In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
Right next to the office towers of the CBD is another world of back alleys, lined with older, smaller buildings, some six stories tall, some only one. These are not the historic Hutongs — this land was not even part of the city 50 years ago. But they retain some of the same spirit. The roads are narrow. Gates open onto walled courtyards. The stores are small. The buildings feel lived in. Cars, bikes, mopeds, and pedestrians mix freely. There’s a remarkable urban life here, sometimes directly across the street from the granite drives and manicured lawns of office towers.
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In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, writers Diana and Steven Wolfe stroll from their first Houston residence, a house in the Heights at 920 Ridge where they lived together thirteen years ago. Turning left onto Julian Street, they pass under the oaks and crepe myrtles to Bayland Street, where “if you look down to your right the streets just become this whole cathedral of overhanging oaks that are like protective Heights spirits, and they make it feel beautifully warm and welcoming.”
Listen by clicking on the link below:
Oaks and Crepe Myrtles in the Heights (mp3, 12 MB) by Steven and Diana Wolfe
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First Ward, photographs by Regina Agu
In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, artist Regina Agu takes us along for her daily wonder-filled walk in the First Ward. As a resident at Elder Street Lofts, she excavates the spiritual from this old graveyard and mental hospital site, appreciates nature’s conquering of an abandoned building, and wonders at the soundscapes of our city’s massive freeways. As you walk with her you’ll weave through history, the life cycle of silkworms, and growth in Urban Harvest’s First Ward Community Garden. Listen by clicking on the link below:
Layered Histories: A Stroll Through First Ward (mp3, 10.7 MB)
by Regina Agu
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Greenway Plaza, 1980. Photos courtesy Fondren Library Woodson Research Center and Rachel Dewane.
OffCite presents the eleventh submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Aaron Carpenter. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
In his frustratingly insightful text After the City, Lars Lerup argues that it is all the in-between places that define Houston geography. And seemingly most important (or most glaring) of them all — even above those power line ranges, freeways, and underpasses — is parking, whether it be in lot or garage form. So is it “unexpected” for a lifelong Houstonian to have the Greenway Plaza parking garage pop into his head as a place where he feels a most personal connection to the city? I think it deserves a real tribute. There’s a lot of Houston here.
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Photo from the Texas Hawking Association
OffCite presents the tenth submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Camilo Parra. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
The Trails of Memorial Park
The coral snake tentatively treads in the leaves decaying
colors camouflage her yellow bands,
a warm winter day unusual to see her.
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This photograph was not manipulated. The motorcycle really is that high off the ground.
My Uncle Arnie Cooper is cool like you and I will never be. His Facebook vacation photos eschew Disneyland for backcountry America: here his family coasts through the red rock arches of Bryce Canyon on bikes, there they huddle inside a tent deep in the High Uintahs on a 20° night, two days into a weeklong adventure.
I have always wanted to be a smidgeon more like him, so I was all ears last summer when I heard him explaining his newest hobby over breakfast—geocaching.
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Outside the Houston Fixed Gear party a young man hangs a bicycle, with gears, on a tree. All photos Raj Mankad.
When a young man hung his bicycle from a tree branch near the intersection of Fairview and Dunlavy, the crowd cheered. Upwards of 200 youths had come Friday January 28—on foot, on two wheels, but very few by car—for the opening of Houston Fixed Gear’s new location. What was it that made the one guy hoist his bike up and hang it as if it were a flag? On a night that the world will remember for the thousands of people who risked their lives for freedom in Cairo’s Liberation Square, did his act and the ensuing cheers celebrate anything beyond fashion and fun? Is it the appropriation of gritty bike messenger culture? Is it just hipsters marking their territory?
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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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