George Fuermann

“ George Henry Hermann, an eccentric who was born in Houston in 1843 and later gave the city a great hospital, Hermann Park, and Hermann Square downtown; and M. D. Anderson and Hugh Roy Cullen, the philanthropists.
Houston’s good fortune during its first century and its extraordinary rise afterward have tempted some to call it a city of destiny. But the cliché signifies an irrevocable fate in spite of man’s successes or failures. And man, not fate, decisively controls the fortunes of cities.
How is one city more or less than another? ”

“ With a median age of 27.5 years, Houston’s population is the youngest of America’s big cities. The city itself seems younger than it is, for since the 1920s Houston has given the impression of being always new. Few structures stand long enough to become old. When the lovely patina of age does get a chance to form, it is scrubbed away as though it were an embarrassment, or so it was removed in 1962 from the bronze of Sam Houston’s equestrian statue in Hermann Park. Houstonians have shown little compassion for their city’s past. ”

“ Birds and beasts almost always know beforehand; often man can tell. Then, suddenly, the temperature falls and sounds break the stillness, first a low soughing of the wind, then bedlam as the fury commands the city.
Arriving in Houston in 1873, Edward King instantly experienced his first norther, “which came raving and tearing over the town.... It was glorious, exhilarating, and—icy.” The infrequent northers are confined, like the oyster, to months with an “r,” but mostly to November, December, and January.
Nothing about Houston is harder to pin down than its weather. ”

“ Beginning life three thousand years after Athens and two thousand after London, beginning two centuries after Boston and New York, fifty years after Los Angeles and at nearly the same time as Chicago, Houston suddenly joined the family of metropolises midway in the twentieth century. Its likeness in history, however, is to none of those cities, but to Carthage of North Africa, one of the most famous cities of antiquity, whose beginning preceded Houston’s by twenty-six centuries.
Carthage, like Houston, was above all a commercial city, its people vigorous, practical. ”

“ In spite of the lingering legend, Houston is in fact a city of working people. They came en masse during World War II, more than forty thousand to the shipyards alone, and most remained. Unlike the state, whose population has grown mainly from the excess of births over deaths, Houston has grown also from people moving in from the rest of Texas and other states.
The city’s population differs widely from that of most other American urban areas, having proportionately fewer industrial workers and more professional, technical, and white-collar workers. ”

“ The millions of dollars to be invested by industry to serve the center are incalculable. Slowly the character of the city will change as the migration of space scientists merges with Houston and with oil, the city’s mover and shaker for half a century. ”

“ With its interest in music, art, and the theater, with its universities and medical schools, Houston is becoming an important center of culture. But nearly all is new: the organization dates of only the symphony, one art museum, and the universities precede World War II, those of only the symphony and one university 26 precede World War I. No cultural institution dates from the nineteenth century, though a tradition of opera and theater goes far back.
Houston’s musical life has long been centered in its symphony, which gives the city much more than symphony music. ”

“ Houston is said to be well planned. Yet it is the largest city in America without zoning and more than three hundred of its streets have duplicate names. Main Street, or so the legend goes, is the longest in the world, sometimes merely the longest in the country. No doubt it is neither; still, from end to end within the city limits, the Main Stem measures 19.1 miles.
In Houston a prudent pedestrian looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. Houstonians, a safe-driving expert said, are the most zealous horn-blowers in the land. ”

“ Shipbuilding, an integrated steel mill, and paper mills are other important aspects of the city’s economy.
It is a paradox that the Houston metropolitan area, which is hundreds of miles from the state’s chief cattle-raising areas, has more cattle than any other county in Texas. Irrigation has made the county a rice producer of importance; within a hundred-mile radius of Houston is grown 28 per cent of the nation’s rice. And Houston, which is the headquarters for Anderson, Clayton & Company, the largest cotton concern in the world, is one of the world’s leading spot cotton markets. ”

“ The Contemporary Arts Association, organized in 1948, conducts an exhibitions museum. One of the few American museums devoted solely to the art of the twentieth century, its beneficial effects on the city’s art life have been far out of proportion to its budgets or the size of its exhibition hall, both small.
A notable omission in Houston’s cultural life has always been a satisfactory natural history museum, but one is to be built at last. The Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium is to be built in Hermann Park at a cost of $2,500,000, possibly by 1964. ”

“ The largest of twenty-one places named Houston in the United States, not counting Houston City and Houston Junction, both in Pennsylvania, Houston is the seventh American city in population and the second, after Los Angeles, in land area. But to call Houston the seventh city in population, though correct, is unrealistic. The true population of a modern city is shown not by the number of people living within its legal limits but by the number living within its metropolitan area, which for Houston is Harris County. ”

“ Thus the Louisiana French-speaking people are to be found in the northeast of Houston; the East Texas people in the northern fringe, which itself is the beginning of the Piney Woods; the German and Polish people are in the northwest Heights; and so on.... Each area surrounding the city has gathered its own, and 8 each group has in turn established a community within the city.... And so the city, which in itself has no cultural traditions, is rich in those it has acquired. ”

