Booms, Blowouts, Bayous and Burbs

The follow article is part 9 of my ongoing series looking at the way the geography and built environment of America has effected the collective psyche of the nation. Along the way I look at how that intersects with arts and culture in music, film and literature. Topically I try to chunk each part out and have them stand on their own, but they are all interconnected. If you are one of my new subscribers I want to thank you for joining me on the journey. Links to the parts 1-8 can be found after the article.

Oil, gasoline, cars, highways, suburbs. All of it came to Houston and the state of Texas at large in a multi-decade ejaculatory gush of expansion and industrial strength decadence that marked the first big oil boom in the state, a spill that lasted from 1901 on into the 1940s.

It started on January 10, 1901 when the Lucas No. 1 well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, discharged its load in a spasm of pent-up fury. Copious amounts of oil flew one hundred feet up into the air. Workers couldn’t even get the well capped and regulate the flow until nine days later. They’d hit the jackpot and the state was forever transformed, fertilized by the crude.

​Just seven years before, when people had been drilling for water, they had discovered oil by accident at the Corsicana field in 1894. It was the precursor to what was to come.

The railroads had already laid their tracks across Texas in the latter decades of the 19th century. Speculators came in on the iron horses and established themselves on the ancient land. The land around the bay of what is now Galveston had once been the home of the Akokisa people, now believed to be gone forever, and the Karankawa tribe who almost shared the same fate.

Some of the early towns in Texas never made it either. Some just hadn’t been lucky enough to have a railroad line built near them when they were getting started. In those days there was a tendency for people to up and move their home base closer to the new railway lifelines. Texas was so big, there was plenty of room. The train service became a major boon to the ranchers, cowboys and farmers who could now ship their goods back to markets outside the state.

The plentiful stores of petroleum hidden underneath the ground, once tapped, wrought a massive tableau of change across Texas, effecting its destiny and the destiny of the nation in turn. Those who made their livings as prosperous ranchers and farmers were taken down a notch in the social hierarchy, as the prospectors, wildcatters, and oil industry men came to do a proverbial keg stand at their derricks, guzzling down the profits. They were now making more money than the meat men.

Corporate development, corporate wealth, corporate politics all came into the area once those dollar signs started popping up in their minds. Money making schemes abounded, and those schemes became incorporated. With the influx of capital small towns grew into gargantuan cities, and companies that had started off as mom-and-pop shops turned into multinational conglomerates. Fortunes were made and evens those who weren’t directly on the payroll had reason to prosper. Ample liquor and prolific prostitution came on to the scene to service money men who were working hard to get gasoline to the service stations.

As the prospect of becoming a high roller flashed inside the dollar bill part of the brain among those who were already at work in the oil industry for other firms in other parts of the country. Those who seized the opportunity quit the jobs that had given them there bread and butter to form new outfits in competition with the people who’d formerly had them on the payroll. Joseph S. Cullinan had worked as a manager for Standard Oil and had built the first modern refinery on the western side of the Mississippi River. When Spindletop started to gush he had the foresight to partner with Arnold Schlaet, a businessman from New York who put up some of the initial money to grease the wheels of economic salvation. They got some more money from former Texas governor James S. Hogg, whose surname, among whatever other qualities he had, fit him for the job. A governor named Governor Hogg is the kind of governor people are liable to elect in the state of Texas. A new company was formed and they planted themselves in Beaumont. As the company grew, they went to Houston, some 90 miles west. The company did so well that others in the oil business started flocking to the area. Houston became the center of the industry in Texas, and in many ways, in all of America. The Texas Fuel Company started by Cullinan got bought out by the Texas Company, and later renamed themselves Texaco. Janis Joplin ended up being the daughter of a Texaco engineer, and grew up in nearby Port Arthur.

Several companies could work the Spindletop well at once. Another few companies tapping into the earths natural wealth joined forces and became the Gulf Oil Corporation. They were later bought out and became Chevron. Another outfit that became known as the Humble Oil Company later became Exxon, and are now not humble at all. Shell, and what became Marathon, all got in on securing their various pipelines of plunder in Texas.

