An Illustrated Essay By George Fuermann With Woodcuts by Lowell Collins Modern Photographs by Owen Johnson Historic Photographs and Sketches by Various Hands The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city. Euripides If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city. C. C. Colton Urbes constituit: hora dissolvit. Seneca 1962 Press of Premier Urbes constituit: hora dissolvit. Seneca 1962 Press of Premier Library

Houston, the reporter for the London Daily Mail wrote, “has caused me to lift my ban on the word fabulous.” The next year, 1956, the London Times speculated that America might “eventually be based on a quadrilateral of great cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.” That year, too, the New York Times quoted Lloyd’s of London: “Within 100 years Houston will be the largest city in the world.” Houston: one of “The 12 Most Exciting Cities of North America,” said Holiday in 1953—one of the

City Seal (Enlarged) The ship channel, Oil, and Two World Wars made Houston what it is. The second age of discovery may make it what it becomes. As Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Magellan, Captain Cook, and others opened the unexplored seas and lands of the earth during the first age of discovery, so the men who are opening the unexplored space of the universe have begun the second age. In 1961, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to build its Manned Spacecraft Cente

Many “think of Houston as a cluster of mud huts around the Shamrock Hotel, in the cellars of which people hide from the sticky climate, emerging at long intervals to scatter $1000 bills to the four winds,” Gerald Ashford wrote in 1951. Such a fancy formed a dominant theme of Houston appraisals during a brief and a bizarre period. The myth that Houston’s population consisted mainly of the rich was absurd, but the millionaire legend, though arresting to the world, was a liability to Houston. For o

Fifty miles inland, Houston is one of the nation’s principal world ports. Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space. Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston S

The Kellum-Noble House With a median age of 27.5 years, Houston’s population is the youngest of America’s big cities. The city itself seems younger than it is, for since the 1920s Houston has given the impression of being always new. Few structures stand long enough to become old. When the lovely patina of age does get a chance to form, it is scrubbed away as though it were an embarrassment, or so it was removed in 1962 from the bronze of Sam Houston’s equestrian statue in Hermann Park. Houstoni

Houston’s character and personality are by no means revealed merely by ticking off oil, a bewildering chemicals complex, a seaport, and an exaggerated reputation for materialism. Consider some enigma variations on an urban theme: Metropolitan, urban, big-city Houston—where E. H. Marks has one of the largest herds of Longhorn cattle in the world, where cattle rustling still flourishes, where wolves still thrive and a few mountain lions still roam in the bottoms. The evangelist Billy Graham, exhor

Houston, an inland port city of southeastern Texas, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, is joined by the Houston Ship Channel with the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles distant, at Galveston. The ship channel joins the Port of Houston with the Intracoastal Canal. Houston’s corporate limits of 349.4 square miles, including the 22 square miles of Lake Houston and a canal leading to it, surround fourteen of twenty-eight municipalities in its metropolitan area, Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat. T

Cullen Center Domed Sports Stadium Manned Spacecraft Center Jetero Airport Natural Science Museum, Planetarium Five important Houston building projects, in various stages of development late in 1962, totaled a minimum completion cost of $347,500,000. Construction of a sixth, a new City Auditorium to be built on the site of the old one, which was opened in 1910, will begin in 1963 or 1964; money for the new auditorium was given by Houston Endowment, Inc., a foundation created by Jesse H. Jones. T