Houston - What a shithole!

YAY! I'm back from Houston after a four-day transportation conference. The conference went very well and all three of our presentations came off without a hitch. I even got not one but two "Oooh"s from the audience during mine. Seriously, yay!

But that's not the real story of the trip. The real story is that Houston is a big shithole. I can't believe that it's the fourth-largest city in America (by population -- it covers a huge swath of Texas though); I can't imagine anybody wanting to ever live there.

First of all, downtown is incredibly dreary. The photo above is a main downtown Houston street at about 7:05pm, and as you can see there is one car, and one bus, for as far as the eye can see. I did manage to get one blurry pedestrian in the photo, which was also a surprise because, believe me, nobody walks anywhere in Houston. Even the McDonalds had already shut its doors by 7:00. Totally dead.

Then one night I took a cab out the 'burbs to find the gay bars with my fellow queer transit planners. The neighborhood known as "Montrose" has all the gay bars clustered together, which definitely had a feeling of circling the wagons in enemy territory. The neighborhood had "sidewalks" but I use the term loosely, because some blocks actually didn't have any sidewalks, and others had sidewalks at one point in the past, but now had ripped up concrete squares that literally rose three or four feet up where tree roots had busted them -- at least a decade ago. Walking the streets of Montrose really was a new form of urban hiking which required special footwear. I only wish I had a photo of that too. (Oh, and once inside, the bars were full of clean shaven twinkies no matter where we went... Texas is not bear country.)

And to top it all off, my hotel room had a fantastic view of Enron 1 and Enron 2, both now occupied by Shell Oil. Enron 2 was only half-built when the company collapsed under the weight of its shell-game crooked accounting scandals. Then, the huge american flag which they attached to the building in fall 2001 to commemorate our fallen, ripped off during Hurricane Ike and the flag's connector hooks clawed huge gashes out of the building's glass window curtain. That's some serious metaphor. The shiny 50-story building still has plywood taped over some sections of its facade. There are a lot of other evil corporations with HQ in Houston -- Waste Management, Hess, Elpaso Gas (which had great propaganda posters at street level).

What a creepy town, still filled with hucksters and crooks. Of course none of this should surprise me, because the head of Houston's travel modeling agency applied for my open position and spelled his own name wrong on his résumé.