The next Sunday Streets HTX is November 2 from noon to four in the Greater Third Ward along Dowling, Alabama, and Almeda. This route will be the fifth one this year. With each sun and rain and sweat drenched Sunday Street, we have stretched our collective imagination, reworking the “structure of feeling” of Houston’s public realm. The events are ephemeral. Once the crowds are gone we are back to cracked sidewalks for pedestrians and big wide lanes for cars. And yet, Sunday Streets change our understanding of what is possible. Sunday Streets establish a sense of belonging. Fears are relinquished. Whole landscapes are seen afresh.

And of all the routes, I believe this one in the Greater Third Ward --- this mile-and-a-half lightning bolt --- has the greatest significance and potential. It is a chance to experience history and a chance to make history. I hope you will be there.

Read below for a bottom-up, unofficial, incomplete guide to what you can expect once you arrive. I’ll start from the north east side of the route at Dowling and Elgin.

 Raj Mankad. NuWaters Co-operative at the El Dorado Ballroom building. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Progressive Amateur Boxing. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Solar Decathlon House. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Iterations of the Six Square House. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Flowers bloom outside Cleveland Turner's home. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Doshi House. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Project Row Houses. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Vanessa Diaz's "In Considering Placemaking." Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Rosine Kouamen's "Anlu Is Protest." Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Houston B-cycle has a location in front of Project Row Houses. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Bungalow preservation. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Alabama Street. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. 288 and 59 overpasses divide the neighborhood. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Axelrad Building. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Midtown Mobile Cuisine. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Freeway over Almeda. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Site of Weingarten's Sit-In, now a Post Office. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Cafe 4212. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

 Raj Mankad. Peggy Park. Photo: Raj Mankad.

 

The Dowling and Elgin terminus of the November 2 Sunday Street is the site of the storied El Dorado Ballroom. In his 2005 article for Cite, "Howling on Dowling," Barry Moore writes, "The El Dorado Ballroom was built in 1939 by philanthropist Anna Dupree and her jazz impresario husband Clarence to establish a 'class' venue for black social clubs and general entertainment. They hired architect Lenard Gabert, a graduate of Rice's first architecture class in 1916, who produced a streamlined modernistic building with a rounded corner facing the intersection." Moore continues, "Roger Wood's Down in Houston, a great book about Houston's jazz and blues legacy, quotes trumpet player Calvin Owens: 'Playing the El Dorado — I mean that's like saying, OK, I've made it.' And impresario John Green adds, 'The El Dorado Ballroom was top of the line. Oh yeah, back in those days, people would really get dressed to hear a band there!' The site was celebrated in Conrad Johnson's 1947 single, 'Howling on Dowling,' recorded in Houston's Gold Star Record Studio."

The first floor of the El Dorado is home to NuWaters Co-operative, a fruit and vegetable store run by volunteers. NuWaters has organized a martial arts demonstration, a double Dutch demonstration, a Jamaican food truck, yoga, and music by DJ VooDoo!

Next to the El Dorado Ballroom is the Progressive Amateur Boxing building. Sometimes you can see classes outside jabbing away at the air.

If you meander a little down Stuart Street, and I do recommend that you wander off and on the route, you may see the Solar Decathlon House, designed and built by Rice University students. It was built on a radically affordable budget for a site in the Third Ward, transported to Washington D.C. for an international competition, and brought back to Houston where it has served as a home for resident artists with Project Row Houses. OffCite covered this project in four articles you can find here. The publisher of this blog, Rice Design Alliance, contributed to its construction.

Wander down Francis Street in one direction and you'll see several iterations of the Six Square House, a design developed by the Rice Building Workshop under the leadership of Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader. (Read about their ongoing efforts to build architecture and community.) At least 25 duplexes have been built using this prototype near Project Row Houses and in other neighborhoods. These houses, which are private residences not open to visitors, have generous porches and shared backyards that update and continue the tradition of the vernacular "shotgun" row house.

Wander down Francis Street in the other direction and you'll find the house of the late Cleveland Turner, a.k.a. the Flower Man. The house was a "transcendent shelter," as Lisa Simon writes, in constant flux when Turner was alive. He collected material from all over the city to fasten to its exterior. Now the site is in a state of beautiful decay.

