Diamond Glenn

On St Patrick's Day 1949 the wildcatter Glenn McCarthy opened the Shamrock, an eighteen storey hotel of eleven hundred rooms decorated throughout in sixty three shades of green, on what was then the empty southern edge of Houston. It was the largest hotel built in the United States in the 1940s, it cost about twenty one million dollars, and McCarthy flew and railed a hundred and seventy five film stars in from Los Angeles for the opening. Three thousand guests were invited; some fifty thousand Houstonians turned up outside to watch. The night went so far out of hand that the live network broadcast from the Emerald Room lost control of itself and fell back on piano filler before limping to the end. He launched his own bourbon that evening, called Wildcatter. McCarthy was the model Texas oilman of the age, worth perhaps two hundred million dollars that year, and Edna Ferber met him at the Shamrock and made him Jett Rink in Giant. Then he overreached. He defaulted in 1952, owing some fifty two million, and the hotel passed to his creditors and then to Hilton, which ran it until 1986. The Texas Medical Center took it on and demolished it in 1987, over the protest of three thousand people who joined hands around the building on the anniversary of its opening. McCarthy, then seventy nine, stood with them. The wreckers gave him the cornerstone. Houston passed its first preservation ordinance eight years later.