What Else Can You Say About Houston?
Written: Oct 13 '03 (Updated Dec 10 '03)
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Pros: Food, culture, business, people
Cons: Traffic, weather, pollution
The Bottom Line: Houston definitely gets an unfair bad rap. But it sure ain't perfect, neither.
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| tesseract's Full Review: Houston |
Preface: I started this as one document, then broke it into two reviews, a general essay about Houston, and a list of tourist destinations, when I realized how long it was going to be. But then I found I'm not allowed to post more than one review under the "Houston" category, so I've glomped them back together into one incredibly long unwieldy review/essay-type thingy. If you already read my review "20 More Things to See and Do in Houston," you can ignore the second half of this-- I haven't made any changes. And I applaud in advance anyone who makes it through the whole thing.
Part I: A Frank Discussion of All Things Houston
I’ve lived in the Houston area all my 31 years (grew up in Dickinson), and lived in the city proper since 1991. I’ve read a number of reviews on the city here, ranging from those trashing it as a complete hellhole to those extolling its glories so hard they’re nearly blind to its flaws. What I’ve seen very little of is balanced and in-depth discussion of the things that make Houston what it is and why.
Ecology/Landscape
Many people have described Houston as having no natural beauty, and it’s both true and false. My mom grew up outside of Boston, moved to Seattle when she was a kid, and then moved here as a teenager (Coast Guard brat) and told me that when she got here, she thought Texas was the ugliest place she’d ever seen.
But you have to understand the ecology before you can appreciate it. Houston is located roughly on the confluence of three major biomes: the eastern piney woods, the post oak savannah, and the coastal prairie. The dividing line between the woods and the prairie can be said to run roughly along Buffalo Bayou, which runs through the heart of the city and becomes the Houston Ship Channel before it spills into Galveston Bay on the east side. Of course, even in their natural state, coastal prairie and post oak savannah aren’t things everyone can love. There’s no question that these parts of Texas are a bit short on the kinds of things that are obviously beautiful to most people, like mountains or rolling hills or great rivers. These are also the kinds of things that tend to survive development, at least in some form.
Our natural beauty was mostly in the vegetation and small creek bottoms, and a lot of that was bulldozed and filled in when the developers came. We tore down the woods, paved over the prairie, and channelized the bayous, until only ghosts remain of the Houston that once was. More of the natural creek bottoms remain on the heavily residential west side of town, where in most of the rest of the city they were turned into underground pipes decades ago. If you want to see what Houston was like before it was paved over, you should pay a visit to Bayou Bend, and I challenge you to claim this area has no natural beauty after picnicking under the trees along the creek bottom. But in spite of all the development, we actually are still a very heavily wooded city, so much so that city planners worry the large number of trees will seriously exacerbate the damage if—no, when—another strong hurricane hits town a la Alicia in 1983.
One of the most scenic drives in Houston is Memorial Drive from downtown out to the west side. Memorial Drive passes along Buffalo Bayou, through Memorial Park, and then through some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in town. If you have a high tolerance for pretentiousness and conspicuous consumption, it’s quite a nice drive.
In recent years, we’ve had a resurgence in construction inside Loop 610, no thanks to the repeal of the density restrictions, and we’re rapidly losing what little green space we have left. What I can’t figure out is why these idiot developers think it’s a good idea to fill those tiny remaining slivers of green space with four-story stucco apartment buildings as fast as possible. Houstonians need room to breathe, people! What are you trying to turn us into… Seattle?? Seriously, do any real Houstonians actually live in those boxes? For the rent they’re charging, I at least want to be able to stretch my legs…
Houston’s Character
The other thing you have to understand is how Houston’s history affects its current character. In addition to having a lack of immediately obvious natural beauty, Houston, like a lot of other western cities (and I do think of Houston as more of a western city than a southern city) was settled and developed by enterprising people who came west seeking opportunity… primarily, the opportunity to make a buck. This is both good and bad for Houston today. On the one hand, Houston is a burgeoning center of industry and business, a melting pot of people from every nation in the world, and due to the continuing enterprising spirit of Houston, it’s no longer solely dependent on oil and freight to prop up its economy. On the other hand, the dollar has been king in Houston for a long time, and that underlying attitude resulted in a lot of short-sighted choices that ultimately led to the sprawling civil planning disaster you see today.
