New archival wing reading garden of Julia Ideson Building.
OffCite presents the seventh submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Wendy Heger, Assistant Director for Planning & Facilities for the Houston Public Library system. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
A little-known oasis in downtown is the recently-completed Outdoor Reading Room at the corner of Smith and Lamar, part of the Julia Ideson Building which houses the Houston Metropolitan Research Center. Graceful palm trees complement the Spanish Plateresque architecture framing the courtyard. Seated on a chair next to a historic bubbling wishing well, visitors are slightly elevated above adjacent public sidewalks, allowing peaceful reading or contemplation in the midst of a busy downtown landscape.
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The Beer Can House. All images courtesy of the Orange Show.
OffCite presents the sixth submission by a commenter to the original Unexpected City challenge post. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
My favorite place to take out of town guests is the Beer Can House at 222 Malone. Begun in 1968 by the creator John Milkovisch, the house is a great example of dedication and whimsy. Walking up to the house, you can see the extensive number of beer cans that were used to cover the house. If the wind is blowing you can hear the tinkling of the wind chimes that were created with the tops of the beer cans. As you stroll down the driveway, there are quirky objects like marbles placed in the concrete.
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OffCite presents the fifth submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Bart Truxillo. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
I purchased the Magnolia Brewery Building in the late 1960s from a bank trust at a time when no one thought old buildings in Houston were good. The bank thought the building was a teardown. Located at 715 Franklin Street near Market Square, it had been vacant for some years and what we today call street people were occupying it. I loved the architecture and the history of the building. It was the home of the Houston Ice and Brewing Co. at the turn of the last century, one of the largest businesses at the time, which produced Magnolia Beer, Richelieu Beer, and, the most popular, Southern Select.
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Three ponds at Sheldon State Park. All photographs by Theresa Keefe and Keith Koski.
OffCite presents the fourth submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Theresa Keefe. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
Sheldon State Park is a wonderfully unexpected place in Houston. It is located in east Houston, wedged in the corner where 90 comes off the Beltway. I would say no more than an hour’s drive from anywhere in Houston.
My partner and I have driven past the treeless pipe yards along 90 numerous times but never noticed the signs for the State Park. We went to the part that was once an old fishery.
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OffCite presents the third submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by John Bryant. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
This train car sat between the old “Success Rice” building and Winter Street Studios on the Washington Street Corridor, which is part of Houston’s historic First Ward.
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In May 2010, OffCite published A Slice of Houston, an analysis of the census tracts lining Bellaire Boulevard. Susan Rogers, the Director of University of Houston’s Community Design Resource Center, presented data showing an astonishing level of international diversity along Bellaire between Loop 610 and Beltway 8 that drops off to near total native-born homogeneity inside the Loop 610. In this post, Rogers updates her analysis:
Early this year,\ I graphed median household income and place of birth for all of the census tracts along Bellaire/Holcombe from Main Street in the Medical Center, west to Highway 6. Recently, updated 2009 small area data has become available from the American Community Survey. The graph below shows Median Household Income along the Bellaire corridor in both 2000 and 2009.
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Aerial image of the San Jacinto monument in its industrial context. Photo by baldheretic.
OffCite presents the next submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Cite editor Raj Mankad. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
Anyone who has attended the fourth grade in Texas knows there is no place more central to the state’s history than the San Jacinto battleground. The monument there was designed by Alfred Finn, also the architect of Houston City Hall. At 570 feet, the obelisk is taller than the Washington Monument. As architectural historian Stephen Fox noted in his Houston Architectural Guide, the “heroic scale,” “radical symmetry,” and the “ceremonial conception of public life” are “so disconnected from the landscape in which it stands…that the monument seems meant for some other place, some other culture, and to have ended up here by mistake.” That disconnect is why I think the site makes for a wonderful visit and a prime example of the Unexpected City.
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Houston might let you gawk at all its contradiction and complexity, but it doesn’t exactly provide an easy education for why it looks the way it does. Even if one’s adolescence consisted of breakfast with the Hobbys and dinners with the Menils, odds are—with only that human mind at your disposal—you would still be unable to answer why all the bayous and highways and neighborhoods turned out the way they did. But Progrowth Politics: Change and Governance in the City of Houston tries anwering those questions. Though the book ends with the reign of Bob Lanier, it’s still a wonderfully definitive explanation of the city’s development.
The duo is Robert Thomas and Richard Murray. They are well-credentialed: the former was then director of the program in Public Administration at UH, and the later is now director of the Institute of Public Policy at UH. The book is part of a series by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, designed to promote “better understanding of the nature and working of the American system of democratic government, particularly in its political, economic, and social aspects.” We’re in the company of New York, London, Toronto, Stockholm, Montreal, Winnipeg, Indianapolis, and Leningrad, and have a place among them because we were a “unique case study” in a city where “it no longer seems appropriate to focus government intervention primarily on economic development alone, while ignoring societal ills and social objectives.”
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OffCite presents the first submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by bicyclist Peter Wang. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
I found a treasure along the eastern and southern edges of the Addicks Reservoir as I sought a way to ride my bicycle to work from Cy-Fair to Westchase.
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A man fishes on the Houston Ship Channel at the site of the San Jacinto monument. Photograph by Hester & Hardaway.
Houston has its share of famous buildings like Mies van der Rohe’s addition to The Musuem of Fine Arts, Houston and Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection. While places like these garner global acclaim, it is often Houston’s unexpected places—from the warehouses surrounding downtown to old-school barbershops to open fields, and the many places in between—that give Houston its spark. Other times, the unexpected allure of Houston exists in a personal experience of a well-known place—like the sensation of wondrous disorientation as you walk into the slanted-glass entrance of Philip Johnson’s Pennzoil Place. Houstonians are often walking libraries of beloved places that may go unseen by other passersby.
It is these places and their accompanying experiences that the Rice Design Alliance wants to know about. This month, we are launching a campaign entitled “Unexpected City” that is asking Houstonians, or anyone who wants to participate, to submit their favorite location in the city. Submissions will be published here on Offcite. In addition to submissions, Katie Plocheck and others will also be visiting many of the locations and documenting the time spent there on Offcite.org. Our expectation is that we can have an exhibition of places at the end of the year, and one day, a publication.
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