The Pecan Park Eagle

Prior to it;s August 1952 Opening, Houstonians referred to this answer to all our local travel problems as "The Super Highway"!

Our hopes didn’t fly for long, but there was a brief time in the late summer of 1952 that Houstonians thought that we had solved our local transportation problems for all time.  Under construction since 1948, the Gulf Freeway opened in August 1952 as the four-lane (two each way) clear shot passage from downtown Houston as a fifty-mile bullet car path to Galveston Island. All we had to do was to climb into our cars, enter the freeway, push the petal to the metal, and zoom on down to the Gulf of Mexico without ever stopping for a single traffic light.

It seemed too good to be true. Getting around this city of 490,000 souls without traffic would soon enough be an issue of the past in 1952. Of course, the fact that Jesse Jones and the Lamar Hotel “Good Ole Rich Boys Developers Club” had already bought up most of the land between Houston and Galveston and other boondocks places that could be turned into new housing subdivisions never occurred to most of us as the real motivation behind the construction of the Gulf, Southwest, Katy, Eastex, North, and Baytown freeways that soon enough spiderwebbed Houston like a form of concrete Kudzu vines. By 1965, we were hopelessly tied to freeways and the use of personal automobiles in this town. For a city as spread out as we had become, nothing les than the personal automobile could give many Houstonians the flexibility they needed to travel around and do business. Those who could’ve been served by trains to stationary work places were kept on the freeways too as the Texas Department of Transportation moved in to buy up usable rail lines and take them out in favor of freeway expansions like the recently completed I-10 route west into Katy.

The Gulf Freeway in 1956 wasn't wide enough to handle what was coming.

This past summer, I was coming back from an appointment far out the Gulf Freeway during the rush hour hour when I ran into a totally stopped up block of traffic in the old Gulfgate Mall area next door ro my old Pecan Park neighborhood. I thought, “Why not?”

I got off the freeway at Woodridge and took Redwood to Griggs, Griggs to 75th, 75th to Lawndale, Lawndale to Telephone, Telephone to Leeland, and Leeland to downtown. The whole detour took me no more than 15-20 minutes, just as it did in the old days prior to freeways. Then it dawned on me. We didn’t really have traffic jams back in the days prior to August 1952, but we did have a lot of really very   inconvenient red lights that today seem to run just fine with proper timing. We were sold on freeways as a route that wouldn’t stop us. We just didn’t understand that our impending glut of the freeways with increasingly necessary additional cars would stop us dead in our tacks without any red lights on our freeways. By the time I reached downtown using the old way, I could’ve still been siting out there on I-1o and Telephone via the freeway.

Oh well, what’s done is done. I’m just left thinking about all the old travel routes we once used to fan into our neighborhoods from downtown prior to the freeways. To travel east, you took Navigation, Harrisburg, or Leeland. To head south, you wanted Almeda or South Main. To head west, you had many choices, starting with Buffalo Drive (now Allen Parkway) to Shepherd and from Shpehred north and south to the western paths of Westheimer, Alabama, Richmond, Bissonnet (used to be Richmond Road), Memorial, Washington, Hempstead Highway, and Old Katy Road. To go north, the most obvious route was North Main, but you could also take Houston Avenue, Heights Boulevard, Fulton, Jensen, or Irvington as other options among the most travelled routes.

Regardless of your direction from town in 1950, you could be home inside of a one to eight mile trip. It was pretty simple stuff, this travelling, til we committed to the freeways. Now we’re back and looking for ways to living closer to work downtown so we don’t have to use the freeways we once built to escape the same scene we seek to recapture today.

Our problem is not the freeways. Our problem is that we once bit into the idea that freeways were our answer. Now we can’t make them go away. For one thing, we are hooked on having to using them. For another, the freeways have too much money and power behind them now to ever disappear.

Have a nice week, everybody!

Tags: freeways, History, Houston

This entry was posted on December 14, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.