The Gulf Freeway Years

For almost three years before the Manned Spacecraft Center at Clear Lake was ready, NASA's human spaceflight program ran out of rented buildings strung along the Gulf Freeway and Old Spanish Trail. The largest was a complex on the Gulf Freeway that included the Houston Petroleum Center buildings and held the Flight Operations Division. Most of it has been demolished; one building survives at 6001 Gulf Freeway, on what is today the campus of the George I. Sanchez Charter School. NASA announced on 19 September 1961 that the center would come to Houston. On 2 October an advance team set up in two empty dress shops at Gulfgate Shopping City, offered by the mall's manager, with furniture lent by Fingers, drapes from Joske's and Continental Airlines hostesses answering the phones. By 1 November the center was officially open for business, spread across 13 sites, some with as few as 46 employees and the largest with 389.

The four main leases came together in about three weeks. Headquarters went into the Farnsworth and Chambers Building on South Wayside, which now houses the Houston Parks and Recreation Department. Max Faget's engineers took the Rich Building on Telephone Road, which President Kennedy toured on 12 September 1962, the day of his Moon speech at Rice. Life Sciences tested spacesuits in the Lane-Wells building, and at Ellington, before the new center was finished, some 1,500 people worked in wooden wartime barracks with no air conditioning. Some 750 employees moved down from Langley, Virginia, between December 1961 and July 1962, and the last of the city offices moved to Clear Lake in June 1964.