You see, Texans like wide-open spaces. We always have. We also have always been big believers in individual liberties (with some surprising blind spots), free enterprise, and the sanctity of private ownership of property. This last is probably why some others here have accused Texas of having one of the smallest percentages of publicly owned property in the nation. (“Like that’s a bad thing,” a Texan would say.)
All these values collide to create the first sight most people get of Houston—vast stretches of concrete freeway, crammed with cars (each containing exactly one commuter), lined with endless tracts of retail strip centers, and liberally strewn with billboards, many of them advertising topless clubs. If nothing else, Houstonians insist on going to hell in their own handbasket. We will defend to the bitter end our “God-given” rights to ignore the greater good and make our own idiotic choices, come hell or high water. In fact, virtually every facet of Houston life can be explained by these basic guiding principles.
That’s probably why, when told to clean up its air or lose federal highway funding, Houston scoffed. “Like some fed’ral gov’mint’s gonna to tell us what to do,” we sniffed. “That Prezident Clinton can take his goldang fed’ral money and stuff it where the sun don’t shine! You cain’t stop us from buildin’ highways, Mr. Clinton, we’ll just build ‘em with our own goldang money!”
(However, those principles certainly don’t explain those four-story stucco monstrosities springing up everywhere. Those have no place in the Houston way of life. We believe in living in Katy or Kingwood and spending two hours on the freeway five days a week in our gas-guzzling SUVs! Who ever heard of Houstonians living in town, near where they work, stacked on top of each other like ants?)
Traffic
Our love for wide open spaces and individual liberties leads to a lot of freeways, a lot of commuters, a lot of traffic, and very little in the way of reliable mass transit. Mass transit would require that we give up our ability to go on a moment’s notice wherever we want, whenever we want—perish the thought! For the most part, the only people who ride the bus are those who can’t afford cars. The upside (if it is one) is that we’ve gotten used to handling heavy traffic and dealing with the constant construction. I once spoke to a resident of L.A. who had nothing but admiration for the way Houston is able to constantly rebuild its roads and freeways with relatively minimal disruption to traffic. He told me the same construction project in the City of Angels would have brought traffic to a grinding halt for weeks. Funnily enough, it’s not that often that construction brings traffic to a halt in Houston, it’s just the sheer volume of cars clogging the highways like plaque in an artery. We’re busily building more lanes of freeway even though studies have shown that more freeways just create more traffic demand. That’s the Houston way. No, I’m not bitter.
It’s not only how many cars, it’s what kind of cars that count. I bet Houston boasts more pickups trucks per capita than any other city in the nation, with the possible exception of Dallas. Between that, the recent idiotic SUV craze (don’t even get me started), and our passion for driving, I bet Houston also has the second-highest per capita gasoline consumption in the world, right behind L.A. I’m just prouder every paragraph that I live here. But you know what? In spite of all this, and in spite being the fourth largest city in the U.S., according to CNN’s website, we’re only 13th in number of hours spent in gridlock. Woo hoo!
Apparently, we’re also aggressive drivers. I never thought of it this way before—I just thought of it as the basic rules of driving. I went to Boston last year, and I would have thought surely they would be more aggressive drivers than we are, the northeast having a reputation for being pushy, aggressive people. Not so. I couldn’t believe my eyes at how unnecessarily nice drivers were to each other, and not just a few isolated instances, either. Drivers on a main street would actually slow down and wave someone waiting at a stop sign to go ahead of them. Drivers on the highway would yield to those coming up the ramps. That would never happen in Houston! I tell you what, Boston drivers. If you want to get anywhere in Houston, you better learn how to find an open spot and seize it. If you sit at a stop sign and wait for someone to wave you in, you’ve got a lo-o-ong wait ahead of you.
The funny thing is, in spite of our aggressive driving habits, we rarely honk at each other. I don’t know if it’s a laid-back southern thing, or just fear of a road rage shooting. When there’s as many cars trying to seize the open spot as there are during a typical Houston rush hour, fender benders and road rage happen. I’m one of the most nonviolent people in the world (I'm 4'11", I have to take the high road), and I’ve even found myself having fantasies of waving a gun in some idiot driver’s face.
