 1947, and then subsequently to a
strong-mayor with council form. A 1979 United States Justice Department
ruling led to nine city council members elected from districts, and five
elected at large. Voters selected the first African American for the
council in 1971 and the first Mexican American in 1979.
The early settlers used lumber to build frame houses, ditches for
drainage, and pigs to clean the streets. Yellow fever struck
periodically-in 1839, 1844, 1847, 1848, 1854, 1858, 1859, 1862, and
1867-until it was controlled by quarantine of the coastline. In 1839 the
disease killed about 12 percent of the population. Since many of the
first Houston settlers were from the South, they endorsed the
slavery-plantation system and used urban slaves for menial tasks. This
started Houston on the same bifurcated pathway as other Southern towns,
where the black minority developed a subordinated and separate social
structure. The slaves lived scattered through the neighborhoods, were
subject to an 8:00 P.M. curfew, and could not take employment without
their owners' permission. There were few free blacks in the city.
After the Civil War, separation of the races continued with
segregated schools and dissociated churches, clubs, bands, businesses,
and sports teams. Segregation by law began with separation on trollies
in 1903. It continued through the first half of the twentieth century,
during which blacks were excluded from or had only limited access to
white parks, depots, schools, drinking fountains, buses, restrooms, and
restaurants. Though residential segregation never became part of the
legal code, it did operate as part of the social code. Separate
residential areas developed for African Americans, Mexican Americans,
and whites by the end of the century. Despite occasional outbursts such
as the Houston Riot of 1917, when a black army unit shot up the town and
left nineteen people dead, nothing changed the legacy of slavery until
the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Although Houston started as a political boomtown in the nineteenth
century, its livelihood depended upon cotton and commerce. The Texas
government left Houston for Austin in 1839, and the city settled into
the rhythm of agriculture. Businessmen such as William Marsh Rice,
Thomas M. Bagby, Charles Shearn, William J. Hutchins, Paul Bremond, and
A. S. Ruthven established trade connections. Activity was greatest
during harvest and marketing times, while the rest of the year was spent
in sending supplies to farmers. Oceangoing ships brought to Galveston
cargoes of cloth, flour, whiskey, gunpowder, iron castings, lead,
coffee, sugar, nails, books, and hundreds of little items. Small river
steamships took the goods from Galveston to Houston. The merchants then
sent them by ox wagon to the farmers in the hinterland. In the reverse
direction came cotton, corn, and hides through Houston to Galveston and
on to New Orleans, New York, and Europe. The Telegraph and Texas
Register moved to Houston and began its publication there on May 2,
1837. The Houston Morning Star started on April 8, 1839. These
early newspapers reflected the local interests in cotton production,
roads, railways, and bayou clearance.
From the beginning, Buffalo Bayou was difficult to navigate. After
the Civil War, businessmen mounted various efforts to dredge a better
channel by forming the Houston Direct Navigation Company, the Houston
Ship Channel Company, and the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company.
Charles Morgan, a Gulf Coast shipowner, eventually took over and in 1876
opened a twelve-foot-deep waterway to Clinton, a port town below
Houston. The United States government assumed Morgan's work in 1881 and
after delays dug a ship channel through Galveston Bay and Buffalo Bayou
to a turning basin above Harrisburg. The Houston Ship Channel opened in
1914 and has been since widened and deepened. It made Houston a
deepwater port variously ranked second or third largest in the United
States, with access to the shipping of the world. Complementing this
facility, Houstonians worked to build railroads into the countryside.
