Houston Is Weird: David Adickes's Giant Presidents

The first time I visited to David Adickes's presidents was during my first-ever trip to Houston in 2004, when Jess was trying to disabuse me of my Yankee prejudices against the place. It was an eerie, muggy night with lightning flashing on the horizon. We got lost for a while among huge silent grain elevators and half-abandoned warehouses near the city's main east-west railroad line, but Jess wouldn't tell me what we were looking for, insisting that it was a surprise.

Then we coasted down a dead-end street and through an open chain-link gate, and saw this:

Left to right: Martin Van Buren, Barack Obama, George Bush Sr., Lyndon B. Johnson, and others (back in 2004, of course, the bust of Barack Obama hadn't been made yet).

A field of gigantic presidents' heads looming in the hazy yellow light of the city, with a distant thunderstorm approaching over the city's suburban prairies: that was an experience I won't soon forget. I moved to Houston a few months later.

Lincoln, Jackson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

You know the "Keep Austin Weird" bumper stickers? Like saving the whales or supporting our troops, it's a halfhearted expression of nostalgia for a condition that's long been on the wane. Houston doesn't need that kind of bumper sticker, because Houston just is weird – though not in the cute ways that people romanticize. There are inflatable gorillas on top of freeway car dealerships, and ubiquitous faux-Mediterranean parking garage/condo buildings, and the flying cockroaches.

Because Houston is so sprawling, it has plenty of room for relatively ordinary people to do weird things on a grand scale, and that's exactly what David Adickes does. He's probably best known for his 70-foot statue of Sam Houston, looming over Interstate 45 about 60 miles north of the city.

Adickes makes cheap concrete sculptures on a monumental scale. His art is quintessentially Houstonian: campy, favoring quantity over quality, and scaled to a freeway audience driving 70 miles per hour. He's purchased additional real estate along I-10, possibly the city's busiest freeway, to become a roadside permanent collection for his sculptures, including a 30-foot tall representation of the Beatles and a huge "We Love Houston" sign.

In a 2004 newspaper article, he said, "the endless road through Houston is filled with a lot of junk on both ends. This will offer a little relief." Or at least some slightly different junk for people to look at.

Until that roadside attraction opens, the sculptures are in storage in a big fenced yard next to Adickes's studio. Personally, I think it's a much cooler place to see them – away from the freeway, you can enjoy them at a leisurely 2 miles per hour, and finding them feels like a discovery. It feels like wandering through a Titan grandmother's knick-knack drawer.

Visiting the presidents' heads make for a good bike ride. They're just a couple of blocks south of the very pleasant Heights Bike Trail, which extends northwest from downtown into the heart of the Heights neighborhood. As you're heading west from downtown, the bike path crosses White Oak Bayou, goes under the freeway, and enters a residential neighborhood. From there, you can take one of the side streets to your left to Summer St., then follow Summer to the end, It's about 2 miles from downtown, an easy 10 minute bike ride. You'll know the place when you find it. I mean, look, the heads are even visible from space:


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Go to Detroit, Young Man, and Grow Up

Bizarrely, a boot company and the guy from "Jackass" have teamed up to debunk the hopeless, epicenter-of-the-recession "ruin porn" that dominates everyone's perception of the Motor City. It's pretty fantastic, so I'll buy into their viral marketing scheme by re-posting and recommending their film here:



Here's the link for the whole 3-part series. It visits some of the famous ruins of Detroit, but only in the context that people are reviving and doing exciting things for those ruins. In this telling, the empty prairies and abandoned buildings don't necessarily represent blight; they represent possibility. Like the frontier in Horace Greeley's day, Detroit offers amazing opportunities for people to reinvent themselves - and reinvent the city.

A lot of what appeals to me in this video reminds me of the things I loved about Houston. Because in spite of its rapid growth and booming economy, Houston (like any other big city) also had a fair share of abandoned buildings, even entire neighborhoods overgrown in weeds, and those were the places I loved to explore.

It was also cheap to live there, partly because Houston has a sprawling geography and very few rules about what people do with their real estate - there is literally no zoning law there.

And so: one man I'd met bought the concrete shell of an old rice mill near the bayou, lived in a bus parked inside its empty walls, and made art cars. Our friends bought an abandoned apartment complex and the old pool hall next door to house a successful after-school program. And the summer we lived there, Art League of Houston commissioned this project for two abandoned houses that had been slated for demolition in the Montrose neighborhood (which is one of the city's most vibrant, by the way):


So in general, the most amazing parts of Houston were the places that had recently been abandoned, and were on the verge of re-creating themselves. I think that the same goes for most cities.

