Houston City Guide

But. The truth is Houston is a great destination for a long weekend, and even a week, especially in late fall when the cool weather has set in, or in early spring, when the azaleas are ablaze with every hue imaginable of pink, purple, red, and a cottony, almost otherworldly, white. What is finally coming to be accepted, after decades of ignorance (and snobbery, maybe), is that the fourth-largest city in the country has so much to offer visitors that trying to experience all the highlights in a short visit is impossible.

Yes, we have world-class high arts, like most big, impressive cities. You wouldn’t want to come here without checking out the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston or the Menil Collection. Nor should you miss sampling some of the rich performing arts offerings, including the Houston Grand Opera, the Houston Ballet, the symphony, the various nationally known theater companies—those artistic baselines that allow all big cities to claim high culture points. And we, of course, have professional sports teams: the Rockets, the Texans, the Astros, the Dynamo, and the Dash, with fancy stadiums to match. Additionally, a decade or so back, some community leaders decided that Quality of Life mattered and started pouring tens of millions into our parks, paying the world’s best landscape architects to convert once-beleaguered spaces into badly needed urban oases. (To recall the muddy ditch that has now become a stunning reflecting pool in Hermann Park is to recall an entirely different Houston.) You can rent a bike and traverse lush, grassy parts of the city that would never be imaginable from our infamous, myriad highways. Tall pines, sprawling oaks, teeming bayous, and the occasional alligator are all right there in the city limits.

But what really separates Houston from other major U.S. metropolises, and from other cities in Texas, is its vibrancy: the cultural, social, ethnic, geographical, and economic mix that gives this place a uniqueness can be found in everything from dinner out to a walk in the park. It isn’t just that you can have a Malaysian meal one night and breakfast tacos the next morning and a Cameroonian stew for lunch. Or that you can sample the work of a different James Beard Award winner at every meal during your stay. Or that you can spend your time shopping for saris off Westpark, Gucci at the Galleria, Brunello Cucinelli in the River Oaks District, and custom cowboy boots at Lucchese. It’s that Houstonians, for the most part, represent self-selection at its best: people are here because they want to be, because a certain kind of ambition drew them here.

They were willing to build a city in a place with a less than perfect climate and a less than perfect geographical location because it allowed them to follow their own dreams, whether those were to become an energy zillionaire or to send a child traumatized by violent revolution in another corner of the world safely to school. As in Los Angeles, every neighborhood tells a different story, from the funkiness of Montrose and the Heights to the (sometimes over-the-top) flamboyance of River Oaks, the vibrancy of Houston’s several Chinatowns, and the great Latino ebb and flow that is Gulfton.

Here, mixing it up is everything. And so you get an architectural mélange, from the late Philip Johnson’s downtown skyscrapers and John Milkovisch’s Rice Military bungalow covered in beer cans to the oil barons’ elegant mansions of Shadyside and the shotgun shacks of the Fourth Ward. But you have to look fast. Historic preservation remains a relatively new concept here, change the dominant constant. (As the late Houston Post publisher [and the first director of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps] Oveta Culp Hobby once said, “I think I’ll like Houston—if they ever get it finished.”)

This openness and optimism so permeates the city—most of us have lived through at least one oil boom and bust, not to mention hurricanes and flooding—that you are likely to feel welcome at the trendiest restaurant or the humblest dive. Houston asks you to see the world in all its forms and join in.