A while back I penned a rant about rising rent in Montrose, and how the place was losing something of its essence. Turns out I was participating in a Houston tradition with roots as deep in the mire of time as Ronald Reagan's first months in office.

Image: Keith Dotson

Writing about a murder in Houston City magazine, way back in November 1980, Dick Reavis portrayed a transitional Montrose in the following elegiac terms:

The neighborhood...was the kind of place where young friends could drop in on each other unnanounced and share meals, ideas, drugs, even sex.

As the Seventies meandered toward the Eighties, Montrose changed. Some of the youth culture crowd bought real estate and turned wrecks that had housed hippie communes into $100,000 and $200,000 redos. Rents went up. Many erstwhile Montrose street people moved away to take mundane jobs in East Texas towns such as Tyler, Jacksonville and Palestine. Of the hard core that remained in Houston, many left Montrose for cheaper digs in neighborhoods such as the Binz or the Heights, while others retreated to the few slumlike niches within Montrose. As had happened in New York's Greenwich Village a generation earlier, gays and the youth culture began to set the tone for Montrose, culturally and politically. Neighborhood balladeers moved to the suburbs of Bellaire and Meyerland. Drug dealers became hip capitalists and opened restaurants and clubs. A co-founder of Space City!, a Montrose-based underground newspaper of the Sixties, became a public relations man. Some of those who had experienced the rush time the Sixties imparted—the exhilaration of moving faster than events, of seeming to change the world—tried to recapture the sensation through drugs or drinking binges or living dangerously outside the law. But it was never the same. The younger crowd paid its ritual visits to Montrose clubs and scenes, but they didn't know the old faces that tried to blend in as the avant-garde ambience drifted from rock to new-wave and punk.

So other than the music styles, and the fact that few exiles are seduced today by the siren call of Palestine, Texas, Montrose then was not much different from today. But then two years later -- in 1982 -- the price of oil tanked. Houston's economy imploded, even in Montrose, which was also beset in horrific fashion by the AIDS epidemic. Crack cocaine helped spawn a citywide crime wave, one exacerbated by the poor economy.  Property values plummeted, rents settled back to earth, and Montrose's reign as Houston's Bohemia continued for another decade or two.

But at what cost? Plague, addiction, and the worst economic times Houston has ever known outside of the Civil War years and the Great Depression.

It appears that in a healthy, wealthy Houston, Montrose would inevitably become one of its most expensive districts, and maybe this time it will stay that way. As Bruce Hornsby and the Range put it...  

If not so well-written as Sig Byrd's Houston, Jesse Ziegler's Wave of the Gulf is as vital a key to understanding local history. Where Byrd was noirish, observational, and even fly-on-the-wall in style, Ziegler's 1937 work is memoirish and gently opinionated. Ziegler was in his '80s when Wave—subtitled "Ziegler's Scrapbook of the Texas Gulf Coast Country—was published by San Antonio's Naylor Company in 1937. The book looks back as far as Ziegler can remember—all the way back to his antebellum childhood in Galveston, where he was born to German immigrants in 1857.

Ziegler moved to Houston as a 26-year-old man and was the oldest man in the Texas cotton industry by the time of Wave's publication. The book is divided into four sections: "Houston," "Tales of the Coast Country," "Historical Sketches," and "Biographical Sketches," and the Houston section is easily the best. (The book badly needed editing: Ziegler can get repetitive, and it is rife with misspellings and sports more than a couple historical inaccuracies.)

His chapter on Quality Hill -- "Houston's first residential district of the 'socially elite'"—is a true standout, showing once again that the more things change the more they stay they same, more so in Houston than anywhere else on earth.

Image: Google Maps

Quality Hill is/was the shaded area.

One fine day, Ziegler was walking down Main Street near Franklin when he was picked up by a fellow octogenarian driving "a fine large sedan of the latest model." Ziegler's old friend enthusiastically exclaimed that it was "just the morning for an exhilerating [sic] drive," so Ziegler eased himself in to his friend's "sleek-looking conveyance" and they steered towards what remained of Quality Hill.

You get the impression that at one time, Quality Hill was every bit as grand as Galveston's East End or Silk Stocking District, a parade of fine old Victorian and even a few French Quarter–ish homes on streets shaded by mighty oaks. Those days were long-gone, even by 1938.

Here's Ziegler remembering the Longcope home on Chenevert, which served for a time as the HQ for Houston's first cycling club after the death of its original owner, a retired steamboat captain.

 "(C)onstructed of beautiful white brick, ornamented with green shutters after the fashion of the times. It boasted also of fancy-worked, black iron railings, after the old Spanish or French styles. In its palmy days the residence stood out like a thing of beauty. Alas for the working of time! It presents now a dilapidated appearance, going slowly to ruin, and is now occupied as a Mexican rooming-house of the cheaper type."

Ziegler and friend drive down Rusk past the former "homeside" [sic] of Judge Peter Gray and that of William Baker, which served as General Bankhead Magrudger's Confederate HQ during the Civil War. Both, apparently, were already gone by 1938.

Things get sadder still when their journey takes them further along Rusk and then up McKinney.

"I recalled distinctly that in the city's earlier years those thoroughfares had been lined on either side with magnificent oaks, the towering branches of which spread across the street until they almost intermingled and it was a stirring sight to drive under the bower thus created. With the coming of the telephone and light wires, they were cut away, giving way to a progressive municipality. Yet I could not but entertain a twinge of regret at the thought of their passing."

