It is hard to pinpoint one specific thing about Houston.
“There are a lot of pieces that make up Houston,” said Lindsey Brown, director of marketing for the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We don’t have just one thing to hang our hat on.”
That hat could be a traditional Texas Stetson at George Ranch Historical Park or at the American Cowboy Museum, which preserves the Western heritage of African Americans and other minorities.
Red Cat Jazz Café. Courtesy Greater Houston CVB
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It could be a helmet worn by astronauts at Space Center Houston or the latest designer haute headwear at Houston’s numerous upscale shopping venues.
A top hat might be appropriate for Houston’s rich cultural scene, where the 17-block Theater District is home to ballet, grand opera, symphony and several top-rated performing-arts theaters, including the Ensemble Theatre, the largest and oldest black theater in the Southwest.
The city’s large Museum District, home to more than a dozen museums that showcase art, culture, history and science, might require a thinking cap or an artist’s beret.
“One thing we have done in our marketing is broken it down,” said Brown. “We do not sell Houston as a big, overwhelming city. We talk more about neighborhoods or areas of town or areas of interest. Anyone can come here and find what they are looking for.”
And it is easy to do that looking. The 3-year-old, 7.5-mile METRORail links the city’s various areas throuogh quick, easy and inexpensive transportation. “The light rail makes it easy to travel,” said Brown. “For the first time, you don’t need a car to travel through Houston. It [the light rail] connects many of Houston’s attractions.”
Entertaining downtown
It is easy to find Houston’s busy and vibrant downtown. It has some of the most modern and unusual skyscrapers in the country, with a granite pyramid topping a 53-story glass tower; a pair of 36-story, angled-roof towers separated by just 10 feet; and a building with a 60th-floor sky lobby that provides a panoramic view of the city.
On Friday and Saturday nights, several blocks of Main Street are closed to traffic to become a pedestrian-friendly place to experience Houston’s downtown entertainment offerings.
Neon and sharks
The Downtown Aquarium also has a carousel and a Ferris wheel. Courtesy Greater Houston CVB
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An unusual entertainment venue there is the blue-neon-clad Downtown Aquarium, a six-acre entertainment and dining complex located in the city’s former Fire Station No. 1 and Central Waterworks Building. Developed and owned by Landry’s Restaurants, the site includes a restaurant where diners are seated around a 200,000-gallon tank with views of a wide variety of fish, including sharks, stingrays, sawfish and guitarfish.
The aquarium has a total of a half-million gallons of fresh and saltwater tanks. The complex also has a white tigers exhibit, a nautical-theme carousel and a Ferris wheel with views of the downtown skyline.
The 130,000-square-foot Bayou Place entertainment complex with a Hard Rock Cafe is located across Buffalo Bayou from the aquarium, and the Houston Pavilion is expected to open later this year with venues like the House of Blues.
Minute Maid Park, Houston’s downtown home to the National League Astros baseball team, also makes use of a historic structure, with the grand arches of the former Union Station train station framing one side of the retractable-roof stadium.
Curtain up
Houston is one of only five cities in the United States with permanent professional resident companies in all the major performing-arts disciplines — opera, ballet, music and theater — and has one of the largest concentrations in the country of theater seats in a downtown area.
A short distance from each other are the Wortham Theater Center, Jones Hall, Alley Theater, Aerial Theater and the massive $92 million Hobby Center for the Performing Arts with its 60-foot-tall lobby windows that provide an expansive view of the Houston skyline.
The castlelike Alley Theate,r with its nine towers and open-air terraces, and Theatre Under the Stars, which presents five musicals a year in the Hobby Center, are two of the most highly regarded regional theaters in the country.
The 30-year-old Ensemble Theatre, which has a light-rail stop right in front of it, is the largest African American professional theater company in the United States that produces in-house and owns its own facility.
The theater has three stages on Main Street in the heart of midtown and presents a repertoire of dramas, comedies and musicals.
The Museum District, which includes the Museum of Fine Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Contemporary Arts Museum and the Holocaust Museum Houston, is within walking distance of Hermann Park, the city’s oldest public park, which is completing $30 million in renovations.
In addition to an 18-hole golf course, playgrounds, ponds and picnic areas, Hermann Park is home to the Houston Zoo, the Miller Outdoor Theatre and the Japanese Gardens.
Theaters and museums are not the only things Houston has a large concentration of. The city is also a shopaholic’s paradise.
Project Row Houses has restored row houses for art and community projects. Courtesy Houston CVB
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Located about 10 minutes west of downtown, the recently renovated Galleria is one of Houston’s premier shopping venues, with more than 375 stores, including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Lord and Taylor; restaurants; and a full-size ice rink.
“There are two hotels connected to it, and it is truly a shopping destination,” said Brown. “Many groups stay at one of the hotels, and many never leave the inside of the Galleria.”
Four miles from downtown, the Heights was Houston’s first suburb in the late 1880s. Today, antique dealers, art galleries, vintage clothing stores and garden shops are located in Victorian and Victorian-style houses throughout the area.
Uptown Park is a European-style shopping center, Highland Village is an outdoor upscale center, and Katy Mills Mall is a sprawling center of more than 200 outlet stores.
Cowboys and astronauts
Houston’s heritage stretches from the days of cowboys on the open range to brave explorers testing the open expanse of space.
George Ranch Historical Park, just southwest of Houston, is a 480-acre living-history museum located on a 23,000-acre working ranch. Costumed interpreters give tours of an 1830s stock farm, a late-19th-century Victorian mansion and a 1930s ranchhouse. and demonstrate traditional ranching activities.
At Space Center Houston, a half-hour south of downtown, the official visitors center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and astronaut memorabilia.
The 36-story-tall Saturn V rocket, which blasted men into space on the way to the moon, has recently undergone a careful two-year restoration and is housed in a new building complex at the space center.
Preserving the African American West
African Americans played an important but often overlooked role in the settling of the West. Two Houston-area museums are dedicated to telling about that role.
The Buffalo Soldiers National Museum is the only museum in the United States dedicated primarily to preserving the legacy of African American soldiers.
It has the largest collection of African American military artifacts, documents, prints and memorabilia in the country.
www.buffalosoldiermuseum.com
The late Mollie Taylor Stevenson Sr. and her daughter, Mollie Stevenson Jr., founded the American Cowboy Museum on Taylor Stevenson Ranch to preserve the Western heritage of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and women.
The museum offers tours, exhibits, oral historians dressed in native attire and hands-on activities.
In 2001, the Stevensons were the first two African Americans inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.
(713) 478-9677
