Short Cuts: Episode I 
Montrose Lives!
There's something for everyone in Houston's Montrose, the strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos.
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The Montrose has also been the focus for organic/health food/vegetarian restaurants and stores ever since the Natural Child proved you could sell food even without the chemicals. The area now supports close to a dozen such places, including one where you can pay whatever you figure a meal happens to be worth. Wonder how that would go over on Westheimer Strip…
Another Montrose restaurant that is way, way off the Strip, in more ways than one, is Zorba's, long held dear by Houston's restaurant aficionados. Frequented by Greek sailors whenever a ship's in port, Zorba's proffers a raucous Mediterranean camaraderie that is, perhaps, less élégant than that offered on the Strip, but more fun.
Ever since 20 immigrants built Houston's first Greek Orthodox Church in 1917, the Montrose has served as the center of Greek community activities. Two of Houston's three Eastern Orthodox churches are there. The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Yoakum is, in addition, the seat of the Eighth Archdiocesan District of the Greek Orthodox faith, encompassing 11 states from Mississippi to Wyoming, as well as Panama, Venezuela and Columbia.
Which brings us back to Prufrock's. We mean, if you were writing an article about a place that was the favorite hangout of River Oaks bridge clubs, Cuban exiles, Greeks, junkies, runaways, drug store cowboys and God knows who else, wouldn't you run for cover? It's not like all we had to do was knock out a piece about Highland Park or someplace simple.
That's why we said you needed to know about Prufrock's to understand this article. We sure needed Prufrock's to survive writing it, and to help writing it: sooner or later, someone is gonna turn up there who knows the history of the trolley car lines or where Tab Hunter used to live, or has a good rap about the lady who lives with 500 cats. Montrose is full of weirdness like that, and Prufrock's is one of the places where it all kind of comes together and you can sit back with a beer and soak it all in.
It's like interviewing Dorothy (she owns the place, remember?); you don't really interview people in the Montrose, you just sorta sit around and talk with 'em and scribble notes like mad hoping that something in there will be of some use. Dorothy owns another bar a couple of blocks down from Prufrock's called the Round Table, which has been open for seven years now and was one of Houston's first gay bars. "I'd been looking all over Houston for a place to open a gay bar and this just seemed the natural place for it," she says.
The Montrose, then as now, was the center of Houston's homosexual community, which many people say is one of the largest in the nation. "We don't live or work here (the Montrose) necessarily, but we play here," is the way a man we'll call, say, Ralph, puts it. Ralph is one of the four directors of a gay organization called Integrity, which was formed by a local church as "a forum to air our difficulties," He characterized it as "the more moderate" of the two existing gay organizations, the other being the Montrose Gaze, a community center founded by "younger, more militant" gays who split away from Integrity. The Houston chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, which would be a third group, is, Ralph says, "dead," expired from terminal publicity.
Ralph estimates that close to two-thirds of the "30 or 40" gay bars in Houston are located in the Montrose, including the Bayou Landing, reputed to be the biggest gay dance hall between the East and West Coasts.
Many gays feel that they have had a significant impact on the development of the Montrose. "The intrigue helps the area, I think," says Ralph, "like Bourbon Street." Joe Anthony, owner of Mary's Lounge and active with Montrose Gaze, is more outspoken, contending that "the area is going to grow around the gay community and businessmen have to accept us because if they didn't, they'd be out of business," a statement with which Willie Rometsch is "very much" in agreement.
Although both Ralph and Anthony agree that the gay community is "not particularly well organized," they both see an amorphous cohesiveness that "is beginning to come together" enough to exercise a little leverage in their own behalf. "Most gays are pretty conservative voters," Ralph says. "But if you give them a candidate who will speak to their issues, and support their interests, then they'll support him."
He gives as an example State Representative Ron Waters, a 23-year-old law clerk who defeated a former House member last year to win his seat from newly-drawn District 79, the population center of which is the Montrose. Waters ran on a typically liberal platform of legislative and tax reforms, but included strongly libertarian positions on the decriminalization of marijuana and the repeal of laws regulating abortions and sexual conduct between consenting adults, all hot issues in the Montrose.
