Woke up on the bus and looked out the lounge window onto a parking lot with a few cars evenly spread out, like birds on a wire. Despite the heat I went for a bike ride later with C. There were almost no people on the streets — at a major downtown intersection I counted two. We rode past towering banks and oil company headquarters, offices and empty plazas, with no one about except for the poor and little clumps of smokers, huddled in the shadow of massive corporate towers.
This was the home of Enron, and other now-defunct entities have skyscrapers here as well. Some of the names and logos have been swapped out, but not all. We pass a residential neighborhood with lovely oak trees shading the street, and then, without any major landmark to let us know we’ve crossed a line, we’re in the ghetto, with shotgun shacks and old black men sitting on stoops in the withering heat. Boarded up houses, and vacant lots with cars on blocks.
From here one can see “downtown” a few blocks away.
“Downtown” is in quotes because Houston has hub cities further out that are almost as big.
A block or so past the run-down shacks — this is Houston where there is NO zoning — is the new Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a weird, almost surreal post-modern edifice.
The mind turns to Alan Greenspan, former head of the Fed, who helped via deregulation to get us into the mess we’re in today — the whole Goddamn world is fucked, Alan! This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator. Alan was recently quoted as saying “I made a mistake.”
A few blocks further away is a bayou — a stagnant body of water in the shape of a river, with a bike/jogging path running alongside it. In this heat (100 ºF) the path is all but unusable, though we pass a few joggers who are possibly more insane than us. Looming over a grassy knoll is Houston’s AIG headquarters. If I were them I’d come up with a new name or logo ASAP.
The town is crisscrossed by massive elevated freeways, and as a result the sprawl here is immense. Though there is a center to the town, there are also myriad mini-cities — or, more properly, clusters of towers, splattered here and there, linked by the freeways. I imagine that if oil companies could control more cities they’d all look like this.
We’re playing at Jones Hall, a lovely symphony hall named after Jesse Jones, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who at one time was head of the US Department of Commerce and a large bank, owned the newspaper and was a major developer— all at the same time! You could say Jesse had this town locked up and could basically do whatever he wanted — for better and for worse.
Right after the turn of the century Jones owned almost 100 buildings in Houston, and he then
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Jones chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation — an entity created to help banks and businesses survive the Depression. He held that position from 1933 until 1939, and as a result, became one of the most powerful men in America. He helped prevent the nationwide failure of farms, banks, railroads, and many other businesses. [Link]
[Source]
Some folks referred to Jones as "the fourth branch of government.” [Source]
As the first chairman of the Houston Harbor Board he raised money for the Houston Ship Channel’s completion. A shallow waterway was dredged, and the city became a viable port… and he built this concert hall, as oligarchs do, to both enhance his reputation and “improve” the cultural life of Houston — and as a byproduct, provide a place where the upper crust could mingle. In a backstage hallway leading to the symphony players’ locker rooms are some 8x10 glossies of retired classical musicians. A happy bunch of misfits and one photo of a stern-looking Eastern European conductor.
The stage sound is possibly the best of any hall we’ve played in. Extremely dry (not echoey) for a symphony hall… so we can hear ourselves and each other clearly.
After the show we have drinks at the oldest bar in town, La Carafe, and a man tells Steven that there are now a series of bike lanes here that enable people living in neighborhoods within the freeway ring road zone to commute to work. Hard to believe anyone would ride regularly in the Texas summer heat… but in the mornings (around 7:30) it is actually quite cool… so I guess if one gets an early start it might be OK.
