Our cities sometimes appear inevitable. Once something is built, it’s difficult to remember what the landscape was like before—before a highway cut through a neighborhood, before an office tower hovered over a downtown, before a housing development carved up a wetland.
But in 1836, when Houston’s founders, Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen, envisioned “a great interior commercial emporium of Texas,” the city was just an idea, a vision projected onto a swampy prairie at the confluence Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, once home to the Karankawa and Atakapa tribes. So how did Houston become Houston?
Two new books about the Bayou City—one about its people, one about its places—provide compelling answers to that question. Both Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of A Changing America and Improbable Metropolis: Houston’s Architectural and Urban History offer layered, nuanced histories of this ever-evolving city. If Houston’s dizzying growth over the past half century offers a glimpse at the future of the United States—multicultural, sprawling, unequally prosperous—then, these books suggest, by understanding how we got here, we can better understand where we’re going.
