HOUSTON

HOUSTON. The city of Houston, Texas—fourth largest city in the United States, world petroleum and petrochemical capital, national corporate center, and major international port—has long been noted for its aggressive

business leadership and impressive record of economic growth. Houston's phenomenal development ranks as one of the most astonishing examples of urban growth in United States history.

In 1836, only John and Augustus Allen, the visionary New Yorkers who founded the city on the coastal prairies of southeast Texas, fifty miles inland from Galveston Island, glimpsed Houston's potential. Hampered by its location on Buffalo Bayou, a scarcely navigable, sluggish little stream, Houston was overshadowed in importance by the seaport of Galveston. Southeast Texas itself was only a peripheral area of the Deep South whose long-dominant urban entrepôt was New Orleans.

Named after Sam Houston, hero of the fight for Texas independence, the city served briefly as capital of the Texas Republic (1837–1839), but its future did not lie in becoming a seat of government. Like other southern inland cities Houston specialized in rail development, serving as a railhead for Galveston and as a collection and shipment point for cotton and other agricultural goods produced in the region. Before the Civil War, Houston became a regional railroad center with five rail lines fanning out in all directions. Postbellum expansion linked the city to the national rail network in 1873.

After the Civil War, Houston businessmen determined to make Houston a major port city. Buffalo Bayou was difficult to navigate even for small boats, so Houston boosters began a drive to dredge a navigable channel toward the Gulf of Mexico. Charles Morgan, a Gulf Coast shipowner, headed the project, which resulted in the opening of a twelve-foot-deep waterway to Clinton. Houston entrepreneurs enlisted federal assistance to resume the ship channel project in 1881 until the waterway cut through Galveston Bay and Buffalo Bayou to a turning basin above Harrisburg in 1914. The Houston Ship Channel, subsequently widened and deepened, made Houston a major inland port.

Houston was spared the fate of Galveston, which was completely destroyed by a hurricane in 1900. With the elimination of its rival to the south, the path was clear for Houston to develop into the dominant urban center in southeast Texas. The cornerstone of the city's bid for regional dominance and national prominence was set with the advent of the Texas oil boom that followed the discovery of oil at nearby Spindletop in 1901. The oil boom led to the formation of three of the world's major oil companies: Texaco (originally the Texas Company), Gulf, and Exxon (originally Humble). Houston became the national capital of an integrated industry consisting of energy business headquarters, drilling operations, producing wells, pipelines, refineries, and port facilities. The Houston Ship Channel developed into a major world petrochemical industry corridor.

The city's extraordinary growth, interrupted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, resurged with the onset of World War II. As wartime industrial production expanded

into the South, Houston shared in the largesse by acquiring numerous new defense plants and contracts in the petroleum, petrochemical, and shipbuilding industries. These new and expanded industries acted as a catalyst for postwar growth. Postwar Houston experienced rapid urban population and spatial growth. The city, having incorporated several surrounding suburbs in the late 1940s, surpassed New Orleans in population in 1950. The Bayou City was on its way to becoming a major national metropolis. By 1984, it had surpassed Philadelphia as the nation's fourth largest city behind New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

In the 1960s, the emergence of the economic phenomenon known as the Sunbelt witnessed enhanced economic diversification and growth. Houston's private and public leaders could boast of many accomplishments. Securing the Manned Spaceflight Center (later the Johnson Space Center) in 1960 was a defining achievement of the period.

The oil boom of the 1970s brought even greater prosperity, but collapsing oil prices in the 1980s produced Houston's most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. A return to former prosperity in the 1990s meant greater population, spatial and economic growth, and also created a movement toward greater economic diversification that included such fields as business services, medical research, health services, international banking, and tourism.

Houston was still the fourth most populous city in the United States in 2000. With 1,953,631 people, it is part of the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, the nation's tenth most populous CMSA, with 4,669,571 people in 2000.

The only major American city to eschew zoning as a planning tool, Houston is generally regarded as one of the best examples of a private enterprise city in a nation where the public sector receives its cues from business leadership. Nevertheless, it has managed to adapt well to new political trends. In 1981, the city's voters elected Houston's first woman mayor, Kathryn J. Whitmire; in 1997 they chose its first African American mayor, Lee P. Brown.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Angel, William D., Jr. "To Make A City: Entrepreneurship on the Sunbelt Frontier." In The Rise of the Sunbelt Cities. Edited by David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1977.

Johnston, Margurite. Houston, The Unknown City, 1836–1946. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991.

Kaplan, Barry J. "Houston: The Golden Buckle of the Sunbelt." In Sunbelt Cities, Politics and Growth Since World War II. Edited by Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

McComb, David G. Houston, The Bayou City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.

Parker, Robert E. and Joe R. Feagin. "Military Spending in Free Enterprise Cities: The Military-Industrial Complex in Houston and Las Vegas." In The Pentagon and the Cities. Edited by Andrew Kirby. London: Sage Publications, 1992.

Conrad L.Rein

See alsoPetrochemical Industry ; Petroleum Industry ; Texas .