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. Much of the profit had been fiction, propped up by hidden partnerships and accounting that sent Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow to prison, and the wreck took with it the retirement savings of thousands of employees and the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, which had signed the books and never recovered, even after the Supreme Court threw out its conviction in 2005. Houston absorbed the disgrace at speed. The tower and its skybridged twin at 1500 Louisiana changed hands, and Chevron bought the building in 2011. The company then moved its global headquarters from California to Houston in 2024, so the tower Enron built is now the registered head office of one of the largest oil companies on earth, which is about as Houston an ending as a building can have. The collapse changed the country more than it changed the city: the Sarbanes Oxley Act that governs every public company's books was written in the wake of Enron and the corporate scandals that followed it, and it is still the law.
Getting there
29.7556, -95.3718
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