During this same period Houston exploded in population. Sam Houston had founded the city in 1836, the same year as Chicago. Just like the windy city, it had become a major railroad hub. In 1860 there were close to 6,000 inhabitants. Over a thousand of those didn’t have rights as citizens, weren’t even thought of as humans, but enslaved. Houston would go on to become the fourth most populous city in America. Between its important geographic location on Galveston and Trinity Bay, and between the spewing gushers, the population started to double, triple, quadruple, and finally quintuple.

In a lecture on the history of the city preservationist Anna Mod noted how “the idea for the city was a great center of commerce at the confluence of two bayous. This is the larger Buffalo Bayou, and then the smaller White Oak. And it was chosen because this is where a shallow draft steamship could turn around, so goods could be offloaded.” These bayous being two slow moving rivers. Spoking out from the center of the city, at that place where the rivers met, Houston had initially been organized into a series of six wards that spoked and spiraled out from the city. When the freeways came along, and they came quickly, the original pattern was diced up into disconnected bits, isolating different parts of the city from one another.

The coastal plane is flat. Expansion is easy. Wealth made the area showcase for glitz. As the population of Houston had grown rapidly in the same years as the growth of the automobile industry, and as they produced the oil necessary for the cars, Houston became a major city of motoring. The streets and grids were tailored to the car, and highways came in to allow the quick travel of the businessmen between their offices and the new suburban homes.

Houston Heights was one of the earliest planned communities in Texas. It was already in progress as neighborhood in the decade before Spindletop blew its top. Houston Heights had an advantage over the people in the denser urban core, closer to the rivers, closer to the flooding. It sat 23 feet above the city proper in elevation. The waterways were a breeding ground for mosquitoes and yellow fever outbreaks ran rampant. Those who could afford to get away, wanted to get away, and one of the burbs they moved into was the Heights. It had started as a streetcar suburb, so workers could commute back and forth. They had all their own infrastructure, parks, streets, alleys, and utilities. It was a suburban dream.
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A sprawling suburban dream. Even as early as the 1920s traffic snarls had become a major problem in Houston. The people getting rich off the oil were buying the cars and encouraging others to buy cars. The oil industry itself had become bedfellows with the mavericks of the automotive world, stroking each other underneath the sheets of commerce. Before cars, the main use for commercial oil had been in kerosene lamps. Gasoline was too explosive, too flammable, too volatile a byproduct, and had been discarded in the commercial process of making kerosene. With cars there was finally a use for gas, and the oil barons were quick to form symbiotic partnerships with the auto world, get in league with the asphalt makers paving the planet.

Houston’s seismic growth did not leave much room for the pedestrian, and the trend continued as the city metastasized. At the time of this writing the Greater Houston area is considered to be the fifth largest metro area in the United States and consist of the city itself, and its suburbs, along with the smaller city of Pasadena to the southeast. This massive conurbation of cement and rebar also contains The Woodlands, a “special service district,” 28 miles north of the city on I-45. These are “independent, special-purpose governmental units that exist separately from local governments such as county, municipal, and township governments, with substantial administrative and fiscal independence.” The Woodlands Township began as another exurban commuter bedroom community, a place to put ones head down between days on the job. It is a town that is administered essentially as a corporation.

The Woodlands was the brainchild of oil investor George P. Mitchell and he got the idea when he went to a symposium of the American City Corporation and the developer of Columbia, Maryland. The focus was on how to create new towns using the HUD Title VII program, part of the National Urban Policy and New Community Development Act of 1970. The act provided federal support, that is money from taxes. The purpose was to help develop new towns by private developers through the department of Housing and Urban Development. The project was scrapped in 1978, but not before 13 towns had been built. Mitchell wanted to create an attractive place full of golf courses, retail malls, distribution centers, office parks, conference centers, hotels, homes and schools.

The Woodlands ... sterile as fuck

Bill Schadewald of the Houston Business Journal said that Mitchell’s goal was to “entice city slickers looking for far-flung suburban quality of life.” To achieve this aim, he created The Woodlands Corporation as an extension of Mitchell Energy & Development. Corporations and the suburban vision of America had achieved another unity.