Four more grand homes met the wrecking ball to make way for the old Post Office downtown, and now that post office's modern successor seems doomed to meet the same fate. At Caroline and Rusk there once stood the "attractive home" of rail baron Colonel Charles Dillingham, and at San Jacinto and Rusk, the "charming home of William D. Cleveland Sr."

"Alas!" sighed Ziegler. Dillingham's homesite was now a parking lot and hot-dog stand, "while that of Mr. Cleveland boasts only a parking lot." Around the corner, another grand mansion turned parking lot at the old Hutcheson place. The two men drove up Main, where "all of the magnificent home of yesteryear's Main Street are gone." A man named E.P. Hill tried to deed his old homestead to the city for use as a park, which, Ziegler wrote, "would have constituted a much needed and beautiful area." After all, a man named Captain Darling had brought back several pocketsful of acorns from the Great Oak that stood near the first capitol of Texas in Columbia and planted them long ago. By 1938, only one of these immense oaks still stood, the transfer of Hill's deed was never effected, and what could have been a downtown park was instead covered with "outmoded apartment houses and business buildings."  

(So, so Houston.)

Down Main away from town stood a home that once belonged to Jesse Jones's aunt. It was "falling into decay." Captain James A. Baker's home in the 1400 block of Main? Gone, the block "filled with business buildings." "The site of the Fox home is now occupied by a prosaic appearing drugstore and other commercial buildings," Ziegler continues, after mentioning four other demolished mansions in passing. And he's not done yet: "The Major Dickson home and the James E. Masterson home have given way to a block of business houses."

Another grand home at Hadley and Milam had become a boarding house, and then we come to the former home of T.W. House at McKinney and Lamar: "It was in its day an imposing structure with the entire block covered with stately palms, neatly maintained. Until its recent demolition to make way for a used car lot, the property served as headquarters for housing Federal Transients."

The home of James Bute sported grounds and fountains comprising one of the show places of Houston. "It too has given way to the inevitable parking lot," Ziegler wrote. The James T.D. Wilson place had equally gorgeous grounds—a shangri-la of profuse flowers and shady nooks." They were bulldozed to make way for the Rice Hotel's laundry.

At last their drive came to a merciful end.

"Memories, as some writer has suggested, make life beautiful; sometimes forgetfulness alone makes it possible," wrote Ziegler. "This is a truth. The enjoyable drive—[ED: Enjoyable?]—around parts of Old Houston brought me to a realization that where we had our boyhood playgrounds, our baseball park and circus grounds—on old Bremond Square where the Lamar and Lamar Annex Hotels now stand—is now the home of cold stone and steel converted into modern sky-scrapers. Progress stops at nothing. 'The play stops at nothing...the show must go on.'"

Today, the cold stone modern sky-scraping Lamar and Lamar Annex are also gone. And both Sig Byrd's and Jesse Ziegler's essential books are many decades out of print.

This is the city that forgets even its nostalgia. 

Late last year, James Glassman, blogger par deluxe of all local arcana at Houstorian, approached his younger counterpart Dena Yanowski (who is also a crafter) with a commission.

Glassman was already a fan of Yanowski's hand-made Astrodome-shaped Christmas ornaments, but he wanted a larger Dome memento. How about a sofa cushion, he asked, and after 10 or so hours on the couch with Netflix burbling away in the background, Yanowski obliged.

Yanowski wrote that she was so pleased with it, she found it a little difficult to hand it over to her patron. And it's easy to see why—personally, I haven't coveted a crafts item quite so much in many a year.

But I am an inveterate Dome buff. If the Harris County Domed Stadium is not your thing, Yanowski is expanding her selection of Texana/Houstonia felt crafts to include representations of Lone Star bottles and all manner of additional local- and Texas-themed items—your imagination is pretty much the limit.

Email Yanowski at panchoandleftey (at) gmail (dot) com to negotiate your idea and a price.

Image: Courtesy of the Four Seasons Houston

The nicest suites at the Four Seasons Houston come with full-sized bottles of booze in their not-so-minibars.

One of the more salient memories from a certain childhood vacation was my father saying, “Don’t touch anything in the minibar. Anything.” I’m sure he saw my greedy little eyes survey the wondrous contents of that little refrigerator and knew it would be ever-so-tempting for my nine-year-old self to grab an overpriced Milky Way or pop open a can of Coke Classic before flopping on the bed and watching Full House.

Unsurprisingly, one of my more salient memories from my first solo trip as an adult was a late-night minibar binge, facilitated by a few drinks earlier in the evening and, more importantly, the freedom to waste my money as damn way I chose.

Now older and marginally wiser, I can usually restrain myself somewhat in the face of the hotel minibar well-stocked with scrumptious snacks and fun-size liquor bottles.  I was curious, however, what more tempting goodies might lie in the minibars at two of Houston’s swankier hotels, and if I could resist.

The short answer: “No.” At least not at the Four Seasons Houston. The hotel's “Ambassador” and “Presidential” suites all have fully loaded wine refrigerators and minifridges, but—and here’s the kicker—whereas in the regular rooms the bottles are miniature, the wine and champagne at the Four Seasons come in regular bottles and harder spirits are similarly vended in larger sizes, as one would expect in such premier accommodations. This means that post-prandial cocktail you decided to enjoy could easily turn into an all-night bender with a hefty price tag. However, should you be the Commander-in-Chief staying at the Four Seasons (or sleeping with him/her), you’ll also have the added bonus of a complimentary large bowl of fruit and chocolate truffles or the chef’s selection of antipasti. It all works out in the end. 

