Had enough Houston yet, SSP'ers? Hope not.
Welcome everyone to Washington Avenue.
You wouldn't know it at least from this stretch of Washington, or at night when the Ed Hardy T-shirt sporting crowd comes out to party, but this is quite an old part of the city of Houston.
Before the pubs and their parking lots, there was always somebody and something else here before it.
At one point in its history this whole part of town was all but forgotten about in an era of suburban flight and expansion outward.
Today, history gets made here on Washington. Every day will be history in the future.
I like to make beer history.
So let's take a little stroll into a part of Houston's past that new residents and condo developers will never change....
Here lies George Hermann. Yes, that George Hermann for whom the park and hospital are named.
There are others - if they have a street or a park or something like that around town named after them, chances are this is where they are today. Not the streets or the parks, but their namesakes.
There are also memorials to people who aren't necessarily buried here, and in some cases....
....might have never been recovered. All of the people named here died in the Grandcamp and High Flyer explosions in Texas City in 1947, which also killed some 500-600 others (they really don't know how many) and destroyed a good portion of my hometown as it was back then.
There will be more on this subject sometime in the future.
History has faded in a lot of places in Houston, but it's still there if you look hard enough.
And then, of course, there was something in this place before the cemetery.
So more people are moving in where many others came long before it.
More stuff gets built...
...sometimes built right on the doorstep of ancient - by Texas standards anyway - neighborhoods like Old Sixth Ward.
Every big city was a small town at one point, and usually the small town neighborhoods grow up with the rest of the city.
But there are always exceptions, always an outlier. This is one such place.
I think Sabine Street is the last of the old brick roads here. Maybe it's a sign of things to come?
Old and new right next to each other isn't too rare a sight along this section of the Washington corridor.
Other than more growth and development, something else is coming soon...
You guessed it - summer. And no matter who's come and gone and what buildings have gone up or come down, summer feels the same on the Texas coast.
There will probably be more skyscrapers and touristy stuff.
There most definitely will be more people moving in from every which way.
They will probably say this city has no history, since they weren't around for it, and they haven't seen it.
Sometimes it takes a little exploring to find it.
40-50 years ago a lot of American cities had this idea of "urban renewal" that involved bulldozing entire inner city neighborhoods for stuff like public housing projects. Around that same time was when Houston was transitioning from a regionally important city to a major one on a national level.
And now it is transitioning into a major world city, so who knows what comes next?
More infill and efforts to bring more life into old downtown - which was once the entire city and its outskirts? Or more sprawling development on what we reckon as the outskirts today? Probably so on both counts.
What they build today - come 70 years from now, will our descendants fight among themselves as to whether preserve the past or go forward with progress? Probably so as well.
Today, of course, will by tomorrow had its name changed to yesterday.
And sooner or later we'll all be history.
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