Photo: Allyn West.
Photo: Allyn West.
Photo: Allyn West.
OffCite invites short essays, reviews, and observations on specific moments and places for our CiteSeeing series. Interested in contributing your own? Let us know.
Houston's East End is bordered by the Ship Channel, U.S. 59, I-10, and I-45. Both the edges and the essence of the neighborhood, in other words, could be defined by transportation. The convenient confluence of Buffalo and Brays bayous, allowing the early trading post of Harrisburg to be sited here by John Richardson Harris in the 1820s, has since been supplemented, if not supplanted, by freeways and heavy rail. Not to mention light rail and a few hike and bike trails, too.
That's why the public art by Paul Kittelson installed recently along the forthcoming East End Line makes so much sense: This, it says, is a kind of manic crossroads.
Drawn by METALAB and built and fabricated by Merge Studios, the three wonky, weathervane-like signs of Kittelson's You Are Here each stand about 16 feet tall. The METALAB blog describes them as "extreme way-finding." You can find them on Harrisburg Boulevard beside the Magnolia Park Transit Center station on the East End Line.
When the light rail (eventually) whizzes past, the planks on the signs will jangle like a wind chime.
One is hung with planks that point locally, to Humble and Hermann Park; another points across Texas from El Paso to Abilene; and a third points globally, positioning Houston right in the center of things as an international locus --- and the East End, particularly, as the hub of it all, where trains, semis, and ships converge and diverge, arrive and depart.
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