The Super Highway in Houston.
Back in our less enlightened days, just after the end of World War II, we called that new big street they were going to build in Houston by the best name anyone around here could imagine. That original name of the IH-45 South, Gulf Freeway, was nothing less than wonderful tribute to magical wishes. They called it “the super highway”.
Here’s how its humble beginnings were reported in the Galveston Daily News on Page 2 of their August 7, 1947 edition:
SUPER HIGHWAY
Houston Tex., Aug. 6, (AP) – The first concrete has been poured on the new Houston-Galveston super highway. J.C. Dingwall, urban design engineer with the state highway department has announced. The concrete was poured at Pierce and Crawford streets in Houston where a #1,000,000 widening project is underway.
After the super highway was completed, it took on a more modest identity as the Gulf Freeway, but it’s job was done by early 1949. It had solved all traffic flow problems between Houston and Galveston, given all of us in southeast Houston a new easy five to ten minute sight-seeing drive to downtown from our homes, and established itself as the model design for all the other freeways that were soon to come in service to all of Houston. – The Southwest Freeway, the EastTex Freeway, the North Freeway, and the lovely 610 Loop eventually rang in as Houston’s easy new way to get around town painlessly without trains or any plan to preserve the integrity of inner city, near downtown life.
What a wonderful world!
Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to run to the store. This stuff I’ve been smoking this morning is a little strong.
Tags: the super highway
The Pecan Park Eagle 
October 12, 2013 at 2:18 am |
Good memory-maker, Bill. I kept looking for the “impact on Buff
Stadium and U of H” commentary in the next paragraph. Uncle Jerome showed us bumpkins from San Antonio lots of Gulf Freeway
miles when we’d visit the Cougar campus and the nearby ball park.