Lords’ Cycle Club at 109 Chenevert Street, probably in 1898, when cycling was one of Houston’s chief pastimes. The first bicycle run to Galveston, in 1892, took ten hours; the cyclists were so exhausted that they returned by train.
Three of six sketches made in Houston by an artist accompanying the journalist Edward King, of Scribner’s Monthly, in 1873, when the city was recovering from Reconstruction. “Houston,” King wrote, “is one of the most promising of Texas towns.” The sketches show:
Two Negroes racing their drays.
A magnolia seller, a common sight at the time.
An auctioneer’s street-hawker.
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 difference is caused by automation and by the technical nature of the four dominant industries. 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.