Discovering Houston

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by Christof Spieler

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From the trees rise buildings, singly, in long chains, and in great clumps. There are three of these clumps: downtown, the biggest and tallest, to the north; Post Oak, with the flamboyant Transco Tower at its center; and the Medical Center behind you. Once, before the cars and the freeways, "downtown" was actually downtown, the city's center of commerce and culture. Now it's merely another cluster of highrises.

While it may not look that way on a map, Houston has no center. This is a city of strips, a place where stores give their locations by which freeway they're on. Stores don't cluster, except in malls; rather, they line up along freeway frontage roads and major streets.

Houston, more than even Los Angeles, is built for the car. Here is the '50s ideal of modernity taken to the extreme. Houston still sticks to its creed of automotive mobility and unregulated growth long after most cities have given up on it.

But I'm forgetting the trees. Walk north from the campus and you get a quite different impression of Houston: quiet streets shaded with canopies of live oaks. The truth is that Houston isn't nearly the caricature I've made it out to be. Among the sprawl are winding bikepaths along bayous, a few wonderful old neighborhoods, nice parks, world-class museums and hundreds of delightfully quirky shops and restaurants.

My first instinct upon seeing this place was to try to ignore it, venturing beyond the hedges only when necessary. Only later did I see what I was missing. My advice is this: There are a lot of wonderful places in this city. Seek them out. Explore. Your years at Rice will be richer for it. (And, while you're at it, let us know how you like this section.)

-- Christof Spieler

This item appeared in the Features section of the September 1, 1995 issue.

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