Pecan Park … It’s a state of mind thing.
As many of you already know, my passion for the history of the Pecan Park neighborhood in southeast Houston is fueled by the fact that I grew up there from 1945 through 1958, from age 7 to age 20. As such, I am also a junkie for any news or historical references that show up about my old stomping grounds in the newspaper files of those earlier times.
This map provides a little help showing the location of Pecan Park relative to the I-45 South Gulf Freeway.
Four days ago, I was rewarded with a gift from friend and SABR colleague buddy Mike Vance. Mike sent me a copy of the following real estate advertisement from the July 6, 1930 edition of the Houston Post:
Of course, I immediately had to check and see what the property at 7111 Vandeman Street looks like today through the Google Maps street view program. I learned that the property is now the base for a small apartment house project, but the house to its right looks as though it could have been a neighbor to the five-room place advertised in the post.
The housing prices are consistent with what my dad always told me about our own place. He and Mom bought our home at 6646 Japonica in 1945 on a $5,000 mortgage purchase over thirty years. They kept the house as a rental property once they finally moved in 1958, but finally sold it in the early 1970’s. The last time I checked Harris County proper valuations about three yeas ago, our old house was now valued at something in the low $90,000 dollar territory.
Money’s crazy. Inflation is even crazier.
Our Japonica Street place was pretty much standard for Pecan Park homes as far as size and space offerings are concerned. We didn’t have the brick veneer, but we did have real wood siding boards and none of this particle board crap that begins to fall apart in about ten years.
Five rooms included a living room, kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. We had one bath, a one-car garage with a manual door, an attic fan for coolness in the summer and a floor furnace for heating in the winter. My dad added a large bedroom after my sister was born in 1949, but we did not begin to have air-conditioning until my folks bought a window unit for the living room in 1957. Attic fans cooled by sucking air though opened screened windows and through the attic. These also brought with them all the various seasonal and full-time smells that hovered outside – and I do mean everything – from the putrid smells of the nearby Champion Paper Company in Pasadena to the rotting figs on the tree outside my bedroom window.
Those wonderful finely crushed gravel roads that the above ad mentions were pretty much gone, converted to cement, by the time we moved into Pecan Park, but Flowers Street was still that way for a while. We used to harvest Flowers Street gravel as land filler in the bowls we used as homes for our pet turtles.
The mostly Hispanic immigrant families that now live in Pecan Park have done a good job keeping the old neighborhood alive in recent years. The family that now owns our old place, in fact, has greatly improved the property, adding a long sitting-room front porch and converting the garage to some kind of extra inside room.
Everything changes – for either better or worse – or simply because nothing ever stays the same over time – no matter how much we fondly remember what we often think of as “the good old days.” Pecan Park will always be with me in the present because it was always there for me in the past, but it has changed – and so have we all.
I will still collect everything I can find on its history for as long as Pecan Park items keep showing up.
Tags: Pecan Park History
The Pecan Park Eagle 
June 27, 2013 at 1:16 pm |
Our first house was on the North side of Houston, just one block off Jensen Drive, all those homes thru out those little subdivisions were all built by Suburban Homes which was in business for years, I even had an Uncle that was a carpenter and actually help build just about everything in that area over a 45 year period. If my memory serves me well our little two bedroom small roomed wooden house cost 7000, that’s in around 51 or 52. It too is still standing and looks pretty decent for the age, the other nice home next to it that was actually a better home than ours, is gone and a new two story is sitting there. We had those brown rock roads which were popular for that end of town. I think the most shocking thing I found when looking at the property after all these years is that the ditches are still open, the city never closed the ditches!!.
You’ll have to write about those nice mom and pop stores all of us shopped at, I keep thinking about those kiddie corrals for some reason, and all those comic books.
June 27, 2013 at 1:53 pm |
materene – we are also “still standing” and I think we look pretty decent for our ages jo :>)
June 29, 2013 at 2:16 am |
The excellent shelled streets is still a huge selling point.