“Sin City? Ah Yes! I remember it well!”
Looking back to what it really was for Houston in the 1960’s, it really wasn’t such a big deal on the sin scale, unless you were a member of that fundamentalist group of world viewers who saw everything that led to dirty dancing (and all good dancing was dirty) as an act of immorality.
It was, on the other hand, the start of social change that was going to pound the beaches of American culture into a new shape for all times over the next half century. As a member of that coming of age Houston generation in the 1960’s that did not marry their high school sweethearts after graduation, or at all, I can only comment on what it was that made it easier for some older people from those days to write the time off as an era of sliding moral turpitude.
In Houston, we had a physical place back then that came to characterize the zeitgeist of the 1960’s as we crashed as an American culture into the Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan music driven, LSD-fed San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967. In Houston, the place where many young singles lived and partied was on a stretch of Mid Lane that descended south from Westheimer Road, inside Loop 610. It ran only a few blocks south of Westheimer, or all the way down Mid Lane to Richmond Avenue, depending on your personal experience.
We called it “Sin Alley,” but it bore little resemblance to the new drug-based, free love, hippie culture of the Haight-Asbury area in San Francisco that spawned out there in the summer of 1967. By 1969, that local legacy of the Haight had taken route in the Montrose area. Sin Alley was more for the mainstream middle class as a place for trying out new social roles and ways of life that didn’t involve going straight from one’s childhood homes and head-first into the land of anointed marriage and the land of happily ever after.
It was a different time. Back then, two young people of the same-sex could live together in a social apartment building and others would not automatically assume or suspect that the two roommates were homosexual. If a guy lived with two girls, on the other hand, he might sometimes be forced to convince the landlord that he was gay, just to allay their fears of unmarried sex taking place under the owner’s roof.
Got the picture on “Sin Alley” now folks? Yeah, there were some wild parties, heavy on alcohol consumption and with an increasing availability of cannabis and amphetamines as the decade rolled into the 1970s, but the heavier drugs of heroin, cocaine, and LSD were much more centered by supply and demand in the Montrose.
Sin City was a place where Houston’s new middle class of the 1960’s and early to mid-1970’s experimented with pre-marital sexual relations and first time love partnerships with people from other religions, and differing ethnic and racial backgrounds. Bi-racial dating was the hardest obstacle to overcome at that time, especially between whites and blacks. It’s embarrassing to remember too, but a number of Houston businesses, restaurants, clubs, and movie houses still segregated against the admission of blacks at that time.
I met my first Jewish girl friend in Sin City. What a neat woman she turned out to be, a tall beautiful brunette with an incredible brain. Alas! She finally moved to Israel and joined the Israeli Army. I never heard from her again, but I was still all the richer for having known her a short while back in my salad days.
Remembering Gail makes me appreciate the memory of Sin City all the more. In a very real way, Sin City was our Sim City. It gave us a place to connect experientially with people who were different from us by race, religion, and sociology. Some of those relationships lasted forever; others didn’t. What lasted for all time was the way each of us was changed because these relationships and experiences had a place to unfold.
Like the old song says: “If that’s a sin, then I’m guilty.”
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 