Neighborhood Memories

Houston, TX, Friday, June 01, 2007

Everybody knows that growing up in a neighborhood is an essential part of the American experience. The best memories of family, friends, schoolmates, church, sports, July Fourth picnics, and chilly Christmas mornings, are imprinted on the streets where we grew up. Just being a kid, falling in love for the first time, and the unexpected experiences that change the course of our lives, happen mostly in neighborhoods. They are very special places.

As an architect and urban planner, now serving as an At-Large member of the Houston City Council, I believe that “neighborhood” is the most important word in American urbanism. It is the fundamental human habitat, which crosses cultures and history. In this fast-paced era of eroding traditional values, we need to get back to the basics of real neighborhood life.

Authentic neighborhoods are a complex quilt of carefully aligned parts – within a pattern of tree-lined streets and blocks. The best streets, designed for strolling, riding a bike, parking, and slow moving traffic as well, are framed by homes of an attractive vernacular architecture. Front porches often “liberate” residents from the isolation of the back yard, and bring neighbors together on the sidewalk. Many “eyes on the street” make the neighborhood safer.

There are other important aspects - relatively short blocks, with intersections (500 to 800 feet apart), and within an easy walk, a small park with a tot lot for moms to gather, convenience shops, an elementary school. Better still, the branch post office, library or the local dentist and insurance man are nearby.

Yet I am sad to say that there are vast residential developments, mostly in newer suburban areas, which don’t qualify as a “neighborhood.” These sterile, cookie-cutter, homogenous subdivisions, which dominate the sprawled margins of our central cities, lack the basic elements and character essential to healthy communal life. In the city, sadly, we are losing our traditional neighborhoods and historic buildings to out-of-scale “redevelopment” and clumsy “infilling.”

Design is critical, because the proper configuration of the built environment – houses, lots blocks, streets, intersections, public places – has a powerful impact on human behavior, how we feel about ourselves - how private and public life take place. A good neighborhood should be part of our “civic ethos.”

Neighborhood Memories – Riverside Terrace

My best memories, during the early years of World War II, are from “Riverside Terrace” just north of Brays Bayou, in the “North McGregor” part of Houston. We lived close to Southmore, a classic boulevard faced by stately homes, its esplanade lined with live oaks. The wealthiest families lived further away, in “mansions” on North McGregor Drive, facing Brays Bayou.

Next to where the railroad tracks crossed Southmore Boulevard, there was a small shopping center with a “Piggly Wiggly” grocery store (today it’s either a convenience store or a supermarket!), a few shops, and two churches. In the other direction, the oval-shaped Calumet Park, with its sloped, gully-like embankments, was a great place to ride a bike. This diversity contributed to its “magic.”

Our house at 5409 Palmer Street, designed and built by my father in the late thirties, backed up to the railroad tracks, where I was forbidden to play. Sometimes after school I would sneak through a break in our rear fence and join my “colored” friends from across the tracks to trade marbles. We would hunker down to tell unfamiliar stories, an uncanny cultural encounter in those days, and watch from the embankment a mighty speeding freight train flatten our carefully placed Indian-head nickels. Occasionally, we would join hands and walk the trestle over Brays Bayou, a scary feat which was definitely forbidden. The clickity-clack of the freight trains as steel rolled over steel, and the sound of their mournful horns, are as real today as back then.

“My” neighborhood was a self-contained microcosm of community life – where I made friends, played in the streets, got to know my friends’ parents, explored unknown parts of Brays Bayou, and listened to radio serials after school - the “Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow.” There was no TV then, so we had to be more inventive. In great detail, the neighborhood map was in my head – I could have found my way to school mostly blindfolded.

There are some differences between then and now. The “Piggly Wiggly” is gone, the railroad abandoned, the school renamed, but the churches remain. On the other side of Calumet Park, where deed restrictions have lapsed, run-down “cheapo” apartments now stand, across from a dilapidated convenience store, where kids can buy drugs day and night. It isn’t safe to walk after dark anymore, and people keep their back doors permanently locked. It’s changed from mostly Anglo to mostly African-American, with more older people than kids. But that doesn’t matter, since it still looks, and functions, much the same – a nurturing place for daily life, which still stirs a child’s imagination.

Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND)

There is a powerful new planning movement gaining momentum world-wide called “The New Urbanism,” founded by Miami-based architect, Andres Duany, well-know for his “Seaside” and “Kentlands” communities. Reacting against placeless sprawl, automobile dependence, and anti-neighborhoods of cookie-cutter tract housing developments, the New Urbanists have promoted “Traditional Neighborhood Developments” or TNDs. TNDs, diverse in housing types and uses, with a family’s daily needs generally within a five minute walk, are patterned after the wonderful, much-loved neighborhoods of the 19th and early 20th centuries - places like “Highland Park’ in Dallas, “Alamo Heights” in San Antonio, and “River Oaks” in Houston. Austin, Galveston, Plano, are among the Texas cities now actively promoting TNDs.

Authentic Neighborhood Life

The most vivid neighborhood memories, often in photographic detail, stem from the indelible fusion of place and experience. One could not exist without the other. It is my hope that cities and their city-builders will learn to preserve, plan and construct anew authentic neighborhoods, which rival the wonderful places where we grew up. Through New Urbanist inspired planning and design, we can reclaim that critical connection between the character of a coherent physical environment and interactive community life. We are shaped by what we build. The making of good and humane places, which uplift the spirit, and bring people together, is a noble enterprise. Good neighborhoods and good places, make us infinitely more human.

Our surroundings speak to us in many ways – they tell us who we are, where we have been and where we might go. So every so often I drive back to 5409 Palmer Street, park my car, get out, walk a few familiar blocks, and reconnect with the magic of my childhood. As memories reappear, time seems to evaporate. It’s still MY neighborhood.
Neighborhoods and all they contain are crucial for a great city's bright future.