"There are lots of gays who are conservative, who voted for me, who worked for me," Waters says. "Because I'm committed to the gay cause, I can be open and public about it—to say in an official capacity that there's nothing wrong with gay love. To admit that I have gay friends, gay people on my staff, and to introduce them as such, should have a radicalizing influence."
Waters, who sees the Montrose as "an identifiable political subdivision with its own particular interests," admits that he may be less than successful in satisfying those interests in Austin. "I'm practical enough to know that everything I introduce isn't going to pass, but I think in many ways the forum is probably more important then in actual legislation. After all, I'm only in Austin about six months every two years, and I can devote the rest of my time inside the district working on local problems."
One constituent who will likely pass up the chance of seeking his legislator's assistance is another Montrose politician, former GOP State Senator Henry (Hank) Grover, who last year narrowly missed becoming Texas' first Republican Governor since the Federal troops pulled out of Austin. (Another Waters constituent, who misses being a full-blooded Montrosite by a scant half-dozen blocks, is Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby.) "Hank is probably a hang-over from the old Montrose; he's part of the transition," is the way Waters sees his arch-conservative constituent.
Which, needless to say, is not the way Grover sees it: "The hippie image of the Montrose is changing because the land values are going up, and the low rent areas are disappearing." Grover has lived in the Montrose for 25 years, went to college there, worked at his brother's gas station down on Westheimer, taught at nearby Lamar High School and was one of the first to dabble in Montrose real estate.
"I've been trying to sell people on this area for a long time. I was the first person to start blocking up property around here. It's financed me in politics." Grover started buying up dilapidated frame houses in the ‘fifties, restoring them and renting them out. "I had my own urban renewal project," he says. In time, he accumulated almost an entire square block on which he intended to build high rise apartments—"this area should have high rises built here, it's perfect for it, convenient to downtown"—but he was forced to sell it during his gubernatorial race.
During the days Grover was teaching in Houston high schools, he was following in the footsteps of another one-time Montrose resident who taught in them and went on to considerably more success in politics: Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's cousin, Mrs. Dorothy Askew, who still lives in the house where "Lyndon shared the corner bedroom with my uncle," says "I guess he thought it was pretty swell; he was a poor boy who didn't make much then, and it was back in the Depression when any place with a roof was a good place to be."
Montrose area schools, in the days when Lyndon Johnson was teaching (1931-32) were widely acclaimed to be the finest in Houston. "All the schools around here were the best in town then," remembers Mrs. Askew, who went to Montrose Elementary and San Jacinto High. "Mayor Holcomb's niece went there, and Lynn (Mrs. Glenn) McCarthy. Roy Hofheinz was a classmate of mine. We had the cream of the crop—high society. Most of my close friends and I went right into Rice University.
If Montrose area schools are no longer "high society," they are still, by contemporary urban standards, among the best in town. Zoned together with the poverty-struck black Fourth Ward in a court-ordered integration plan, Montrose area schools seemed ripe for the kind of private school exodus that plagued other parts of the Houston Independent School District. Typically untypical, the upper middle-class parents of the lower Montrose, urbane and liberally inclined, rallied in support of their public schools to infuse them with community spirit and educational excitement.
Four-year-old Lincoln Jr-Sr. High School, which services part of the area, has been termed by school district officials "the most successfully integrated school in the city." Parents teamed with black school principal Elwood Piper to help win a $40,000 Emergency Assistance Program grant that has sent students to the ballet, opera, Alley Theatre, the Manned Spacecraft Center, and the Contemporary Arts Museum. One-time Montrose author David Westheimer (Von Ryan's Express, My Sweet Charley), after whose family the street is named, spent a week with the high school English classes.
"We've had excellent community cooperation," says Piper, "far better than most other places in the city."
The community projects have brought people together who would have never met by chance. We've had fiestas, ethnic celebrations, parent-teacher basketball games, invitations to the staff to visit in the homes and churches of the neighborhood."
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