At the corner of Dowling and Holman is a cafe called Doshi House that serves excellent vegetarian food. I recommend their smoothies and the Mumbai Streets panini. You'll find OffCite (this blog) teaming up again with the Inprint Poetry Buskers on the Doshi House porch where some of the most gifted poets in the country will compose verse on site, on demand, on typewriters on themes specified by you.

Just beyond Doshi House on Holman Street are the original row houses that Rick Lowe and fellow artists rehabilitated twenty years ago as spaces for site-specific installations. You can learn more about that story in the write-up by the MacArthur Foundation for their induction of Lowe in their "genius" Fellows Program. A new series of art installations just opened that explores artistic process and labor issues. Take the time to go in each house. Children are welcome. The experience of the art is more unfiltered and raw than in most museums. During a visit last week, my daughter and I were taken by the reshaping of the interior spaces by Vanessa Diaz in her "In Considering Placemaking" and Rosine Kouamen's "Anlu Is Protest." Learn more about the artists here.

The entire neighborhood around Dowling has an unscripted, improvisational beauty. The variety and repitition of building types, the spaces between buldings, the uneven grid, the alleys define its character. The Third Ward north of Alabama around Dowling is in many ways a cousin of the neighborhood around the Menil Collection. Located two and a half miles down the road from one another, both have a remarkably strong sense of place, repose, and culture.

Alabama Street will provide ample room to bicycle, walk, run, unicycle, or otherwise move your body. The main event is simply being in the street in the company of your neighbors and friends.

Until the demographic shifts of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Alabama was the dividing line in a segregated Houston. "Negros" could live north of the street but not to the south. This Sunday Streets carries extra importance because a street that once divided the city will serve as a public space where all are invited.

The clearance of the right of way and construction of 288 between 1968 and 1984 displaced hundreds of families, and redefined the boundaries of what was considered the Third Ward. During Sunday Streets, these intimidating structures can be experienced differently. Alone you would be in a space out of scale with the individual, but together we will fill it. A flash of possibility that sustains the imagination or brings about change.

On Alabama west of the overpass is "This Old House" painted with a quote from Picasso: "Creation is first of all an act of destruction." All the land around it has been cleared. The building seems to stand defiantly yet calls out for its own demise.

Where the route will turn onto Almeda from Alabama, you will see the Axelrad Building hung with an art work by Jamal Cyrus, a member of the collective known as Otabenga Jones and Associates. The piece, "A Jackson in Your House," is made of two white sheets with bold lettering that reads, "THE SHOW IS OVER...THE SHOW IS OVER." Robert Boyd discusses the work on the blog The Great God Pan Is Dead. One block off the route at Alabama and La Branch, from one to four p.m., The Station Museum is marking the Day of the Dead by remembering the lives of migrants lost in attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico Border through South Texas.

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This stretch of concrete adjacent to the freeway will be one of the nodes for activity on the route. Ren Garrett, the owner of Midtown Mobile Cuisine: Midtown's Food Truck Park, has worked with her neighbors to put together a program of music, arts, crafts, martial arts, yoga, and, of course, food trucks.

The freeway over Almeda is begging for some kind of activation. The 2012 rdAgents charrette entries called for some kind of utilization of this ready-made, monumental shady place. Bike Houston will be doing just that by managing a bicycle corral under the freeway.

The site of Houston's first sit-in is on Almeda just to the south of the freeway. In 1960 a group of students from Texas Southern University marched here and sat at the Weingarten's lunch counter, challenging an entire social, economic, and political order simply by asking to be served food. In a Houston Chronicle report on the 50th anniversary unveiling of a historical marker, Moises Mendoza writes, "The successful sit-in was the catalyst for more protests throughout Houston. By the end of the year, Houston businesses were largely desegregated." A temporary B-cycle station will be located at the post office.

During the desegregation efforts of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, most Whites moved out of the neighborhood. Businesses owned by African Americans took root along Almeda. Even as the area has been given new names (Midtown and Museum District), townhouses pop up, and the demographics change, a strong African-American entrepreneurial community continues to thrive along Almeda today.

 Raj Mankad. Pursuit. Photo: Raj Mankad.

I have been told that Cafe 4212 on Almeda will have live music inside and a saxophonist on the sidewalk.

The Haus Project is putting together some kid-friendly games in Peggy Park with a giant pink parachute!

Obey Dwight. Come enjoy Sunday Streets. Now is the time to imagine another way to live in this city.

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