It might be slightly easier for me to hold back at Hotel ZaZa. (Actually, I already know from a staycation experience that’s entirely false.) The ZaZa minibars contain all your usual booze suspects plus some of my favorite snacks like KitKats, Red Vines, chocolate chip cookies, “Dirty” chips, and beef jerky. There’s also coconut water, which, by the way, comes in handy for flushing all that sugar and sodium out of your system the next day. 

I should note that the ZaZa folk are quite generous with the freebie amenities, especially on special occasions or holidays. Guests who stay at Hotel ZaZa on St. Patrick’s Day are treated to a small box of Lucky Charms and a $2 lottery ticket at turndown. On Elvis’s birthday (January 8), you'll find the minibar stocked with Moon Pies and Pepsi, and on National Tooth Fairy Day (February 28), you'll find a mini toothbrush, toothpaste, and $2 bill under your pillow. Good Lord, ZaZa, remind me to check you out on October 31. I hope there’s a giant Jack-o-Lantern filled with candy on my bed at turndown.

Of course, there’s always the option to ask the staff at a nice hotel to keep your minibar locked as a preemptive strike against costly indulgence.  If you’re the type of person who values a full wallet over an empty one, that is. 

For some unfathomable reason known only to the darkest recesses of his martyred, shame-benighted Irish Catholic soul, Conan O'Brien is filming a week's worth of shows in Dallas, of all places.

To curry favor with the effete yet vapid Dallasite Team Coco contingent, the ginger wiseacre donned a cowboy hat and a Nudie-looking blazer and performed a ditty slamming Houston.

The lyrics, for those of you who have slavemaster bosses:

650 square miles, all of it comprised of burning garbage piles. Houston’s smog is the 8th worst in the USA, and it’s home to every serial killer that’s alive today. It’s industries are known for pollutin’, and it’s the favorite U.S. city of Vladimir Putin. And here’s my last line, and I don’t mean to be callous, but if you drive near Houston just keep going to Dallas.”

On receiving word of this bit of drivel, we retired to the Cone of Silence and sought inspiration from The Pantheon of Bayou City Ancient Muses: Sam Houston, Bill Hicks, Vassar Miller, Lightnin' Hopkins, Townes Van Zandt, and Marvin Zindler. After their receit of our burnt offering—an effigy of Mark Cuban—the Muses gifted us with the following Answer Song:

"Conan O'Brien in Dallas singin' and lyin',

As if he was a resident of the city that killed our president.

Big D stands for Douche and every Texan knows it,

And Dallas is the place where Jerry Jones always blows it.

They do keep it pretentious,

On that they are conscientious.

And here's my last line, I don't mean to spite,

But Conan, what happened with you and that show called Tonight?" 

Walter was the first of the Tortie Sisters to be trapped.

So over the past month or so we've had an outbreak of feral cats here at the Houstonia House on Heights Blvd. It started with three gorgeous torties who took up residence under our porch while in the late stages of kittenhood, which quickly, before we could catch two of them, turned into young womanhood. (Deputy art director Alese Pickering managed to snag one on Mardi Gras day, took her home, and named her Tuesday.) By the time the remaining Tortie Sisters went into heat, the food we'd been putting out was already starting to attract a few more cats, including a tomcat or two. Or maybe five or 10—we never got an accurate head count.

One of the most persistent gentleman callers was a big gray-and-white fellow with the notched ears of many combats. A week or so back, he was one of two males chasing Walter, one of the remaining Tortie Sisters, and having his wicked way with her.

Things were spiraling out of control. At its peak, we saw as many as five cats simultaneously, with new arrivals almost daily, and this number would soon grow, as we were pretty sure the Tortie Sisters had gotten knocked up. With the assistance of SNAP, we started trapping them.

We got one tomcat first, then each of the Tortie Sisters. We left the trap out to try and snare the other toms, but the next morning the trap contained an unwelcome guest: a fat possum, whose teeth were entangled in the wires of the trap.

"Those teeth were the first things I saw this morning," recalled Pickering later in the day. "I knew we had trapped something and when I lifted the towel, I thought I would see another cat in there. Instead I got an eyeful of possum teeth. The mouth, when open, is probably seven inches long and the teeth were mean looking! He was so stiff I thought he had died hours before. Turns out he was playing possum."

A coworker cut the wires and freed his teeth, but the possum just grabbed ahold of the bars with his little hands and refused to let go -- neither when I poked his fingers with a stick nor when I attempted to blow air into his nostrils. (I vaguely remembered that dogs would let go of sticks when you did that, but why I thought it would work on a possum's hands remains a mystery to even me.)

No, he would not be dumped out of the back of that trap come hell or high water—he just gazed at us, unblinking, his mouth agape, displaying all 50 of those evil teeth, his little fingers wrapped around those bars in a death grip. I assured him his imprisonment was only in his mind, but my pep talk was to as little avail as my human-mouth-to-possum-nose trick.)

I Googled our dilemma and read that they can get dehydrated when they have their mouths open like that. BING! IDEA! Maybe if I lifted his cage up and poured some water on his face, some of it might get in his mouth and it might also getting him to let go of the bars. 