We also consistently get noted in cycling magazines as one of the least cycle-friendly cities. We have almost no dedicated bike trails, and most of the few we do have aren’t the type that would actually get you anywhere—they’re for purely recreational riding. Instead we have “bike lanes” on some of the streets that are a complete joke, and many drivers are actively hostile toward cyclists, especially after their lanes got narrowed to make room for the bike lanes that are hardly ever used. When you combine that with the heat most of the year and the amount of exhaust fumes, I wouldn’t recommend trying to bike commute. Still, it doesn’t stop my boyfriend from doing it, but he’s a braver soul than most and a dedicated cyclist to boot.
A few tips for getting around in Houston:
(1) Have access to a car and map, since mass transit and cabs are few and far between, and what mass transit there is tends to suck. Make sure the car has a good cold AC.
(2) Be prepared to handle a lot of aggressive driving. Find the open spot and seize it.
(3) For god’s sake check for oncoming cars before you pull out into that intersection, I don’t care what color the light is! Houstonians run red lights with as much callous disregard for human life as you will ever see.
(4) Avoid driving downtown if at all possible. Downtown, all normal traffic rules are suspended. Drivers turn from middle lanes, run red lights with even more panache than they do in other parts of town, stop in the middle of the street, and so forth. Lately, half the streets are ripped up or closed off, and most of the street signs are missing. This is our local government’s attempt to make Houston more attractive and visitor friendly.
Geography
In my admittedly limited experience, Houston is one of the easiest cities to navigate. It’s bisected by three major freeways (I-45 running north-south, I-10 running east-west, and state highway 59 running southwest-northeast), and girded by two major loops, Loop 610 and Beltway 8. Those two are soon to be joined by a third, Loop 99 a.k.a. the Grand Parkway, no thanks to those $%@#! developers who think we need more freeway to provide the backbone for more urban sprawl. As if we don’t already have enough tract housing, strip malls, and gas stations.
The two historical mainstays of Houston’s economy, petroleum and the port, dominate the city’s east side, on the west edge of Galveston Bay. Predictably, this is also the less affluent and more crime-ridden side of town. It’s also the worst-smelling part of town, as your nose will clearly tell you when you drive through Pasadena, home to many of the city’s petroleum refineries. Texas is home to roughly 40% of the nation’s industry (we’re so business-friendly, you know), and a large number of those facilities are located in or near the east side of Houston.
Thanks to our infamous lack of zoning (let’s hear it one more time for an individual property owner’s right to create whatever nuisance he wants in any part of town), you can find used car dealerships and topless bars just about anywhere in town. Because Houston is such a patchwork, life is a lot different depending not just on whether you live on the west or east side of town, but literally on which street in a given neighborhood you live on. And if you live in a nice neighborhood now, there’s no guarantee that ten years from now, it won’t be dominated by intimate massage parlors and smoke shops. We like to keep things interesting in Houston.
Weather
I’ve heard it said about Texas that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute, and it’ll change. Well, I think we can all agree it’s not true of a Houston summer, where you can expect endless heat and humidity, punctuated by regular afternoon thunderstorms. Air conditioned homes and cars are absolute musts. However, there’s been some disagreement about the length of a Houston summer—some say 3-4 months, while others claim 9 months. I would say it’s consistently hot (i.e., highs above 85) from about late March to early October, so roughly 6 months. From early June to early September is high summer, when temperatures are consistently in the mid to high 90s, but rarely over 100. Of course, the constant humidity makes the heat much harder to take, since sweat doesn’t evaporate. Our weather forecasters give heat index ratings in the summer the way northern weather stations give windchill ratings in the winter. Another important thing that non-natives frequently don’t realize it that it doesn’t significantly cool off at night, either. It can easily stay well above 80 and sticky-humid for months with literally not one moment of cooler temperatures.
The rest of the year, the aphorism about Texas weather becomes true, since there is no real fall, winter, or spring—there is merely a series of cool/cold fronts which are more or less completely unpredictable. It’s easy to have balmy weather on Christmas day and a hard freeze a week later. I can’t recall ever having 90-degree temperatures in February, as one reviewer claimed, but we have had 75-degree weather in December, and it’s not even that rare. The upside is that freezes are rare, and it snows even less. The downside is that one freeze makes everyone crazy and brings the city to a screeching (or sliding) halt.