So I guess I disagree, somewhat, with the derogatory term "ruin porn." There are at least a few of us who are ogling Detroit's gorgeous, abandoned architecture and new prairies not out of scorn for the Government Motors bailouts, nor for the sake of wallowing in self-pity about this recession, but out of genuine sense of possibility. We are imagining ourselves making something new there, and being a part of the revival.

Disaster and Responsibility

At the beginning of this week, Paul Krugman wrote about the Gulf's oil spill as an old-fashioned, photogenic environmental disaster, one that might finally spur America's leaders to grow a backbone and fight for clean energy:

Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.

It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action... [yet] as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”

This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

So suddenly we have a very visible reminder of why we need alternatives to oil. Some good could come of this, right?

But there's a big problem with this line of reasoning. As terrible as this oil spill has been, and will be, the scale and impacts of this disaster don't come anywhere near the scale and impacts of global climate change. They are separate problems.

True, oil has been a trigger for both problems, and therefore, Krugman reasons, they might share a common solution: generate more clean energy, burn less oil.

Oil rigs under construction in Galveston, Texas in spring 2008.
These are huge, tremendously complex and expensive machines. BP may have been the organization responsible for the Deepwater Horizon rig, but we - the American motoring public - were the financiers.

But the fact that global warming and this oil spill are very different problems also means that they don't necessarily have to share the same solution. In fact, the dominating conclusion that people on the left have been jumping to is one that actually won't do a damn bit of good for the climate in the long term.

That knee-jerk "solution" is to ban offshore drilling, without doing much of anything to reduce our energy use or develop alternatives. This addresses the visible part of the disaster - the part that Krugman sees as the biggest opportunity. But it doesn't do anything to address the more insidious, less visible threat of climate change.

Attendant with this has been a lot of facile political mockery of the "drill baby drill" contingent. This may be fun, but it's not especially productive. The oil spill is creating a political spectacle as well as an environmental one:



Lisa Margonelli, an expert on oil supplies, explained one of the big problems with these reactions in a thoughtful New York Times op-ed last weekend:

Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

It's worth noting that this disaster is happening in the Gulf Coast because the poorer states of the Deep South share a predilection for weak environmental laws, and therefore their coastlines are the only place in United States waters where drilling is allowed. Plenty of people who find drilling distasteful are only too happy to burn the fruits of the Gulf Coast's rigs and refineries: see "Exporting Pollution to Dixie," from December 2007.

Margonelli goes on to suggest that "we should throw our newfound political will behind a sweeping commitment to use less gas." But that, of course, would require more than political will: it would require environmentalists to set aside our Palin-bashing, "we told you so" grandstanding to actually accept our own personal responsibility for the oil we use, and do something foresighted and intelligent.

It would also require us all to share culpability for this oil spill, by acknowledging that everyone who burns gasoline shares responsibility for the thousands of oil rigs in the world's oceans, and the risks that those rigs create for our environment.

Personally, I'm not holding my breath for that outcome. Earlier in the same column, Margonelli notes that BP's ludicrous "Beyond Petroleum" slogan had been extremely successful, in part, because it "accurately reflect[s] drivers’ desire to buy unlimited gasoline while remaining 'beyond' all the mess" [side note: you may recall that BP was also the force behind Los Angeles's "green" gas station a few years ago].

The facile fantasies that banning offshore drilling will save our environment, or that it's all Sarah Palin's fault, are inextricably linked to the fantasy that driving hundreds of miles every week can ever be "sustainable" - the fantasy of the 20th-century American Dream.

Put another way: it's a lot easier to caricature evil corporations and score political points against stupid Republican slogans than to examine the lifestyle we take for granted, take personal responsibility for it, and work to change the economy that spends trillions of dollars to squeeze oil from our oceans.

It is "Commute Another Way" month, if anyone's interested in burning a little less oil.

Anyone?

Spill, Baby, Spill

Two weeks ago, my wife and I spent a weekend in Port Aransas, Texas for our the wedding of Katy and Zach, who love the beach as well as each other. For our first two days there, it was hazy and muggy and difficult to see very far. Still, in the evenings we could see lights out at sea.

But on the third morning, rain showers had cleared the air. When we looked out to the ocean, we were suddenly able to see dozens of oil rigs and platforms scattered along the horizon, as though they had just appeared overnight.

Port Aransas drilling platforms, by Flickr user austrini.

It might be because I grew up in Maine, but looking out at the ocean has never really inspired a sense of awe in me, the way it seems to for others. But seeing the oil rigs at Port Aransas made me feel differently. Looking at these huge machines as tiny blips on the horizon really impressed me with how huge the ocean really is. Each of these rigs had crews that would be flown in by helicopter to live there for month-long shifts. They're tiny villages isolated by miles and miles of ocean, like outposts on a watery and hostile prairie.

