Entertainment & Sports
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.
History
The Allen Brothers' Ad
Houston began as advertising copy. In August 1836, four months after the battle of San Jacinto, two brothers from New York, Augustus and John Kirby Allen, bought three quarters of an old Mexican land grant on Buffalo Bayou in two deeds two days apart, some six thousand six hundred acres for around nine thousand dollars, and by the end of the month were advertising a town that did not exist.
History
The Crooked E
The glass tower at 1400 Smith Street was built as the headquarters of Enron, the Houston pipeline company that remade itself into an energy trader and was celebrated in the business press as the future of everything. That future ended in December 2001, when Enron collapsed into what was then the largest bankruptcy in American history.
History
The Fifty Fifty Plan
Houston is a great port fifty miles from the sea, and the fact was bought with a piece of financial engineering as important to the city as any oil well. Dredging Buffalo Bayou had been the local ambition since the 1860s, and after the 1900 hurricane destroyed Galveston the case for an inland harbour became urgent, but Congress would not pay for the whole dig.
Industry & Science
The Petrochemical Corridor
For twenty five miles east of Houston's Turning Basin, past Pasadena and Deer Park, across from Channelview and on to Baytown and Galveston Bay, runs the largest petrochemical complex in the United States and the second largest in the world.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