For example, this year, October 15 was our first official day of jacket weather in the morning... but by mid-day it was shorts and shirt sleeves again, with an afternoon high around 80.
Don’t forget that we’re the flood capital of the U.S.—one of the few good reasons to buy an SUV. The streets act as the city’s secondary drainage system, and when that happens, I find myself thinking a couple extra inches of road clearance wouldn’t be a bad thing. Flood insurance is a must, and don’t let any real estate agent tell you otherwise. The so-called flood plain maps they use for that purpose are years, if not decades, out of date, and the flood plain gets higher every year as we continue to pave over our green space. Remember all that construction I mentioned? Well, I’ve seen precious few flood retention ponds to go with it. When Tropical Storm Allison hit in 2001, it was the worst flooding Houston had ever seen—properties that had never flooded in living memory were underwater (my then-apartment was one of them), and I believe it’s only going to get worse.
Every region of the country has some kind of natural disaster that’s peculiar to that area, and of which the natives are particularly proud of their ability to withstand. Along the Pacific, it’s earthquakes, and in New England I guess it’s nor’easters. Here, we have hurricanes, which certainly are not unique to this area, but they’re the main source of our natural disasters. The good thing about hurricanes is that you generally see them coming in advance, and the weather forecasters are fairly good about predicting roughly where they’ll make landfall. Plus, they only threaten for about 5 months of the year. Frankly, I’m a lot more scared of earthquakes and tornadoes then I am of hurricanes.
Wildlife
Discussions of Houston wildlife always include the mosquito and the tree roach, but wouldn’t be complete without the cicada and the fire ant. The fire ant is imported from South America, now endemic to the southeastern U.S., and worse than mosquitoes and roaches put together, IMO. If you’ve never been bitten by a fire ant, think stinging nettle with a nasty welt that fills with pus and lasts for a week or more. The worst part is, there’s never just one of the little buggers, and their favorite habitat is carefully mowed lawns where liberal use of pesticides has killed off all the less hardy (and considerably less offensive) native ants that might otherwise compete with them. I guess the upside is that unlike mosquitoes, fire ants aren’t known to carry deadly diseases like St. Louis encephalitis or West Nile virus.
And summer just wouldn’t be summer without the drowsy drone of cicadas, would it? Down here, we don’t have the famous 13 and 17 year cicadas—we have them every summer, though not in insane numbers like the cyclic cicadas. Fortunately, unlike well-behaved children, they’re generally heard and not seen. As you probably know if it’s ever happened to you, it’s not nice to have one of North America’s largest insects buzz you in the face.
Of course folks always talk about the insect life, but did you know that the Texas gulf coast also has one of the highest migratory bird populations in the U.S? In the spring and fall, the coastal flats south, southwest, and southeast of town become a birdwatcher’s paradise. During the winter migration, over 200 species have been recorded in a day, and you can see as many as 100 species on an average day. You can catch some additions to your life list at Anahuac Wildlife Refuge, Brazoria Wildlife Refuge, San Bernard Wildlife Refuge, and McFaddin Wildlife Refuge, all 2 hours or less from Houston.
People
I’m told Houston is a melting-pot, a cosmopolitan city where people of every color and creed live together in perfect harmony and whatnot. Well, you can sure as heck get food from just about every country on earth here. I don’t know about perfect harmony, but I can say we seem to get along all right. I’ve certainly never seen any news stories about race riots here like in some other cities, and I’ve had virtually nothing but positive experiences with people of ethnic backgrounds other than my own.
I think it’s the heat as much as anything else that contributes to the reputation of Southerners for having a relaxed, laid-back, let’s-get-along attitude. Now according to my friend from Baton Rouge, Houston is definitely not a southern city—she claims southern accent and southern culture officially stop at Beaumont. Even though I agree Houston’s not truly a southern city, we have a lot of that southern attitude. It’s a bit different from the west coast laid-back—it’s not “chill out, man,” it’s more like, “y’all set a while and have some iced tea.” I figure it’s just too darn hot for that race riot crap—we’re all busy eating out and taking naps.
We’re also friendly—for a big city. A lot of my friends in college who had come here from other parts of the country were very surprised at how often complete strangers acknowledge you on the street with a nod, smile, or even a hello. And no, we really don’t say “howdy” that often.