With associate editor Peter Holley's assistance, this plan was put into effect, and lo and behold, it was working. The Possum let go of the bars and starting sliding out of the cage, but before he got all the way out, he got hold of another set of the bars. I repeated this beneficial waterboarding experiment and he slid a little bit more towards freedom, but once again, grabbed a hold of another rung in the trap.

Just then the lady from SNAP arrived on the scene, and here we were enacting a marsupial version of a Gitmo atrocity. She was kind of appalled. "Why don't you just leave him alone and let him figure out how to get out of there?" she asked us. Holley and I slunk off in shame, but returned to check on the possum every now and then.

Meanwhile, Grizzled Old Gray Tom headed over to his old stomping grounds, assessed the situation and ran away to the other side of the porch, where he plumped down on the stairs, slumped his shoulders and assessed what he had just seen.

I could read his thoughts. "Man, justlastweek this place was rockin'. Wet food, dry food, sisters in heat, other dudes to fight. Now the food's all gone and that last cat in that trap is truly heinous and seriously insane. Later days, Houstonia."

He hasn't been seen since. The Tortie Sisters found a new home with web producer Dan Derozier. The possum got out. We stopped putting food out and the traps are gone.

So ends the era of Houstonia's Wild Kingdom.  

I love maps, and I was absolutely over the moon when local artist Carrie Marie Schneider tipped me off to this beauty:

Those are Houston neighborhoods, ripped from their contexts, and more or less presented as cuts of meat. There are 85 neighborhoods in all on the 18" x 24" print and you can request that a neighborhood or neighborhoods of your choice be highlighted in red, blue or green.

Here's a close-up.

Are you an Inner Loop Snob? Here's a similar neighborhood map, shorn of all those infernal regions beyond 610.

What looks like quilting is the neighborhood name typed over and over. 

The minimalist maps are the work of Derek Howles. Two years ago when he and his fiancee moved in together he created a series of maps of all the cities they had lived in over the years. Their friends loved the maps so Howles took them to Etsy.  He offers maps of dozens of cities, from New York's capital Albany to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and if enough people request them, he will create new prints for other cities.

At $30 plus $7.95 for shipping, these maps are a steal. 

Christopher Keeble was meandering home along the Heights Bike Trail taking photos yesterday afternoon. Near the corner of Goliad St. and Spring St., in the First Ward, he came across a new mural by Wiley Robertson and dismounted to shoot some pics.

"And this nice van pulls up," Keeble says. "A nicely dressed, older Hispanic dude hops out and sets up a tripod. I tune him out while I try to take pictures."

"[And then] this f***ing heifer sashays by. Blew me away."

"I said how much I liked it, and the cow ordered the Hispanic dude to use my phone to take the portrait," Keeble continues.

Avert your eyes from Mr. Keeble's socks please.

The surreal tableau remains a mystery to Keeble. "When I asked the cow what was up, I interrupted his reply, saying something along the lines of, 'I don't want to know, I think it's awesome, thank you.' But I don't think this is the first time he's done this and I'd like to track down other dancing heifer things he's done."

So Houstonia readers, just who is that floridly-attired, gigantic dancing cow?  

This morning eagle-eyed local attorney Steven Grubbs sent me a link to a house for sale at 2206 Eclipse St., near the corner of Pinemont and T.C. Jester, right outside of Oak Forest and Candle Light Place and not all the way up in Acres Homes.

So yeah, it's kind of in no man's land, neighborhood nomenclature-wise, which is borne out by the fact that its HAR.com listing assigns it to no subdivision. Grubbs pointed out that it does have a legal designation though, and that is Tract 22, Block 18, Deroloc, which is "colored" spelled backward.

It's easy to assume that racism lurks behind the designation, that whites in then-Dixified Houston gave the area this name as a sort of smirking in-joke. Digging in to the history books tells a different story.

In 1899, backward spelling was something of a citywide mania. Modeled on Mardi Gras, Houston's biggest annual citywde celebration launched that year and was called Notsuoh, and it was presided over by King Nottoc, a deity whose approval had to be maintained to keep the Magnolia City's economy humming. Though they picked almost all of it and loaded almost all of the bales on to the ships at Allen's Landing, African Americans were barred from participating in Notsuoh, so in 1901, black civic leaders launced a festival of their own.

Its name: DeRoLoc. It's disturbing to note that the master of DeRoLoc was known as King La-Yol-E-Civ-Res.   

The other Notsuoh is gone now too, replaced in full by Dean's.

In 1913 the DeRoLoc Theatre opened at 609 San Felipe (now West Dallas) in Freedmen's Town. By 1919 the theatre had changed its name to the American and both Notsuoh and DeRoLoc had been shut down, casualties to World War I and/or moralizing editorialists scandalized by the drunken shenanigans. 

The name Deroloc lived on in Mexia, Texas, where in 1919 it was the headquarters of Deroloc Oil, described in Robert Dannin's Black Pilgrimage to Islam as "a legendary group of African Americans who pioneered drilling in East Texas...the men of Deroloc possessed exceptional knowledge of the local terrain and knew almost instinctively where to look for oil. They had memorized almost every inch of soil and landmark where they played as boys. Participating in the exciting oil boom was the realization of a world beyond the cotton fields. These black oil men were a new breed, full of promise, serious and poised, stylishly dressed and urbane."  

