My Montrose
Forty years (and more) of the exuberant, eclectic neighborhood where I was born, grew as a writer, and found inspiration for the early pages of this magazine.
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Austin played something of the same role in birthing the new. But Austin was a relaxed, accepting university town. It was safe. Montrose was an island surrounded by the hostile Houston sea. It was the Gaza Strip of the counterculture. Its radio station KPFT was bombed off the air. You never knew whether the next carful of rednecks would be friendly or jump out with two-by-fours, as Paul Broussard, a young gay A&M graduate, would find out some years later when he was beaten so severely in a Montrose alley that he died.
Montrose has always had a dark side: the runaways, the junkies, the hustlers, the exploited, and the hopeless. In the eighties, the AIDS plague years, Mary’s back patio hosted three or four memorial services a week. For the most part, however, Montrose was a tolerant place, a cease-fire zone where the bent and the straight could all sit down and have late coffee at Art Wren’s when their respective bars closed.
Doug Miller, Houston’s iconic newscaster, moved to the city because “my brother told me that I had to come, that Montrose was Paris.” John Wilburn, who came from New York and went on to be the founding editor of the Houston Press, was told that “Montrose is Greenwich Village.” He laughed at first, having just come from the real thing, but as he settled in, he realized that while no, it wasn’t Greenwich Village, it was Montrose, and that was just fine.
I’m still waiting for someone to compare Montrose to Berlin during the Weimar Republic, since Liza Minnelli in Cabaret validates my Judy Garland reference, or to the Rome of the decadent period, but that moment may have passed. Vance Muse, the communications director at the Menil Collection, was born just south of Montrose. He worked in New York for years, then came back a decade ago and finds it, together with his partner, “one of the most comfortable neighborhoods anywhere.”
The Menil Collection is part of the high culture Montrose also nurtured. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Contemporary Arts Museum are on its southern border. John and Dominique de Menil engaged the modernist architect Philip Johnson to conceive and expand the central campus of the University of St. Thomas on Montrose Boulevard and to design a nearby chapel that would feature huge, moody paintings by Mark Rothko. When they realized that their collection of contemporary art needed its own museum, they built one right behind the mansion of Montrose’s original developer. One vision leads into another. The museum, by Renzo Piano, is consistently named one of the most influential works of modern architecture. It also has a very inviting tree swing.
As almost everything in Montrose is connected in one way or another, the Menils were early backers of Mickey Leland, an activist from Texas Southern University who in 1973 was one of the first African Americans to serve in the Texas House. He went on to be elected to the U.S. Congress and years later tragically died in a plane crash while working to end hunger in Africa. Mickey wore dashikis and platform shoes, called himself a revolutionary, orated on injustice with sparks and passion, and in private had a sly, sweet smile and an easy laugh. Mickey loved Montrose. I met him there through my old friend and now-world-famous naturalist Victor Emanuel, who was then working on Mickey’s first campaign.
In the fifties Victor’s grandmother Sallie Williams bought the house next door to ours on Westheimer and converted it into an antiques store, one of the first commercial ventures on our street. After my grandmother died, Sallie sold her shop, and the new owners bought our house and expanded the business. In the late summer you could stroll into the backyard and pick ripe figs off the trees and smell the sweet thickness of the magnolia flowers, just as I had when I was a boy. But then a developer bought both houses, tore them down, and put up a strip mall. The trees had to go. They, and my memories, disappeared under the concrete. Like the old houses, they were in the way.
The small-scale capitalism that reclaimed the neighborhood for mom-and-pop and pop-and-pop businesses gave way to the pitiless capitalism of the real estate developer and the creed of highest and best use. Down came the great old houses. Up went the strip centers, town house blocks, chain stores. A few years ago Dan Havel and Dean Ruck created a public art sensation when they took two twenties cottages on Montrose Boulevard and inverted them, turning them outside in. You could crawl through a tunnel made from exterior siding into the guts of the houses and then out their backs. Of course, the whole thing was then torn down, but there’s a nice coffee shop called Inversion there now. A photomural of the project is on the wall. You can read the Montrose gay newspaper and watch the NFL.
