A Tale of Six Cities
Forty years of urban Texas, as told through the archives of Texas Monthly.
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In truth, this isn’t just [DJ] Screw’s story. It’s also that of the gritty urban subculture around him, one in which young black men struggle daily with the pathologies of drugs and violence. But here on the south side of Houston, you’ll also find astonishing creativity, powerful dreams, and an unrelenting capitalistic spirit that fits right in with the city’s long wildcatting tradition.
Michael Hall, “The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw,” April 2001
[Jeffrey Skilling’s] eyes flash as he talks about new technologies. “The first wave never gets it right,” he says. “The stand-alone dot-coms didn’t work, but the technological applications will create a second wave that will change the world.” Houston, he promises, will become the world’s center of commodity trading, and he intends to be a part of it. In fact, he is already shopping for office space.
Mimi Swartz, “How Enron Blew It,” November 2001
Since the election of populist mayor Raymond C. Caballero last year, the [McKelligon Canyon Quarry] has been the pluperfect symbol of his crusade to transform this sprawling, poverty-ridden border city into a smoke-free, smart-growth, high-wage, ecologically pristine health mecca. (Think Portland, Oregon. Or Austin—at least the Austin of myth.) . . . The mayor is, in effect, trying to force developers and businesses back into the city’s core, the same sort of “urban infill” strategy that places like Portland and Austin have employed with mixed success. But out here on the free-market frontier, it’s a deeply divisive idea. No El Paso politician has ever dared to suggest it, let alone try it.
S. C. Gwynne, “Ray’s Quarry,” August 2002
The Fourth Decade (2003–2012)
The state of the twenty-first century.
The downturns of 2000 and 2007 didn’t spare Texas, but the state weathered the bad times better than most and is now regarded as the nation’s economic powerhouse, its cities growing more rapidly than ever. The magazine saw more changes this decade, as Levy retired in 2008 to be ultimately replaced by current president Elynn J. Russell, and Smith resigned a year later, in 2009, to be replaced by current editor in chief Jake Silverstein. The offices also moved twice, ending up on the seventeenth floor of the former Frost Bank tower, a building that, in 1988, we declared to have the world’s worst parking garage. Circulation held steady at 300,000, while readership reached an all-time high of 2.6 million.
As a friend has noted, if Willie hadn’t been forced out of Nashville and if dope hadn’t been so cheap in Austin, and if Michael Dell hadn’t dropped out of UT and started selling computers from his dorm room, and if Whole Foods founder John Mackey hadn’t believed he could make a buck selling sprouts and granola bars, who knows where we’d be today?
When you think about our current crop of Texas heroes, you think about those three individuals, along with Lance Armstrong, Ann Richards, and filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater. What do they have in common? All of them are rebels, and they all live in Austin.
Gary Cartwright, “My Blue Heaven,” February 2006
“No one seems to have any idea what is happening down here,” says Amanda Escobedo, a 65-year-old community advocate in southwest Houston who has spent nearly twenty years holding workshops and speaking at schools, trying to persuade kids to stay out of gangs. “The nice Houston people who live in the nice Houston neighborhoods and who come shop at the nice Galleria don’t have any idea—or don’t care—that the apartments that they all used to live in have now become a war zone. And it is a war zone, make no mistake about it. Every week, I hear about a stabbing or a shooting or a drive-by that doesn’t make the newspapers. It never, ever stops.”
Skip Hollandsworth, “You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark,” December 2006
Stuck in the middle of flyover America, the Metroplex has transformed itself into a globalized, fly-to destination, with the world’s third-busiest airport as its entrepôt and a cosmopolitan population that stands on its ear the oft-heard, covertly racist rubric that our nation’s multicultural coastal metropolises aren’t the “real America”—the implication being that a more homogeneous heartland presumably is. Yet here in the heart of real-deal Texas, the nation’s largest red-state megalopolis is actually a showcase for all-American diversity.
Michael Ennis, “The Mighty Metroplex,” January 2007
In case you haven’t been stuck in one of its newfangled traffic jams, San Antonio is now riding the crest of a broad, diversified boom that is unlike anything Texas has ever seen. Corporate campuses of granite and travertine blossom like bluebonnets on the city’s undeveloped outer edges. Vast residential subdivisions bearing names like Redbird Ranch march north and west across parts of the Hill Country that until recently housed only rock quarries and raccoons. Roads are being torn up and rebuilt, pipelines and power lines laid, limestone ridges blasted with dynamite and sculpted by Caterpillar tractors. It is hog heaven for builders, boosters, and developers and a slowly gathering nightmare for environmentalists, residents of old core neighborhoods left behind by the skyrocketing growth, and a lot of folks who liked San Antonio as it was.
S. C. Gwynne, “Boom With a View,” December 2007
Corruption is a betrayal of civic virtue, and this particular scandal could not have come at a worse moment for El Paso. For the first time since the old industries began shutting down, the city’s economic prospects are on the rise. . . . Fort Bliss is booming, with billions of dollars in new construction under way and thousands of troops scheduled to relocate there, along with their dependents. The Texas Tech medical school, which was recently accredited, will begin admitting four-year students next year. . . . The University of Texas at El Paso is rapidly growing as well. Perhaps these developments will jolt El Paso’s somnambulant business community, whose leaders have been generous with their philanthropy but largely indifferent to improving the lot of the minority population here. They have shown little interest in encouraging and embracing future leaders, as their counterparts in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio have been doing since the eighties.
Paul Burka, “Fed Up,” April 2008
The names of Houston’s governing couple, in fact, have been on everyone’s lips since [Annise] Parker became
the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. . . . Many Houstonians heard from other incredulous observers outside the state, receiving correspondence similar to an e-mail I got from a friend in Washington, D.C. “How did this happen???” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
Of course, if you lived in Houston, you did understand, and you found yourself hauling out the same tired saws about Houston that local boosters have been pushing for decades . . . : Houston is the fourth-largest city in the nation. Houston has one of the largest gay populations in the U.S. Houston is sophisticated and diverse; the fourteen-member city council features a Mr. Hoang, a Mr. Rodriguez, a Mr. Gonzalez, several black men and women, and a white lesbian, Sue Lovell, along with the assorted plain vanillas, and that’s not a particularly recent development.
Mimi Swartz, “Out and About,” March 2010
Over the clatter of cutlery, [Julián] Castro laid out his audacious vision for his administration: to create 20,000 new jobs in 2010, go to war against the city’s 50 percent high school dropout rate, build a new streetcar system, invest in renewable sources of energy, rebuild downtown, and forge relationships beyond our borders with, of all places, Shanghai. San Antonio has long envisioned itself as sleepy and insular, slightly removed from the center of action, so Castro’s hip, urban, and expansive style represents, well, something new.
Jan Jarboe Russell, “Alamo Heights,” May 2010
Envisioned as the “signature” of the twenty-first-century city, the elegant arch [of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge] is a letterhead-ready icon of soaring aspirations. Already as you drive by the futuristic, shimmering fractal construction . . . it’s hard to escape the metaphor of Dallas’s ascent, in little more than a century and a half, from a lone log cabin on the Trinity to a metropolis intent on becoming one of the world’s great places.
Michael Ennis, “Arch of Triumph,” August 2011
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