“ The brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, the founders of Houston, were neither heroes of the Texas revolution—they did not fight in the Battle of San Jacinto or in any other—nor were they distinguished in other ways. They were land speculators, New Yorkers who came to Texas in the summer of 1832. Augustus had just turned thirty, John was twenty-six when they bought the land for Houston.
Though the Allens’ town would become one of the leading cities of North America, though it would one day be abashed by a legend of riches, neither profited much for his pains. ”

“ The state’s largest concentration of Negroes lives in Houston, which ranks ninth in the nation in the proportion of Negroes to the total population. Nearly a quarter of a million Negroes live in the metropolitan area, or roughly one in five persons. In an article about Negro millionaires in Texas, Ebony Magazine said in 1952, “Houston is sometimes called the ‘Bagdad of Negro America.’” It is said also that Houston Negroes have a higher per capita wealth than those of any other American city. ”

“ Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space.
Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston Ship Channel to give Houston its One Million. ”

“ Houston’s Mexican group lacks the color and ritual of San Antonio’s, but it is the second largest national group in the city. Western Slavs, mainly Czechs and Poles, have lived in Houston for many decades, especially the Czechs. A few Japanese, most of whom excel as truck farmers and rice growers, live outside the city. Many foreign traders, scientists, and executives have been drawn to Houston by cotton and oil and chemicals. ”

“ The greatest proportional growth of the city’s population, 111.4 per cent, came in the decade of the 1920s, largely a result of the impetus given by World War I. World War II led to the most successful period in Houston’s history. The city took a decisive lead in its long competition with Galveston after the Galveston flood and tidal wave of September 8, 1900, in which an estimated six thousand lives were lost and half the city was destroyed. ”

“ On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna, in hot pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army, rode into the almost deserted hamlet and burned it. The second event, the decision of those other upstate New Yorkers, the Allens, to start a town at the most interior point of 42 year-round navigation in Texas, joined with the first to overcome Harrisburg’s ambitions.
The Allens and others had eyed the Harrisburg area with shrewd expectations. It was early seen that Buffalo Bayou would become important as an exit route for cotton and other crops grown in the rich agricultural lands along the Brazos River. ”

“ Processing oil, natural gas, and especially petrochemicals requires fewer but more highly trained workers than many industries, as does the work to be done by concerns allied with the space center. Such workers get comparatively higher pay, which has made Houston a city with more houses and fewer apartments than older American cities of comparable size. ”

“ During the 1950s Houston was a leading example of the new urban America caused by the economic impetus of World War II and the increased post-war migration of rural people to cities. No period in the city’s history approaches the importance of World War II and the years after. Before the war Houston was an ambitious small city. ”

“ A legend says Houston gets really cold only once every ten years, and many big storms do come in that pattern. Of modern cold spells, the big ice show of 1951 was the most severe. From January 29 to February 3, Houston had 123 hours—more than five days and nights—of below-freezing temperatures. Most of the city’s few freezes last less than a day.
Sometimes it rains and rains. And sometimes you despair that it may never rain again. Rarely does it rain a gentle rain; rarely does it rain just right. The rain in Houston falls mainly all at once. ”

“ Houston’s formidable roles in the oil and gas industries, in the manufacturing of oil-field equipment, and in the nationwide distribution of gas are widely understood but seldom comprehended. The metropolitan area alone, which has seven oil refineries, produces nearly eighty thousand barrels of oil daily. Two major oil companies, the Humble Oil and Refining Company and the Continental Oil Company, and hundreds of smaller ones have their headquarters in Houston, most of whose downtown skyscrapers were built by or for oil, gas, and banking. ”

“ In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, the city began an identity with the old ports of western Europe that played leading roles in the great adventures of two, three, and four centuries ago. Technical direction of America’s effort to put the first man on the moon will come from Houston. ”

“ The excess of births over deaths in the metropolitan area is around 24,000 a year, and each year around 21,000 more persons move to Houston than move away from it. Thus the metropolitan area’s population increases by an estimated 45,000 persons a year—a conservative figure. ”

“ One price of the project’s material benefits was the loss of one of the area’s chief natural beauties, a beauty remarked by many travelers in the nineteenth century. “... this most enchanting little stream,” Clopper wrote in 1828. Edward King foresaw in 1873 what was to happen to the lovely bayou.
“The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston ... is overhung by lofty and graceful magnolias; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for miles along the channel with the heavy, passionate fragrance of the queen flower drifting about him,” he wrote nearly a century ago. ”

“ The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age. ”

“ During the war Houston was a lair for blockade runners, and on January 1, 1863, using two small vessels fortified with bales of cotton, it mounted a sea attack down Buffalo Bayou and helped recapture Galveston Island from Union forces that had seized the island three months earlier. In the same year Houston became the headquarters for the Confederate district of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The period of Reconstruction lasted from June 20, 1865, when Houston was occupied by Union troops, until January, 1874. ”

“ The ship channel joins the Port of Houston with the Intracoastal Canal.
Houston’s corporate limits of 349.4 square miles, including the 22 square miles of Lake Houston and a canal leading to it, surround fourteen of twenty-eight municipalities in its metropolitan area, Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat. The county’s total area is 1,747 square miles, of which the land area is 1,711 square miles.
The city’s lowest altitude is 25 feet; the highest is 75 feet. The county’s altitude runs from close to sea level to 310 feet near Tomball, on the north. ”