Paul Bremond, a Houston merchant, began a slow northwestward
construction of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad in 1853. This
line started as the Galveston and Red River, changed its name in 1856,
and reached Hempstead in 1858. Meanwhile, the Houston Tap and Brazoria,
a seven-mile railway, joined the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado
Railway at Pierce Junction in 1856. This linked Houston with the sugar
plantations of the Brazos valley. Other roads were started, and by 1861
Houston was the rail center of Southeast Texas with five lines
stretching fifty to 100 miles south, southeast, west, east, and
northwest. The Civil War interrupted construction, but building revived
afterwards. When the Houston and Texas Central reached Denison in 1873,
Houston joined the national rail network. The railroads efficiently
spanned the muddy bogs of the coastal prairie. Although roads existed
from the start, travel was often slow and rough. Roadwork was costly,
and significant improvement came only with the construction of
all-weather highways in the 1920s. The city's first expressway, the Gulf
Freeway, connected Houston and Galveston in 1952 and later became a part
of the interstate highway system. Houston opened its first airport in
1928, Houston International Airport in 1954 (renamed William P. Hobby
Airport in 1967), and Houston Intercontinental Airport in 1969. The
various transportation systems, along with the communication systems of
mail, telegraph (built in 1853-54) and telephone (1878-95), allowed
Houston to develop as a cotton and lumber market in the nineteenth
century. The discovery of oil at the Spindletop oilfield dramatically
changed the Houston economy in the twentieth century. Oil companies
chose to locate refineries along the Houston Ship Channel, where they
were safe from Gulf storms. By 1929 forty oil companies had located
offices in the city. The most important were the Texas Company (now
Texaco), Humble Oil and Refining Company (now Exxon), and Gulf Oil
Corporation. Sinclair Oil Company built the first major refinery in
1918.
World War II brought a demand for synthetic rubber, gasoline,
materials for explosives, and ships from the area. Concrete barges,
steel merchant vessels, and mid-size warships were built along the ship
channel. Houston Shipbuilding Corporation, a subsidiary of Todd
Shipbuilding Corporation, for example, built Liberty Ships and employed
20,000 workers by July 1942. The Brown Shipbuilding Company pioneered
broadside launching and produced more than 300 war vessels by the end of
the war. Nearby coastal deposits of salt, sulfur, and natural gas
supplied the ingredients for petrochemicals, and the United States
government provided the contracts for war materials. On this foundation
after the war Houston developed one of the two largest petrochemical
concentrations in the United States with such companies as Dow, Du Pont,
Shell, Sinclair, Monsanto, and Goodyear. In 1990 a complex of some 250
interrelated refineries extended from Corpus Christi along the coast to
the Louisiana border. The main exports and imports of the Port of
Houston, consequently, were petroleum or petroleum-related products.
Houston thus became a world energy capital in the 1970s, expanded with
the rise in oil prices, and suffered with the downturn during the 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, for the first time in its history, Houston lost
population.
The developments of the twentieth century, however, made Houston the
largest city in Texas in 1930, when the population was 292,000. At this
time Houston had three newspapers-the Houston Post (founded
1880), the Houston Chronicle (1901), and the Houston Press
(1911)-and four radio stations-KPRC (1925), KTRH (1930), KTLC (1930),
and KXYZ (1930). Facilities for urban living had to develop along with
the growth. Merchants and others complained about the city streets from
the beginning. Efforts to rise out of the mud and dust featured
experiments with cypress blocks, gravel, planks, shell, limestone
blocks, and later cement and asphalt. In 1915 Houston had almost 196
miles of paved streets. In 1922 the municipal government began to
replace wooden bridges with steel and concrete. Electric streetlights
appeared in 1884 and an electric streetcar system in 1891. Automobiles
came at the beginning of the century and caught on fast; there were
1,031 in Harris County in 1911 and 97,902 in 1930. This growth led to
traffic regulations on speed (fifteen miles per hour in 1907), one-way
streets in 1920, and traffic signals in 1921. The increasing use of
automobiles also led to the building of expressways in the 1950s that
extended over 200 miles by 1990, air pollution, urban sprawl, and
traffic jams. The most important urban necessity, the water supply,
improved in the late 1880s after several citizens discovered artesian
water by drilling shallow wells. Well water thus replaced the
contaminated bayou water used by the private water-supply company. The
city took over the company in 1906. Continued pumping from the aquifer,
however, resulted in subsidence of the land in southeastern Houston in
the 1960s. To avoid further sinking, the city turned to the Trinity and
San Jacinto rivers for most of its water. The paving of land and
consequent quick runoff of rain resulted in a flood problem. Severe
floods in 1929 and 1935 led to the formation of the Harris County Flood
Control District, but storm flooding in parts of the metropolitan area
has continued. Water pollution has been a long-standing problem. Surges
of rainwater into the bayous have flushed the contamination of the ship
channel into Galveston Bay and caused fish kills. While building the
channel, the United States Army Corps of Engineers forced the city to
construct a sewage-disposal system that, when completed in 1902, was
among the best in the nation. Urban growth and neglect, however,
overcame the advance.
