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.
Each June, the gay pride parade surges down Westheimer Road, packing more than 200,000 celebrants into Montrose, the Houston neighborhood that nurtured and sustained the gay community when it was young and embattled and just emerging from the shadows. One recent year, amid the feathers and the leather and the outrageous floats, a spectator might have caught a glimpse of a neatly dressed, very proper white-haired lady in her mid-eighties riding at the head of the parade in a Ford Fusion.
Like many moments in Montrose, this one was spontaneous. The older lady’s husband, a World War II bomber pilot, had missed the detour to downtown, and once in the parade, there was no way out till the end. True to her well-mannered Southern soul, my sweet mother smiled and waved back politely to the cheering crowds.
When Texas Monthly began, there was no gay pride parade. There was, however, a Montrose, and before it became a refuge for gays, before it became a magnet for artists, writers, musicians, bikers, pagans, seekers, chefs, Greeks, Cubans, misfits, and lost and found souls, before it became the birthplace of Texas’s counterculture, all of which it was by 1973, Montrose was where my mother was born. I was born there too. So when my mother took her unintentional star turn in the gay pride parade, right down the very street where she’d grown up, it was really just one Montrose meeting another. It was weird, yes, but weird is what for the past forty years Montrose has been so gloriously about.
My grandfather built our house in the new development of Montrose before World War I. It was in the 500 block of Hathaway, a quiet street just east of Montrose Boulevard. He planted a magnolia and a fig tree in the backyard. When my mother was a child, Houston was a small city of 140,000 people and Southern to its core. The knife sharpener came to the door; so did the milkman and the iceman and the seamstress. The Tower Theater was down the road, and my mother would walk there on Saturdays, pay a nickel to watch cartoons, and on the way home pick buttercups in the vacant fields for her mother.
Lyndon Johnson taught school nearby, Howard Hughes lived around the corner, and Clark Gable studied acting down the street. Judy Garland could have burst out of the door singing “Meet Me in St. Louis” and she would have fit right in. By the time we started Texas Monthly, however, Montrose belonged to Judy Garland’s fans. Montrose then could be roughly—and debatably—defined as the four square miles bound by Shepherd to the west, West Gray to the north, Bagby to the east, and the Southwest Freeway to the south.
Hathaway had become an extension of Westheimer Road, and our old house was in the heart of the Westheimer Strip, ground zero of Montrose. A few of the other old houses along the Strip were still occupied, mainly by elderly white people who hadn’t followed Houston’s inexorable move out to the suburbs. Prufrock’s bar, one of the seminal counterculture hangouts of Montrose, was on the next block, and Michelangelo’s, one of the first casual European-style restaurants that changed how Houston ate out, was a block past that. A tattoo parlor was across the street.
That was the beauty of Montrose in 1973. It was a laboratory of primitive capitalism, unimpeded by details like zoning or pretty much any other restriction. You had an idea, you scraped together a few dollars, you rented a cheap old house, and your dream of a record store, a coffee shop, a bar, a roller rink, an antiques shop, there it was, right next to someone’s home or a nursery school or a Greek Orthodox church. Each block was Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never knew what you were going to get.
In 1965, when Greg Curtis and I were seniors at Rice University, we moved into an old house on Westheimer, a few doors down from where the Brasil cafe and gallery is today, though nothing so upscale was near us then. There was a Trash and Treasure junk store across the street, a strip joint a few blocks away, and for us, a wonderful sense of freedom. While we were living there, Greg and I helped start a Rice literary magazine called The Thresher Review, which was a huge success among three or four people besides our mothers. Still, we liked working together, so when I was assembling the staff for Texas Monthly, I called Greg first.
I had been living near Montrose when Mike Levy came to see me in early 1972. Mike had an idea for a new magazine about Texas. He would be its publisher, and he was looking for an editor. We met, as I recall, over a chicken-fried steak at Phil’s. Mike reached into a small suitcase and started pulling out issues of Philadelphia and New York magazines at warp speed, all the time pitching his idea. “We can do this here! Texas is ready for this!”
My main qualification to be the editor, it seemed to me, was that I didn’t know enough about journalism to know what a crazy idea it was. Mike was passionate and persuasive, but it took me a few months to wrap up my job at the Houston Independent School District and come on board. At the district, I’d been in charge of public affairs, and the reporter who’d given me the hardest time was an A&M graduate named Al Reinert. I recruited him too.
Al wrote about Apollo astronauts in our second issue and about Montrose in our third. Our original guiding principle at Texas Monthly was that even though most Texans now lived in cities, they still shared a vision of a frontier Texas that united them no matter where they lived. Even if you worked at a downtown law firm, you wore cowboy boots and dreamed of your ranch and the Alamo and Longhorn cattle. Montrose was another, emerging Texas: enthusiastically urban, bohemian, iconoclastic. We were going to write about that as well.
We had an account with the Plaza Hotel, which was built in 1926 as the cornerstone of Montrose. Many of the early leaders of Houston lived there. By the seventies, however, it was, like the neighborhood itself, occupied by widows and older residents. Shortly after Al moved in to work on other Texas Monthly stories, Bob Marley and the Wailers took over a floor to cut an album. They filled the hotel with the odors of the Rasta gumbo they cooked in their rooms during the day and the ganja they smoked at night. “It was a transformative moment for the hotel,” Al says. “The little old ladies moved out, and it became hip.”
Whenever I phoned Al, I had to go through the hotel operator, who was none other than my cousin Lisa Williams. Lisa had moved to Montrose and had become one of the Sisters of Mercy backup singers in the band Doctor Rockit. That, however, is another story. The point is, in Montrose, pretty much everything is connected. In the nineties, Al and I worked out of a house in Montrose when we built on his original article about astronauts to write the screenplay for Apollo 13 together.
Speaking of Doctor Rockit, Montrose has been home to blues and folk-rooted Texas music forever. There were the clubs Sand Mountain, La Maison, and Theodore’s, Anderson Fair, Numbers, Cody’s, and on and on. We listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb and the 13th Floor Elevators and the jazz of Jerry Sandifer. Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Billy Gibbons and Don Sanders paved the way for Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams and Beyoncé, who went to the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Montrose. Her mother had a hair salon on—where else?—Montrose Boulevard.
In the early seventies, if you were from the suburbs or a small town, or, really, just about anywhere, Montrose was a mindblower. Chances are you first heard the words “espresso,” “pasta,” and “sushi” somewhere along Westheimer. You could sit at a sidewalk cafe with some French onion soup and a glass of wine, you could sip cappuccinos on paisley cushions, you could listen to folk and jazz and blues and rock and roll, you could rub shoulders with hippies, artists, prophets, pagans, and even black people.
The fifties lay over Houston well into the early seventies. It was still a Southern city. Much was forbidden, unspoken, taboo. But in Montrose, anything was possible, anything was permitted. It was a spore, an incubator, a beachhead. Montrose was Texas’s Dada: it was the shock of the new. The campy, explicit mural outside the gay bar Mary’s said it all.
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