The Hispanic element is far more predominant here than in some other parts of the country, and if you don’t know any Spanish when you get here, I guarantee you’ll pick up at least a few words pretty darn quick. If nothing else, you’ll learn the words for “save” and “sale” from the billboards. We also have several thriving chinatown areas and I guess what you would call Little Vietnam for lack of a better word. My mom’s neighborhood is very mixed white and Hispanic, and my own apartment complex is a mix of black and white with a fairly strong Indian presence.
Crime
You know, any big city has crime. It’s part of the territory. But I’ve never seen or heard anything that leads me to believe it’s any worse here than in any other comparably large city, and it may be substantially lower. I’ve heard crime downtown has significantly decreased in recent years, and with all the development, it certainly feels safer to walk the downtown streets at nearly any time of day or night than it used to. Also, the recent craze in loft apartments (I’ll never understand why a person should pay more money for an apartment without walls) means more people are living downtown these days. What a concept. Who would have thought that people would actually live in downtown Houston?
I’ve resided on the near west side for 10+ years, and I’ve not only never had my car broken into, I’ve even occasionally forgotten to lock the car doors overnight, and come out in the morning to find to my surprise that nothing has been taken! But yes, I have had different experiences in different parts of town. My mom lives in the Heights, a historic neighborhood just northwest of downtown that is particularly subject to that patchwork quality I mentioned, and although her car has never been actively broken into at her house, one night we forgot to lock it and something was missing in the morning (I forget what it was, but it was something small that was left in the car). It wasn’t the theft itself that was unsettling, it was the fact that it happened on the one night we left it unlocked, which suggested to me there are people wandering the streets nightly looking for the chance to steal something, no matter how small.
But again, I have the privilege of living in a pretty nice neighborhood on the nicer side of town. Others who have written here have reported much worse problems, and I guess it comes down to that patchwork quality again—it really depends what part of town you’re in.
Air Quality
Yes, it’s true that we have some of the worst air pollution in the nation in certain categories. I haven’t looked at the numbers in a while, but I remember for a few years we kept jostling with LA for the worst. What’s actually surprising to me, considering the amount of petrochemical industry along the gulf coast, is that it isn’t worse than it is. And I think air quality in most of the major cities in the US, including Houston, has improved in the 20-odd years since the Clean Air Act was passed, even weak and full of holes as it is.
Houston has heavy, humid air that feels like a hot, wet blanket smothering you during the summer months, and it’s naturally loaded with pollen and mold spores during most of the year. I was once in a doctor’s office, and there was a pollen chart on the wall comparing pollen levels in different cities throughout the year. Houston was the second worst, with high pollen of various types for 11 months of the year, which makes sense since it’s a sub-tropical to semi-tropical climate here. If memory serves me right, Honolulu was the worst, being truly tropical. So even before you add manmade chemicals to the mix, Houston is already an asthmatic’s nightmare.
Another factor that makes Houston’s smog situation bad is simply its natural climate. Photochemical smog is formed by heat and sunlight reacting with chemicals in the atmosphere, and I think we’ve covered the fact that Houston’s hot. Our worst smog-forming season is noticeably longer than in more northern cities, and it’s frequently punctuated by ozone alerts warning those with respiratory ailments to avoid outdoor activities. How does this affect the average person? It doesn’t really, except aesthetically. No, it’s not nice to be told that we live in one of the most polluted cities in the nation. And it’s certainly not nice to look over to the horizon and see, where the sky approaches the earth, a faint grayish brownish haze and know we’re all breathing that. But as a rule of thumb, the stuff you can see is the least of your worries—it’s what you can’t see that’s more likely to make you sick. It certainly doesn’t seem to stop Houstonians from hitting the Memorial Park jogging trail in the thousands, even on the hottest summer afternoons. I will say that I’ve had a lifelong genetic problem with headaches, and they became noticeably worse in 1990 when I started commuting into town from the suburbs. But that was the same year I started college, and had plenty of lifestyle changes that could have made the headaches worse as well, and I’ve never been able to convince even myself that it was definitely the pollution.
