Table of Contents
Contributors
Lynn M. Herbert; Karl Kilian; Barry Moore; Malcolm Quantrill; Barrie Scardino; Ann Walton Sieber; Mitchell J. Shields; Steven R. Strom; and Drexel Turner.
This issue of Cite, appearing as we turn the corner into Y2K, has the feel of a bookmark --- a large one that may cause us to stop and look back over the triumphs and missed opportunities of our urban past, as well as forward to what could be.
We've chosen to use this pause between millennia to mull over some of the things that have tended tos et Houston apart. Among the more obvious distinctions is the city's inseparable connection to water, and how that has shaped its gorwth and formed its character. We also look at the various nicknames that, over the eyars, Houstonians have given their hometown in an attempt to define that character. To name something properly, after all, is to capture its essence, and if we can understand the city's names, perhaps we can also better understand the city itself. Of course, such an understanding requires knowing where we came from, and to that end we cast a backward glance at some of the architecture of quality and wonder that the city has let slip through its fingers. Similarly, we had noted scuptor Jim Love and longtime museum curator Ed mayo reminisce about that period in the 1950s and 1960s when, for better or worse, the Houston art world was evolving from a community of volunteers into a realm populated by paid professionals.
To put all of this into a context, beginning below and runnign along the bottom of the next five pages we have a 20th-century timeline organized to hint at the interrelationship between national events, Houston civic events, and the architecture we see or emember. It stops, as all timelines must, in the now. But it is easy to imagine it stretching out over infinite future pages.
Happy new millennium, readers. Use your bookmarks well.
Lynn M. Herbert; Karl Kilian; Barry Moore; Malcolm Quantrill; Barrie Scardino; Ann Walton Sieber; Mitchell J. Shields; Steven R. Strom; and Drexel Turner.