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Houston’s character and personality are by no means revealed merely by ticking off oil, a bewildering chemicals complex, a seaport, and an exaggerated reputation for materialism. Consider some enigma variations on an urban theme:
Metropolitan, urban, big-city Houston—where E. H. Marks has one of the largest herds of Longhorn cattle in the world, where cattle rustling still flourishes, where wolves still thrive and a few mountain lions still roam in the bottoms.
The evangelist Billy Graham, exhorting a crowd of forty thousand in Rice Stadium in 1952, called Houston “a more wicked city than Hollywood.” He said earlier “that less people probably go to church in Houston than in any other city in Texas.” Yet the city has more than twelve hundred churches.
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. In 1961 another expert told the City Council that Houstonians lead all Americans in shunning public transportation to drive their own cars.
Main Street, 1866; the east side of the street between Congress and Preston Avenues. What may have been the city’s first three-story building, on the left in the row of five, was built by William Van Alstyne. J. R. Morris soon built the city’s first four-story building, the one in the center, which was the first iron-front building in Houston.