Part II: 20 More Things to See and Do in Houston
Mark Stevens’ list of the Top 20 things to do in Houston was pretty good, but he missed a few teeny things, which I intend to rectify right now, including plenty of links where you can get the whole scoop.
1. The Galleria: The premiere shopping destination in Houston, the nation’s fifth largest shopping mall is located just off West Loop 610 about 15 miles directly west of downtown, and the district around it has grown into Houston’s second downtown, a.k.a. “uptown” or just the Galleria area, featuring some of Houston’s best shopping and restaurants. There are plenty of free parking garages and plenty of opportunities to spend beaucoup bucks.
www.galleriahouston.com.
2. Bayou Bend: The stately old mansion of famed Houston socialite Ima Hogg, located in the heart of Houston’s most exclusive neighborhood, is now a public museum operated by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, featuring a history of American furnishings and interior décor personally selected by Miss Hogg. The mansion sits on 14 acres of formal gardens and woodland and creek bottom maintained in its natural state, where you can discover the natural beauty that has been lost in much of Houston. You’ll hardly believe you’re still in the heart of the city. http://www.mfah.org/bayoubend/
3. Moody Gardens: So it’s not exactly in Houston, but Moody Gardens is worth the hour drive down to Galveston. Since it’s a day trip by itself, it’s hardly fair to lump it in with the rest of Galveston Island. The best features are the Rain Forest Pyramid, a 10-story glass pyramid filled with tropical plants, birds, and fish from around the world, and the Aquarium Pyramid, one of the world’s largest aquariums, featuring a penguin exhibit, a huge tropical reef exhibit, and a massive Caribbean exhibit complete with sharks, stingrays, eels and sea turtles. Moody Gardens also includes the Discovery Pyramid, which is more kid-oriented, Palm Beach (an artificial beach for those who don’t take to Galveston’s naturally brown sands and waters), an IMAX theater, rides on an old-fashioned paddle-wheel boat, and a posh hotel and convention center. Located on the bay side of the island, the triple pyramids are now one of the most eye-catching sights as you enter the island via I-45.
www.moodygardens.com.
4. Wortham Center: Home to the Houston Grand Opera, the nation's fifth-largest opera company and the only one to have won a Grammy, Tony, and Emmy, and home of the Houston Ballet, considered one of the nation's best ballet companies.
www.houstongrandopera.org
www.houstonballet.org
www.houstontheaterdistrict.org
5. Houston Symphony at Jones Hall: Fortunately, the musicians’ strike is over, and we can all enjoy a night at the symphony again, just in time for the new season!
www.houstonsymphony.com
www.houstontheaterdistrict.org
6. Alley Theatre: Home to one of the nation's oldest resident theater companies, the Alley is also Houston’s most well-known playhouse, featuring an eclectic mix of broadway shows, classic plays, and more funky fare. www.alleytheatre.org
www.houstontheaterdistrict.org
7. The Richmond Strip: If the Museum District and the Theatre District are Houston’s two great cultural centers, this is the third! If you want to party down, Richmond Avenue just outside the West Loop is the place to do it. The downtown nightclub scene is trendier these days, but for sheer volume of alcohol and music decibels, you can’t beat the nightclubs along Richmond.
8. The Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park: I officially hate baseball, and I hate the trend in corporate naming. I wish it could still be called The Ballpark at Union Station, which was its original name before they managed to sell off the naming rights to Enron. Of course, after that fiasco, it got renamed again, and now we have Minute Maid Park. I also think it’s sheer folly to build a retractable roof stadium in Houston for a sport that’s played mostly during the summer, when it’s generally too darn hot to open the roof. But even I went to at least one game here, just so I could say I had been. They don’t open the roof at all for afternoon games, and for night games, they open it about the 7th inning. Oog. Money well spent, eh?
www.astros.com
http://glasssteelandstone.com/US/TX/HoustonMinuteMaidPark.html
9. The Houston Rockets, Comets, and Aeros at Toyota Center: If you’re here in the summer, I highly recommend taking in a Comets game—you can get tickets as low as $8 in the nosebleed seats, so the whole family can go, and it’s a very family-friendly event and a good chance to get out of the heat. Toyota Center, located downtown, is the team’s brand new home—it opens in just a few days, so I haven’t been yet, but it’s supposedly very posh. Unfortunately, no more free parking like we had at the old Compaq Center (which will always be The Summit to the natives).
www.houstoncomets.com
www.houstontoyotacenter.com.
