How Houston got here
A city that was an advertisement before it was a town, and has spent 190 years arguing with the water it was built on.
Houston began as a real-estate advertisement. On August 26, 1836, promoters Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen paid $5,000 for about 2,214 acres on Buffalo Bayou, naming the place for Sam Houston, who had just won Texas its independence. Four days later they advertised it in the Telegraph and Texas Register, promising the "great interior commercial emporium of Texas" and claiming ocean-going ships could sail to its door. Neither was true yet. On New Year's Day 1837 the site held twelve residents and one log cabin; four months later, 1,500 people.
The bayou was the whole argument, and a thin one. When the steamship Laura first reached the town in January 1837, the men aboard found the channel choked with branches and the settlement almost invisible from the water. It was still the fastest way farmers could move cotton, corn and hides to Galveston and Europe. Wharves opened in 1840 and the Port of Houston in 1841; by 1861 five rail lines ran out of the city. The government left for Austin in 1839; the trade stayed.
What made Houston a port in earnest was a catastrophe fifty miles away. After the 1900 hurricane destroyed Galveston, the case for a deep-water harbor further inland became hard to argue with, and in January 1910 Harris County voters approved — by sixteen to one — $1.25 million to dredge the channel to twenty-five feet, a sum the federal government then matched. President Woodrow Wilson opened the Houston Ship Channel on November 10, 1914. The port now handles more international waterborne tonnage than any other in the country.
Oil arrived a few years earlier, then chose Houston on purpose. On January 10, 1901, a well at Spindletop near Beaumont struck oil and threw it more than 150 feet into the air, running at something like 100,000 barrels a day. Petroleum stopped being lamp fuel and became the fuel of everything. The companies formed to work that field built their refineries along the Ship Channel, because an inland waterway was safe from Gulf storms in a way the open coast was not. Forty oil companies had offices in the city by 1929.
In September 1961, NASA chose a thousand acres of cattle pasture near Clear Lake for its new crewed-spaceflight center, land donated to Rice University by Humble Oil. The Manned Spacecraft Center opened in September 1963 and was renamed for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973. Mission Control took over American crewed flight with Gemini 4 in June 1965 and has run every mission since. On July 20, 1969, the first word Neil Armstrong radioed from the surface of the Moon was the name of this city: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
Houston built something almost as unlikely at home. The Astrodome opened on April 9, 1965 before a sold-out 47,879 — the world's first multi-purpose domed stadium, nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World before it had hosted a game. It started an industry by accident: glare through the roof panels made fly balls impossible to track, so two sections were painted over and the grass beneath died. Its replacement, ChemGrass, was renamed AstroTurf after the building. The Dome has been shut since 2009, though a 2017 landmark designation means it cannot legally be demolished.
The bayou that started it all spent a long time as an afterthought — for much of the 1800s it was both the city's sewer and its drinking water. In the 1960s a conservationist named Terry Hershey, working with her congressman George H. W. Bush, stopped a federal plan to line the straightened sections with concrete. Buffalo Bayou Park was completed in 2015 — 160 acres along a 2.3-mile stretch, at a cost of roughly $50 million. The water is still not clean, but it is a park now, not a drainage ditch.
West of the city the same floodplain grew something else. The prairie around Katy turned out to be good rice country, and the first concrete rice driers in Texas were built there in 1944; they are still standing. What changed that landscape was not farming but Interstate 10, which opened in 1966 and pulled Houston steadily westward into it. The Katy Prairie has shrunk to about a quarter of its former size.
Houston has always had a water problem, and it is the one nobody has solved. Floods in 1929 and 1935 produced the Harris County Flood Control District, which built the Barker and Addicks reservoirs. They were not enough. Hurricane Harvey stalled overhead in August 2017 and put down 32.47 inches in three days — a United States record for a major city — leaving an estimated quarter to a third of Harris County underwater. More lives and property have been lost to flooding here than in any other locality in the country.
What all of that built is a city of 2,304,580 people — fourth largest in the country — at the center of a metro of about 7.8 million. A 2012 study by Rice University's Kinder Institute found Greater Houston to be the most ethnically diverse metro in the country, measured by how evenly its population divides among four major racial groups; around 1.1 million residents, 21.4 percent, were born outside the United States. Of the ten largest American cities, Houston has the most parkland — 56,405 acres, much of it in the directory above.
Sources: Wikipedia · Handbook of Texas (TSHA)