Off the major streets, many of the old cottages remain, but much of Montrose looks more and more like every other gentrified downtown neighborhood, only with worse roads. Houston has breached the borders and swarmed over the last redoubts. People with money want to live where the cool people live, so they move in and drive up prices and the cool people can’t afford the cool area anymore. They move out to the Heights or even to Acres Homes or distant, now diverse and accepting suburbs like Pearland.
Montrose was always a place where you could come to have a casual dinner or a walk on the wild side. But now the wild places are harder to find. Like Greenwich Village, Montrose has become something of a Disneyland for the suburban crowd. Most of the old hangouts are long gone. Felix’s, the simple Mexican restaurant where I ate as a child, is now Uchi, one of the hottest venues in town. As with many Montrose restaurants, you need a reservation. Few artists or writers or seekers could even afford a glass of wine there, much less linger over it for hours like in the old days.
For years, there was one place you could go in Montrose and count on bumping into everybody. “I hung out at Prufrock’s, Churchill’s, Theodore’s, Anderson Fair, you name it,” says longtime Houston restaurateur Bill Sadler. “Then I decided I was spending so much money in other people’s places I might as well start my own.” Bill’s first place was the River Cafe, on Montrose Boulevard, and in the eighties it became the one place to be. Bill promoted artists and writers and musicians, and since nothing impresses writers more than flattery, we loved him.
In 1989 Bill, Doug Miller, and other journalists started the Roundtable at the River Cafe, where writers and self-selected troublemakers like senators and governors met every Wednesday night. Bill’s next place was Cafe Noche, on the other side of Westheimer; it was even more casual and, in the early nineties, even more of a magnet. But Cafe Noche is no more, the Roundtable meets in Midtown, and Bill’s latest restaurant, Arturo’s, is outside the loop. There’s no one place to hang out anymore. The artists, writers, and musicians have dispersed all over town. Most of Houston’s gays don’t live in Montrose anymore.
When I returned on a recent visit, I realized Montrose is like someone you loved when you were young. You want to remember them as they were, but they’ve changed and so have you. Still, for every generation, Montrose is born again. When they were in high school, my young nephews Ben and Jake Breier would sneak out of their house to hang out in Montrose. They still go to Rudyard’s, Poison Girl, Boondocks, and Helios (now AvantGarden), a performance art, totally-out-there rock and roll bar where you can also see belly dancers, Thai musicians, and the occasional string quartet. It’s right next to where my mother grew up, so in a Montrose kind of way, they’re going home. And Montrose is still a place where you can build a dream, as a former busboy named Hugo did. He now owns one of the best restaurants in town, across the street from where Greg Curtis and I lived almost fifty years ago.
Montrose may be losing the battle, but it’s definitely won the war. At the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the International Terminal is named for Mickey Leland. The juxtaposition of those two names says it all. When it began, the gay pride parade was rough-edged, insecure, and in your face. Houston didn’t like it one bit. Now it’s the biggest event in town besides the Livestock Show and Rodeo, and many Houstonians happily attend both. Among the sponsors are the Houston Chronicle, Walgreens, and Bud Light. The mayor rides on a float.
Of course, the mayor, for two terms now, is Annise Parker, the first openly gay mayor of a major American city. And she lives, yes, in Montrose, where she and her partner are raising three children. A nice, stable family, just up the road from where my mother grew up. Forty years ago, stable families were not what Montrose was known for, and Mayor Parker’s family is not the kind that Houston was once known for either. But today it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
When we started Texas Monthly, Houston had 1.2 million people and was majority white and still a conservative oil town. Now it has more than 2 million people and is 26 percent white, and it’s one of the most diverse, vibrant, and interesting cities in America. And my mother still loves it, which is what counts. Could you have expected any of that back in 1973? No, not unless you lived in Montrose.
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