10. The Houston Texans at Reliant Stadium: Built next door to the Astrodome, and again with the retractable roof. At least this time it’s for a sport played in the winter, Houston’s nice season. I haven’t been to a game and I probably won’t go, since my dislike for football is surpassed only by my dislike for baseball. Hint- if you do get tickets, don’t try to park at the stadium; take a Metro shuttle from an outlying lot instead.
www.houstontexans.com
http://glasssteelandstone.com/US/TX/HoustonReliantStadium.html
11. The Texas Medical Center: Not exactly a tourist destination, but a destination nonetheless. Thought by some to be the largest medical center in the world. If the Galleria is Houston’s second downtown, this is the third downtown, and it’s just as heavily traveled. It’s a complete pain to drive through, but a new light rail line is being built running from downtown, through midtown, the museum district, past Hermann Park, Rice University, and the Med Center, all the way down to the Astrodome and Reliant Stadium. This line should bring this extremely vibrant corridor of Houston together and make it much easier to get around. http://www.tmc.edu/
12. Rice University: Located across the street from the Med Center, and just down the road a pace from Hermann Park and the Museum District, Rice is one of the prettiest campuses around, featuring classic ivy league architecture, and certainly my favorite place in town, considering it’s my alma mater. Definitely worth wandering around just for the heck of it, and the Rice Media Center is always showing wacky films. You can also stop by the small Rice Art Gallery in Sewall Hall. www.rice.edu
13. University of Houston: The UH campus is quite a bit bigger than Rice, and also a very pleasant place for a stroll. Its campus is more park-like than Rice, featuring many fountains and beautifully landscaped lawns and plazas, and many of the buildings have more modern architecture.
www.uh.edu/
13. Downtown Tunnels: These always get mentioned, but I don’t think of them as a tourist destination-- they’re more just a place for busy downtownies to get out of the heat and exhaust fumes on the streets. They’re filled with small delis, coffee shops, and most everything else a downtown worker might need during the day, and during lunch hour, they swarm with rushing workers frantic to get lunch. Be ready to dodge power walkers.
http://www.treebeards.com/location/mpdttunn.html
14. Bayou City Art Festival: held twice a year, the art festival is located in Memorial Park in the spring and Tranquility Park (downtown) in the fall, and features 300 artists, both local and national, showing their original works. Plenty of music, food and beverages are also on hand, as well as activities for the kids.
http://www.bayoucityartfestival.com/
15. Contemporary Arts Museum: Located across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, CAM is free—yes, free! www.camh.org
16. Beer Can House: Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like—a house covered from top to bottom in flattened beer cans—roughly 39,000 of them. Houstonian John Milkovisch created it over 18 years as a hobby, and after he died his wife Mary maintained it and welcomed visitors. Since she passed away, the property was purchased by the Orange show Foundation, and they are in the process of turning it into a public museum with space for traveling folk art exhibitions. It’s not open yet, but you can always drive by and see it. http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/TXHOUbeer.html
17. Williams Tower and Waterwall: (f.k.a. Transco Tower) By some standards it’s considered the tallest building in the world that’s not located in a Central Business District. Located in the Galleria, the tower includes an observation deck on the 51st floor and a 3-acre adjacent park featuring the famous Waterwall, a favorite haunt for young couples in love and photo-seeking families. According to the site below, the observation deck is currently closed, probably due to the suicide last year. http://glasssteelandstone.com/US/TX/HoustonWilliamsTower.html
18. Chase Tower: (f.k.a. Texas Commerce Tower) Houston’s actual tallest building, it’s 75 stories with a free observation deck on the 60th floor, accessible by express elevator. Since Williams Tower's observation deck is currently closed, you can drop by here while you're checking out the tunnels and get an even better panoramic view of the city. http://glasssteelandstone.com/US/TX/HoustonChaseTower.html
19. Houston International Festival: In keeping with Houston’s (somewhat secret) reputation as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city, Houston hosts an annual international festival, spotlighting a different culture each year. Lots of food, music, and fun. www.ifest.org
20. Restaurants, restaurants, and more restaurants! Yes, I’m told Houston has the highest per capita restaurant density in the nation. (Although apparently a lot of cities make that claim to fame. Maybe some fact rat can look it up and report back.) In fact, in a highly publicized survey, Men’s Fitness Magazine ranked Houston the “fattest” city in the U.S. several years running. The rating has nothing to do with actual weight, but is based on the ratio of restaurants to fitness opportunities, such as parks, bike trails, and running trails. Since we have so many restaurants, and we rank pretty low on outdoor fitness opportunities, of course we win every time. Only trouble is, with so many restaurants, there's a chronic shortage of quality waitstaff, and all but the top tier restaurants have to settle for hiring any clod off the street who can carry a tray, and service at the mid to budget level restaurants tends toward the abysmal. That, and so many Houstonians eat out, there's a good chance your choice eatery will have an hour or more wait for a table on a Friday night.
