Contributors
Joel Warren Barna; Terrence Doody; Stephen Fox; Nonya Grenader; John Kaliski; Bill Mintz; Mitchell J. Shields; William F. Stern; Rives T. Taylor; and David Theis.
Cite 45: The Main Idea
Summer 1999
Editor’s Note
Barrie Scardino was the chair of the editorial committee for Cite 45. John Kaliski starts the cover story, "The Main Idea," with the following:
For almost 100 years, Main Street was exactly what its name suggcsted: the place that Houstonians identified as rhe center of their everyday as well as ceremonial lives. From the wharf at Allen's landing, through the business core of downtown, past the grand resiliences of local burghers, and to the cluster of cultural, open space, and educational facilities around Rice University, Main Street served as gathering space, home, place of work, and recreational resource for the city. Even with the advent of the automobile, Main Street, at least in the beginning, was able to adapt. Historic photographs show a rich diversity to approaches to both parking and building typologies respectful of the older 19th-century urban fabric and accommodating of early 20th century locomotion. For perhaps 30 years, from 1920 to 1950, the physical scale and form of Main Street matched well the dimensions ot the pedestrians, workers, residents, shoppers, and motorists who used the street.
The building ot the interstates did not so much kill Main Street as slowly strangle it, making obsolete much, though not all, of the thoroughfare's uses. By the 1980s, large blocks of land lav vacant in Midtown, while Main Street downtown was a fume-filled transfer point for buses. Even well-maintained destinations such as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Texas Medical Center increasingly turned their backs to Main. The street became unfriendly to pedestrians, more of a traffic conduit than a place, and its urban purpose in the framework of the city was ambiguous. During the 1990s there have been a series of efforts to deal with the deteriorating situation along Main. In 1992, moved to action by Houston's brief flirtation with zoning, the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects organized a workshop that brought together the city's schools ot architecture, politicians, and professionals to contemplate visions for Main Street's future. The organizers saw an opportunity to codify order along the corridor, and their publications are infused with optimism about a planning tool that Houstonians had traditionally eschewed. But the defeat of zoning at the polls rendered the spirit, if not the ideas, of this exercise moot.