If that's the source of the name, what could have been prouder or more glamorous for its time?

Image: Shannon O'Hara

Monarch Bistro's dining room at Hotel ZaZa

Looking to leave it all behind for the weekend? Why not decamp to a place that won’t cost an arm and a leg, that doesn’t need months of advance booking, and requires not a single plane ride—hell, you don’t even need a car to get around in the Museum District. That’s what we call relaxing.

Friday 

6 p.m. Check into the Hotel Zaza. (Book the Arts & Smarts Package, which features a $50 credit at the Monarch Restaurant, free valet parking, and two tickets to any MFAH exhibition.)

6:30 p.m.Dinner on the Monarch’s lush patio.

8:30 p.m. Grab a seat on the lawn at Miller Outdoor Theater for a free concert by the Houston Symphony. (There are five of them planned this summer.)

10 p.m.Nightcaps back at the hotel.

Saturday

9 a.m. Room service!

10 a.m. For her: Zaspa facial, massage, and mani-pedi. For him: tee time at the scenic 18-hole Hermann Park Golf Course. 

Noon Lunch from a local food truck and a picnic at the Cullen Sculpture Garden.

1 p.m. Museum crawl: the Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Arts Museum, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Asia Society, the Health Museum, and more, as all are within easy walking distance of each other.

4:30 p.m. Catch the light rail to the Ensemble/HCC station and walk five short blocks to DiverseWorks. 

6:30 p.m. Head back to Main St. and revive yourself with coffees at Double Trouble Caffeine & Cocktails.

7 p.m. Pick up some locally made jewelry, art, and music at Sig’s Lagoon, The Tinderbox, and My Flaming Heart.

8 p.m. Dinner at chef Monica Pope’s Sparrow Bar + Cookshop

9:30 p.m. Live music at the Continental Club and Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge

Midnight Still up? Grab late night Tex-Mex at Tacos a Go-Go and catch the train back to the hotel.

Sunday

10 a.m. Restorative mimosas and Bloody Marys by the pool at Zaza.

Noon Sunday blues brunch at Danton’s.

2 p.m. Walk it off at the Houston Zoo and Hermann Park; take a trip on the tiny train and relive your childhood. 

5 p.m. Head home, replenished and refueled by your weekend “away.”

Image: Shutterstock

It’s hard to imagine today, but Hermann Park’s statue of Sam Houston was once a controversial fixture.

From atop its 35-foot marble arch, the iconic equestrian statue of Sam Houston has guarded Hermann Park so long—since 1925—it’s hard to believe that its installation was once controversial. Among its detractors were Houstonians who still castigated Sam, more than 50 years post-Civil War, for his steadfast allegiance to the Union cause. (They likely preferred the park’s statue of loyal Confederate cannoneer Dick Dowling.) Others disliked the monument on aesthetic grounds, notable among them Sam’s last surviving son, Sam Jr., who groused that his father’s statue looked like “a monkey of a man straddling a jackass.” 

A Guide to Hermann Park’s Centennial Art Installations

We happen to disagree with Junior, and the tourists are apparently on our side: the stately bronze monument has been a perennial postcard favorite. And this year, at last, thanks to the Hermann Park Conservancy, the statue’s surroundings will finally match it in grandeur. To celebrate its centennial, the park’s main entrance, the Grand Gateway, is getting a complete makeover, with new and more extensive landscaping between the Mecom Fountain and the statue, plus new sidewalks, benches, bike racks, and lighting. And that’s just one of many changes visitors will see in the months ahead, the culmination of 22 years of effort on the part of the Conservancy, a nonprofit citizens’ group in a public-private partnership with Houston Parks and Recreation that has raised $115 million for the steady improvement of the park. Many of the plans being realized today, by the way, were part of the original vision for the park but never realized thanks to WWI, WWII, and various recessions; as any Houstonian knows, beautification hasn’t always been the city’s foremost priority, even in times of plenty.

Already completed as part of the plan are the restored Japanese Gardens, the renovated Jones Reflection Pool and McGovern Lake, the creation of Lake Plaza as a bridging space between the park and the Houston Zoo, and improvements to the Brays Bayou hike-and-bike trails. The Conservancy also upgraded the park’s rinky-dink, if beloved, miniature train with new and better cars and extra stops along the route, and installed Trenton Doyle Hancock’s colorful, fantastical Destination Mound Town artwork in the train tunnel, one of many temporary installations the Conservancy has scattered about the park’s 445 acres.

Also in the works: the 15-acre Hermann Park Garden Center is being completely renovated as the McGovern Centennial Gardens. Some of the old elements, like the rose garden, will remain, and a sculpture promenade will be added, along with a children’s garden, a great lawn (this one the size of a football field, and crowned by the beautiful Chinese Pavilion), a Centennial Green, and a woodland garden. But not all the changes are aesthetic. A new adjacent parking lot is also in the works, one that will further encourage visitors to enjoy the very special public space that is Hermann Park—an oasis of tranquility in the increasingly frenetic heart of the city.

It's been awhile -- time for another iPhone dump of some of my favorite shots I've taken of this fabulously messed-up city we call home. As the great 30footFALL singer / longtime downtown bike messenger Butch Klotz once put it: "Houston. You love it because it's made of garbage."

Riding the side streets along N. Durham and N. Shepherd one Saturday afternoon, I came across this little lady chomping grass near a car lot. She had a friend across the street working the same gig.