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Mark included these items on his list, but I had already written blurbs on them and I didn’t want to throw them out, so here’s a little more detail:
Astroworld: One of the Six Flags theme parks, located across the freeway from the Astrodome complex. Home of the Texas Cyclone, the state’s oldest and tallest wood roller coaster. The fear that it may collapse at any moment is part of the thrill. Also home of the Dungeon Drop (a 230-foot free-fall) and more kinds of roller coaster-type rides than you can shake a stick it, including one that’s totally in the dark, one in which you ride backwards and suspended from the track, one in which you ride hanging from the track with your feet flying free in the air, one you ride standing up, and a couple in which you get sent through a loop or a barrel roll both forwards and backwards at high speed. Can you tell I’m a coaster junkie? www.sixflagsastroworld.com.
Waterworld: Not just a bad movie starring Kevin Costner. Located adjacent to Astroworld, Waterworld used to be a separate park, but in recent years, they’ve combined them into one $40 admission. (Hint: never pay full price for an Astroworld ticket. Go to any Kroger courtesy booth and buy them for half off.) Astroworld proper features four rides that get you wet anyway, so you might as well wear your swimsuit and go all the way. The perfect way to cool off on hot Houston summer day, featuring a huge wave pool, a free fall water slide, speed slide, tube slides, and a lazy river where you can relax on an inner tube. (Actually, I have a certain fondness for the movie Waterworld, since it was my first date with Carl just over 8 years ago.)
Galveston Beaches: Yeah, yeah, so they’re not the world’s most beautiful beaches, but they’re ours, and they’re close. The water tends to be high in sediment, and due to the large amounts of dark brown seaweed in this part of the Gulf, the sand tends toward brown rather than white. On top of that, thanks to natural changes to the Mississipi delta over the last 500 or so years, most of Galveston’s beaches have been in a constant state of erosion for all of living memory. Part of the erosion control plan includes dumping massive amounts of new sand on the beach, and it’s not the prettiest stuff in the world, either. East Beach and Stewart Beach are the party beaches, and the pocket parks at the west end tend to be more family-oriented, but also more remote. Jellyfish can be a big problem in certain seasons. If you see a lot of dead jellyfish on the beach, I’d advise staying out of the water. I think complaints about pollution are overrated—I wouldn’t swim in the Ship Channel, and probably not in the upper bay, but out on the coast, I don’t think it’s any worse than anywhere else. When I was a kid, oil spills were a common problem, but I haven’t seen any tar on the beaches in years.
www.galveston.com.
Downtown Theatre District: It’s been called the largest theatre district outside New York city. The Alley Theatre, Jones Hall, Wortham Opera Center, Bayou Place, and the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts are all located in a few blocks on the northeast side of downtown, and make up one of Houston’s two main cultural centers. Bayou Place includes both the Angelika Film Center, which shows a variety of eclectic and arty films, and Verizon Theatre, which hosts smaller musical acts. The number of good nightclubs and restaurants in the area make it a great destination even if you don’t have show tickets.
www.houstontheaterdistrict.org
Midtown Museum District: Houston’s second great cultural center, just a few miles southwest of downtown along Main and Fannin Streets, features the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Museum of Natural Science (including the Burke-Baker Planetarium and Cockrell Butterfly Center), the Menil Collection, and the Children’s Museum. www.houstonmuseumdistrict.org
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Mar - May
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Member: Tesseract
Location: The Fourth Dimension
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