Land developers inspired the spread of the city when they built
suburbs such as Pasadena (1892), Houston Heights (1892), Deer Park
(1892), Bellaire (1911), and West University Place (1919). The most
famous, because of its wealth, was River Oaks (1922-24), started by Mike
and William Clifford Hogg and Hugh Potter. There, architect John F.
Staub designed tasteful homes to match the curved streets and large
green lawns. Suburbs have since spread out in the metropolitan region.
An important example is The Woodlands, a new town built by oilman George
T. Mitchell between 1964 and 1983 north of Houston in southern
Montgomery County. Mitchell blended homes, business places, and
recreation facilities into the pine woods with minimal environmental
disturbance. In 1948-49, to avoid encirclement by incorporated suburbs,
the Houston City Council under Mayor Oscar F. Holcombe used its
annexation power to envelop the older suburbs. As a result the city
doubled in size. In 1956 the council voted more annexation, and in 1960
while fighting with neighboring towns, the council threatened to annex
all unclaimed land in Harris County. Compromises finally brought the
annexation war under control. Part of the dispute involved the rich and
prestigious land around Clear Lake to the south, where in 1961 the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration built the Lyndon B.
Johnson Space Center. Houston was able to control the land.
In the ordering of urban space Houston politicians and voters have
rejected the use of zoning. The administration of Mayor Kathy Whitmire
in the 1980s brought the subject up for review, but Houston remained
infamous as the largest unzoned city in the United States. The lack of
zoning has not affected development to any great extent, however, since
heavy industry concentrated in the area of the ship channel and
subdivisions controlled construction through deed restrictions. This
casual attitude toward land use encouraged business expansion. The
greatest city builder in the first half of the twentieth century was
banker Jesse H. Jones. By the mid-1920s he had constructed about thirty
commercial structures, and in 1956 he controlled fifty buildings. He
brought the 1928 Democratic convention to the city and later served as
Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of commerce. His most impressive
structure was the thirty-seven story Gulf Building, completed in 1929.
The prosperity after World War II brought the world famous Galleria
shopping mall with its interior ice-skating rink in 1970; Pennzoil
Place, a startling black-glass downtown building in 1976; and the
Astrodome in 1965. The Houston skyline became a showcase of modern
architecture. In 1992 Houston hosted the national Republican convention.
The city meanwhile matured culturally and socially. The Texas Medical
Center, with its fourteen hospitals, emerged as a global focal point for
heart and cancer treatment. The center was the largest employer in
Houston in 1990 and was famous for heart transplants. In 1971 Dominique
and John de Menil built the Rothko Chapel, which became a place of
religious pilgrimage, and in 1987 Dominique de Menil constructed a
gallery to house the Menil Collection of modern art. This added to the
collections of art that began with the opening of the Museum of Fine
Arts in 1924. A free secondary school system began in 1877 and became
the Houston Independent School District in 1924. This district is now
one of the largest in the nation. Rice University started in 1912,
financed by a bequest from William Marsh Rice, who made his fortune in
Houston in the nineteenth century. The University of Houston began as a
junior college in 1927 and was supported by oilman Hugh Roy Cullen in
its early years, until it became part of the state system of higher
education in 1963. KUHT-TV, which started in 1953 at the university, was
the first educational television station in the United States. Texas
Southern University began in 1934 as part of the University of Houston.
The University of St. Thomas began in 1945 and Houston Baptist
University in 1963. In 1914 George H. Hermann donated Hermann Park,
where a thirty-acre zoo was established in 1922. Memorial Park, the
other major Houston park, developed from land purchased in 1924. The
Houston Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1913, the Houston Grand Opera
in 1956, the Alley Theatre in 1947, and the Houston Ballet in 1969. The
Houston Public Library opened in 1904 with the help of Andrew Carnegie.
Television began in 1949 with broadcasts from KLEE-TV, which became
KPRC-TV in 1950. Seven other stations followed. Professional sports
teams arrived-the Houston Astros (the Colt .45s until 1964) baseball
team in 1962, the Houston Oilers football team in 1959, and the Houston
Rockets basketball team in 1971.