It took all my Facebook friends a couple of hours to help me puzzle out the meaning of this strange sign I found across the street from the Sonic near N. Shepherd and 610. I thought it was runic, but it ain't, nomtombot?

This beauty is often posted up outside Big Star Bar in Shady Acres. 

Groucho glasses at the Bellaire Nature Center.

Jedi sign in the First Ward Arts District.

Cranky sign on a North Main convenience store's front door.

Boots at the pulga at Hillcroft and the Southwest Freeway.  I can't decide between the tiger stripes or the checkerboard, and I need the Columbia blue ones for Oilers parties.

I have been commanded to "Stop N' Go," "Tote-M," and even, in Colorado, to "Kum N Go," but I have never been ordered around by a convenience store with as much specificity as at this Spring Branch shop. Even so it's a bit confusing. I get that they want me to stop then buy something, but what? Just some food or the whole food store?

 How the West Was Won, Versions 1.0 and 2.0. (Taken in Independence Heights.)

 This is not the boot and shoe repair store you are looking for...

And this is not the Happyland it once was...

I'll close on an inspirational note. Against all odds, this thing still works.

So until next time, keep your lens cleaned, those tires pumped, and your chains good and greasy and I'll see you up the trail.

Just west of TC Jester on West 11th stands the ruins of the Timbergrove Park Apartments. Not since the long-delayed demolition of the Parc Memorial complex on Memorial at Detering has there been such a bountiful inner-loop urban exploration destination. Here is part one of a two-part photo essay, this one covering the grounds. In the next installment we will take you inside the ruined buildings. (UPDATE: Part II is here.)

Handsome palms line the entryway to the complex's office...

One of the buildings is cordoned off as an asbestos hazard. In several, the electricity and water is still running.

It is apparent that a great many of the tenants left in a hurry. Each of the complex's courtyards is full of the detritus of their lives.

Like so...

 And so...

...And so.

There is everything from toys...

...to whole rooms, all ruined.

Here is the pool...

And the environs of the laundry room...

Someone had success with a tomato plant, now trampled and at the mercy of a pair of mockingbirds...

It seems like the residents were evicted some time shortly after Christmas, as signs of holiday cheer abound.

The saddest Christmas tree ever...

Many of the residents worked in the restaurant industry...

A giant trash pile in the parking lot offers strange tableaux like this one...

And this one...

So long for now. See you back here for Part II.

Earlier we brought your Part One of our adventures at the abandoned, partially demolished, 56-year-old Timbergrove Park apartments. That post covered the parking lot, pool area, and courtyards; this one takes us inside five of the complex's six two-story residential buildings. (All except the one with the asbestos quarantine.)

So come on in!

We are not in Kansas anymore...

Some cupboards were not bare...

(All of those Speed Sticks were empty; evidently this person had a deodorant hoarding fetish.)

There were memories of happy times...

And one scene that freaked me the hell out...

(It's nail polish. I think.)

Some walls were adorned with sweet-natured works of art...

While others were not...

While still others sported the lyrics of Snow Patrol songs...

This one put me in mind of Pompeii, where archaelogists found frescoes picturing the doomed homeowners on the walls of their volcanically entombed abodes. 

See what I mean?

It was eerie in there. The smoke alarms were chirping their dead battery alerts in many of the units, and ceiling fans were spinning in others. As you might be able to imagine the smell was dank in the extreme. It was time to go...

I guess it's the boom times we are living through—people moving around and/or upgrading their settees—but in the last year or so Houston's street couch population has exploded. Here is a whole relaxation of discarded sofas I have found while riding my bike around in the last 12 months.

I found this cushionless matched pair in the alleyway near the Family Thrift on Durham. I've been told that roofers buy old couches, take the cushions as padding for their knees, and then dump the rest. Given their proximity to Family Thrift, I think that's what happened to these two. Also their Cosby-sweater pattern makes them kind of unfit for human consumption nowadays.

Skyline view! Swimming pool! Starting in the low 300s!

A keeper, found in Shady Acres. This was one day I wished I had a truck.

A Garden Oaks Shangri-La. Ponder the big blue Texas sky.

Wicked wicker.

Warm. (Squeee) Leatherette. (Squaaw)

These chairs are gone now. So are the houses. 

Since we've strayed a bit from street couches, we'll just throw this in here as well...

Back on point, the abandoned TimbergrovePark apartments is Street Couch El Dorado...

And another from the same place...

You know you want more...

And more...

And even more...

These babies really will save you money!

The amount of talent that was in and around Houston's music scene in 1968 is simply astounding. All it takes is a quick reading of issue #2 of Mother, Larry Sepulvado's short-lived rock magazine, to tell you that loud and clear as a Roky Erickson howl.

Take the cover.

Unfortunately Mansonesque in retrospect, that's the visage of Rick Barthelme, son and brother of two famous Donalds. At the time, Rick Barthelme was the drummer in the Red Krayola, the psychedelic rock / noise group that coalesced around Mayo Thompson at the University of St. Thomas. Eventually Rick would revert to his full name of Frederick Barthelme and become an award-winning author of New South-based "dirty realism" and "K-Mart fiction," but at the time he was still alienating crowds with the sort of atonal, experimental rock that was capable of alarming the freaks in Berkeley, CA enough to elicit a $10 bribe to stop playing. That's right, Houston out-weirded Berkeley.                                                                           

That cover photo was taken by the late Les Blank, the soon-to-be-award-winning filmmaker most famous locally for his documentaries The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins and A Well-Spent Life, about Navasota's sharecropping songster Mance Lipscomb. Both are now in the Criterion Collection.

