The Pecan Park Eagle

Pecan Park Subdivision, Houston: Redwood (Hazle in 1930) @ Schley & Hemlock, June 21, 1930 by Joseph Litterst.

Pecan Park Subdivision, Houston: Redwood @ Schley & Hemlock, May 10, 1983 by Paul Hester.

To reach my house from the photographed intersection, you traveled 2 blocks further south on Redwood and turned right on Japonica. We lived another block and a half west of there at 6646 Japonica, the 5th house on the right at 6646 Japonica.from 1945 to 1958. The photo site is noted inside the yellow triangle, upper right. Our house is pegged with the red pin marked A, near the middle of the upper yellow line, also inside the triangle.

As many of you know, this Pecan Park Eagle site takes its name from the little southeast Houston neighborhood where a number of us grew up in the years following the end of World War II. I’m always looking for relics, artifacts, and photographs of “the way we were,” but I hardly expected to find two things in a recent trip to the Carl Jung Center on Montrose in the Museum District. As a lifelong student of the great twentieth century psychologist Carl Jung, I often take courses and attend lectures at the Jung Center as my way of keeping up and also of satisfying the continuing education requirements of my “day job” office as a therapist in private practice.

About a month ago, I attended a lecture at the Jung and found a number of ancient photographic panoramas that had been donated to the Jung Center years ago that the organization finally prepared for free public viewing. I was in near rapture state, of course, to find these two “then and now” panorama shots of a bizarre corner in my old stomping grounds that I already knew from memory like the back of my hand. The corner of Hemlock and Schley at Redwood was only a block and a half east and two blocks north of where I spent most of my childhood and my first two years of college. It was wonderful to see these sites again, thanks to long ago photography of two men, Joseph Litterst (1930) and Paul Hester (1983).

One of these days, it would be interesting to organize a large-scale “old photo roundup” of Houston’s past from people’s long-term stored away personal, business, and family collections. I will always believe that – out there somewhere – sitting quietly in someone’s attic trunk – there’s an album or loose picture that would answer many of the questions we have about Houston’s past in so many disquieting to patently curious ways.

One of these days. You never know.

In the meanwhile, our thanks go out to Misters Litterst and Hester for some fine work on the Redwood @ Schley intersection. One of these days I will get out to Pecan Park and do an even more current version of that same extant perspective.