Progress and the Interstate Highway System were viewed by most Americans as going hand in hand. Trucking overtook the railways as the means of shipping goods and the highway became the arteries of the nation’s economy. It also continued to represent mobility. It was the free way, but there was always a cost. The cost for those living in Houston was how dependent on cars just living in the city made them, whether they wanted to be or not.

Interstate-45 was one of the earliest interstate highways in the system, though it doesn’t go between any states. It’s a stretch of road connecting just above Houston and down into Galveston. It’s the shortest interstate in the United States at just under 285 miles and was the first freeway in the state. Later came the beltways.

Where Boston got Route-128 as the first beltway in the nation, Houston has at least what can be considered four beltway loops going around the city, each further out, each encompassing more and more suburbs and sidereal communities. These loops, Beltway 8 and the 610 Loop, made it easier for suburbanites to go to work so they could come back home and then get in there cars again to go to malls and shopping centers where they spent the money earned at work so they could fill up their homes with consumer goods. It was all fine and dandy if you had a car, but if you didn’t drive, you were out of luck. The developers didn’t take into account that anyone might not want to drive, and with more and more people coming into Houston for oil, for aerospace, and for the other businesses that serviced the needs of each, more people came from across the country in search of their slice of the pie. The lack of public transport reinforced dependency on cars, which was good for the oil industry, and what was good for the oil industry was good for the car industry. It was like a self reinforcing beltway loop cinched around the citizens, strangling them.

The Galleria, the third largest shopping mall in the United States, catered to this car crazy populace. Car culture, malls, suburbs all became synonymous with Houston’s identity. Too bad if you were a kid. Then you had to walk around the neighborhood, ride a bike, get a ride from parents or older siblings, or sometimes even hitchhike and get into a car with strangers. Some of those strangers didn’t have good intentions for a kid.

Destroying ground to create the Galleria mall

​Houston didn’t have any zoning laws, so sprawl was often unchecked. Expansion of roads or other infrastructure bifurcated low-income and minority community. Highways were also used as a means of segregation. Following World War II, the Second Ward had been a home to many Mexican-Americans. So-called urban renewal put a portion of I-69, the spur section down in Texas, right through it, clearing several blocks and forcing thousands of people out of their homes. The highway now blocked their ease of access to downtown.

The African-American’s who made up the majority of the Third Ward also felt the effects of similar displacements when freeways put their neighborhoods on the chopping block. Over 10,000 Black Americans were displaced in this area just for roadway construction. Many of those communities now exist within the various freeway loops, creating barriers to easy freedom of movement.

Freedmen’s Town, in the Fourth Ward, was a settlement for the first free black population in Houston. That town got split in the middle when I-45 was created. In the process close to a third of the buildings destroyed.
The Fifth Ward, also home to many African American and Mexican Americans was another community cleared in the name of progress, displacing its citizens, and cutting them off from downtown.

The downtown area itself suffered significant loss in the name of car culture. By the 1980s 35% of the area was used for parking lots.

If this sounds like a congested snarl, it is and it was. The suburbs enabled each area to be seemingly self-contained. Upper middle-class and affluent communities wouldn’t have to see or come in contact with the lower middle-class, the working class, and the working poor. Staying in the burbs allowed Texans to live the illusion of progress. The blight and slums were kept from spreading to the places where the good upstanding citizens lived. The downtrodden could be further ground down. This process was in its way, an essential, if unconscious, strategy towards keeping up the morale of the visionaries of technological progress who brought the space race to Texas in the 1960s.

While they were looking to the stars, a murderer spree went unnoticed in the dark underbelly of the oil barons blight.

.:. .:. .:.
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AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY... the story so far...
​
​Tail Pipe Fumes and the Limits to Oil: American Psychogeography Part VIII

Book End the Summer: American Hauntology Part VII (Modesto, California and American Graffiti)

O Superman, Where Art Thou? American Psychogeography part VI

THE SPRAWL (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IV)

ROADRUNNING THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL TEMPLATE (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY III)

​THE NEW EXPLORATIONS OF A GEOTECHNICIAN

LOOKING BACKWARDS AT ROUTE 128: FROM SAINT BOTOLPH TO THE ROAD WARRIORS (AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY I)