Half of the rest of the photographs in Mother were snapped by a part-time artist, part-time folkie by the name of Guy Clark. "Guy is good at anything that is artistic," Sepulvado noted in his column "For What It's Worth." 

So was the Houston of 1968, as that column makes abundantly clear in its first few paragraphs. "Houston is a very fertile ground for talent," wrote Sepulvado. "Already projected from this area is JANIS JOPLIN of Big Brother and the Holding Co., JERRY JEFF WALKER of Circus Maximus both of who [sic] at one time played Houston's folk club SAND MOUNTAIN on Richmond, Lightnin' Hopkins and his brother, MANCE LIPSCOMB, Johnny Nash, and Gale Storm. (?) Impressive, huh?" (Storm was a joke... She was a local who went on to mainstream fame as a postwar pop was then in the twilight of her fame. Also, Hopkins and Lipscomb were not related.)

Sepulvado name-checks some local bands with hilariously dated names: Eden's Children, Ultimate Spinach, Neurotic Sheep. Can you dig, man?

Image: Llloyd Sepulvado

The fool on the hill, illustrated by Larry Sepulvado's late brother Lloyd.

Sepulvado then moves on to the bands he thinks really have a chance to hit it big: Red Krayola, the 13th Floor Elevators, and Fever Tree. 

Though none of them exactly seized control of the pop charts, each developed cult followings and critical acclaim that extends into the present. The Elevators were the most psychedelic band of all time, bar none. Chicago's uber-hip Drag City label is enamored with the Red Krayola, who were a primary influence on that city's post-rock scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. Fever Tree managed to chart in 1968 with their single "San Francisco Girls" and rapper Madvillain built a track around their funky take on Steve Cropper's "99 and a Half Won't Do" in 2004.

Sepulvado was also high on The Moving Sidewalks. "Bill Gibbons is an exceptional guitarist with one of those really strange voices," he noted, pretty much describing every ZZ Top album to come. And down in the news and notes section of the column there's this aside: "More from Sand Mountain; Townes Van Zandt has a record contract and an album and single slated for release."

All that plus ruminations on the then-rarely-explored interconnectedness of rock and country music and Donovan's career and renunication of psychedelic drugs. And then there's that interview with the Red Krayola touted on the cover, in which they talk about how they ruined a party at UH and played a disastrous / sublime set (depending on who you believe) at the opening of artist/sculptor David Adickes's new Allen's Landing club: the Love Street Light Circus and Feel Good Machine.

Said the Krayola's Mayo Thompson: "[Adickes] knew Rick [Barthleme] because of the art thing. We used  to crash his openings and drink wine and stand around. He got us one time to play this happening. He did a little light show and impromptu number and told us he was opening this club and we hinted about being the house band. So the last time he saw us we were doing semi-rock music. The next time he saw us we had dropped the drums and the Familiar Ugly." (It was the '60s. Explaining "Familiar Ugly" here is too hard to explain.) "We were doing this three-piece thing with clarinets, trumpets, guitars, razors on cymbals, phonograph turntables, and tapes, etc. But he had already asked us to play the press opening for Love Street and we played our music. He hired another [house] band."

Sepulvado asked the band to clarify if they indeed even made it to that opening.

Image: John Nova Lomax

Adickes loves Houston more than the Red Krayola version 2.0

"We played opening night and he knelt down front, wanting us to get off stage," Thompson said. "I'm not knocking him but I don't think he liked us too much. He has provided a certain class to Houston that it did not have before." 

All that, plus ads like this:

I love maps, and I was absolutely over the moon when local artist Carrie Marie Schneider tipped me off to this beauty:

Those are Houston neighborhoods, ripped from their contexts, and more or less presented as cuts of meat. There are 85 neighborhoods in all on the 18" x 24" print and you can request that a neighborhood or neighborhoods of your choice be highlighted in red, blue or green.

Here's a close-up.

Are you an Inner Loop Snob? Here's a similar neighborhood map, shorn of all those infernal regions beyond 610.

What looks like quilting is the neighborhood name typed over and over. 

The minimalist maps are the work of Derek Howles. Two years ago when he and his fiancee moved in together he created a series of maps of all the cities they had lived in over the years. Their friends loved the maps so Howles took them to Etsy.  He offers maps of dozens of cities, from New York's capital Albany to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and if enough people request them, he will create new prints for other cities.

At $30 plus $7.95 for shipping, these maps are a steal. 

Christopher Keeble was meandering home along the Heights Bike Trail taking photos yesterday afternoon. Near the corner of Goliad St. and Spring St., in the First Ward, he came across a new mural by Wiley Robertson and dismounted to shoot some pics.

"And this nice van pulls up," Keeble says. "A nicely dressed, older Hispanic dude hops out and sets up a tripod. I tune him out while I try to take pictures."

"[And then] this f***ing heifer sashays by. Blew me away."

"I said how much I liked it, and the cow ordered the Hispanic dude to use my phone to take the portrait," Keeble continues.

Avert your eyes from Mr. Keeble's socks please.

The surreal tableau remains a mystery to Keeble. "When I asked the cow what was up, I interrupted his reply, saying something along the lines of, 'I don't want to know, I think it's awesome, thank you.' But I don't think this is the first time he's done this and I'd like to track down other dancing heifer things he's done."

So Houstonia readers, just who is that floridly-attired, gigantic dancing cow?  

This morning eagle-eyed local attorney Steven Grubbs sent me a link to a house for sale at 2206 Eclipse St., near the corner of Pinemont and T.C. Jester, right outside of Oak Forest and Candle Light Place and not all the way up in Acres Homes.

So yeah, it's kind of in no man's land, neighborhood nomenclature-wise, which is borne out by the fact that its HAR.com listing assigns it to no subdivision. Grubbs pointed out that it does have a legal designation though, and that is Tract 22, Block 18, Deroloc, which is "colored" spelled backward.

It's easy to assume that racism lurks behind the designation, that whites in then-Dixified Houston gave the area this name as a sort of smirking in-joke. Digging in to the history books tells a different story.

In 1899, backward spelling was something of a citywide mania. Modeled on Mardi Gras, Houston's biggest annual citywde celebration launched that year and was called Notsuoh, and it was presided over by King Nottoc, a deity whose approval had to be maintained to keep the Magnolia City's economy humming. Though they picked almost all of it and loaded almost all of the bales on to the ships at Allen's Landing, African Americans were barred from participating in Notsuoh, so in 1901, black civic leaders launced a festival of their own.

Its name: DeRoLoc. It's disturbing to note that the master of DeRoLoc was known as King La-Yol-E-Civ-Res.   

The other Notsuoh is gone now too, replaced in full by Dean's.

In 1913 the DeRoLoc Theatre opened at 609 San Felipe (now West Dallas) in Freedmen's Town. By 1919 the theatre had changed its name to the American and both Notsuoh and DeRoLoc had been shut down, casualties to World War I and/or moralizing editorialists scandalized by the drunken shenanigans. 

The name Deroloc lived on in Mexia, Texas, where in 1919 it was the headquarters of Deroloc Oil, described in Robert Dannin's Black Pilgrimage to Islam as "a legendary group of African Americans who pioneered drilling in East Texas...the men of Deroloc possessed exceptional knowledge of the local terrain and knew almost instinctively where to look for oil. They had memorized almost every inch of soil and landmark where they played as boys. Participating in the exciting oil boom was the realization of a world beyond the cotton fields. These black oil men were a new breed, full of promise, serious and poised, stylishly dressed and urbane."  

If that's the source of the name, what could have been prouder or more glamorous for its time?

Image: Shutterstock

It’s hard to imagine today, but Hermann Park’s statue of Sam Houston was once a controversial fixture.

From atop its 35-foot marble arch, the iconic equestrian statue of Sam Houston has guarded Hermann Park so long—since 1925—it’s hard to believe that its installation was once controversial. Among its detractors were Houstonians who still castigated Sam, more than 50 years post-Civil War, for his steadfast allegiance to the Union cause. (They likely preferred the park’s statue of loyal Confederate cannoneer Dick Dowling.) Others disliked the monument on aesthetic grounds, notable among them Sam’s last surviving son, Sam Jr., who groused that his father’s statue looked like “a monkey of a man straddling a jackass.” 

Video: Newsfix

There's big fun to be had this summer in the heart of the city, Houston's Museum District.

We happen to disagree with Junior, and the tourists are apparently on our side: the stately bronze monument has been a perennial postcard favorite. And this year, at last, thanks to the Hermann Park Conservancy, the statue’s surroundings will finally match it in grandeur. To celebrate its centennial, the park’s main entrance, the Grand Gateway, is getting a complete makeover, with new and more extensive landscaping between the Mecom Fountain and the statue, plus new sidewalks, benches, bike racks, and lighting. And that’s just one of many changes visitors will see in the months ahead, the culmination of 22 years of effort on the part of the Conservancy, a nonprofit citizens’ group in a public-private partnership with Houston Parks and Recreation that has raised $115 million for the steady improvement of the park. Many of the plans being realized today, by the way, were part of the original vision for the park but never realized thanks to WWI, WWII, and various recessions; as any Houstonian knows, beautification hasn’t always been the city’s foremost priority, even in times of plenty.

Already completed as part of the plan are the restored Japanese Gardens, the renovated Jones Reflection Pool and McGovern Lake, the creation of Lake Plaza as a bridging space between the park and the Houston Zoo, and improvements to the Brays Bayou hike-and-bike trails. The Conservancy also upgraded the park’s rinky-dink, if beloved, miniature train with new and better cars and extra stops along the route, and installed Trenton Doyle Hancock’s colorful, fantastical Destination Mound Town artwork in the train tunnel, one of many temporary installations the Conservancy has scattered about the park’s 445 acres.

Also in the works: the 15-acre Hermann Park Garden Center is being completely renovated as the McGovern Centennial Gardens. Some of the old elements, like the rose garden, will remain, and a sculpture promenade will be added, along with a children’s garden, a great lawn (this one the size of a football field, and crowned by the beautiful Chinese Pavilion), a Centennial Green, and a woodland garden. But not all the changes are aesthetic. A new adjacent parking lot is also in the works, one that will further encourage visitors to enjoy the very special public space that is Hermann Park—an oasis of tranquility in the increasingly frenetic heart of the city.