But the biggest feeling of awe didn't come from contemplating the vast ocean. It came from contemplating the tremendous wealth and social complexity necessary to plant thousands of these rigs and their crews miles out to sea.

A map of offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, from Wikipedia.

From Port Aransas we drove through a landscape of ride fields and petrochemical refineries to Houston, home to the headquarters of most major oil companies doing business in the United States, including BP. While we were there, BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operating in deep waters beyond the edge of the continental shelf, exploded and sank to precipitate what could become the worst oil spill in history.

But in those first few days, there wasn't much to indicate that it would be such a disaster. With thousands of oil rigs operating in the Gulf, accidents are inevitable. At the airport the next morning, we read through a discarded copy of the April 21st Houston Chronicle. I remember noting that the newspaper was lighter and smaller than it had been five years before, when I'd lived in Houston. But I don't remember any stories about the Deepwater Horizon. We wouldn't know the scale of the disaster until later. We probably still don't know.

How we respond reveals a lot about the state of environmentalism, energy policy, and our economy. I have a lot more to say on this - in the meantime, here's an old post about my visit to the Texas Star offshore oil rig museum in Galveston:

The Gulf Coast Money Machines, from March 2008.

Galveston

As a deadly hurricane bears down on the Texas gulf coast, I thought I'd write a requiem post for the 8,000 souls who died in the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston, which was then the fourth-largest city in Texas.

The 1900 storm hit with no advance warning - it was long before satellite tracking, radar, or reliable forecasts (in the absence of professional meteorology, the storm also had no name). Five days after the storm, a Galveston Daily News reporter wrote,

The story of Galveston's tragedy can never be written as it is... But in the realm of finity, the weak and staggered senses of mankind may gather fragments of the disaster, and may strive with inevitable incompleteness to convey the merest impression of the saddest story which ever engaged the efforts of a reporter.

The quote and photograph come from a Galveston Daily News website dedicated to memorializing the 1900 storm.

After the storm, the city participated in a massive effort to raise the elevation of the island's most flood-prone areas, by as much as 16 feet. To me, the raising of Galveston exemplifies Texas's incredible capacity for revival and growth. It was an incredible feat of civic effort and engineering, executed with turn-of-the-century technology.

Entire structures were jacked up into the air and put on stilts:

St. Patrick's Church, Galveston: from the Texas State Library and Archives.

Avenue O residence, Galveston. Note the front stairway suspended in midair. From the Texas State Library and Archives.

Then, massive pipes were laid in the streets, and dredges began to flood the ground beneath the stilts with mud...

Pipelines discharging dredged fountains of muddy fill. From the Texas State Library and Archives.

...until the ground rose up to meet the bottoms of the raised buildings, and the stilts were buried.

Before and after. This photo comes from Pruned.

In the century since, rising seas and geological subsidence have brought Galveston's elevation as much as 2.5 feet closer to sea level. That also brings the city 2.5 critical feet closer to disaster as Hurricane Ike bears down on the barrier island tonight. Worse still, the past few decades have brought intense development of new homes and businesses to the western end of the island, areas unprotected by the city of Galveston's raised grade or seawall.

This storm could be really ugly for southeastern Texas. Let's hope for the best.

Exporting pollution to Dixie

As someone who lived (happily) in Houston, Texas for a year, it kind of gets on my nerves when northerners pick on the South - Houston or LA or the sprawl around Pheonix and Atlanta - as being the cause of the nation's environmental ills. It's true that these cities have big environmental problems - especially air pollution. But these problems are largely caused by industries that Northerners don't want in their own backyards, although we don't mind buying their products.

Skyline and Ship Channel from the San Jacinto Monument
Originally uploaded by j-a-x.

Let's start with Houston's ship channel (photo at right), home to the largest concentration of oil refineries in the United States. These refineries produce tons of air pollution and greenhouse gases daily and are largely responsible for Houston's notoriously poor air quality. Because of the refineries, Texas's per-capita greenhouse gas production is nearly double that of most northern states.

But we in the northern states are still buying and using those refineries' products. In fact, in the last year that data was available, the average Maine motorist drove 11,348 miles: over 1,000 miles MORE than the average six-shootin', hollerin' Texan (source). Back-to-the-land Vermonters drive even more on a per-capita basis. So not only are we actually responsible for more pollution, we're also doing the dishonorable deed of producing that pollution in a poorer part of the country where more minorities and immigrants live. How could anyone possibly be self-righteous about that?

Similarly, Los Angeles is well known as the smog capital of the nation, but that's largely because of its port, where millions of containers from China get transferred from diesel-burning ships to diesel-burning trucks to supply stores and warehouses all over the country. Without the Port of Los Angeles and its pollution, it would be a lot harder to come by your organic pears from New Zealand, or any of the thousands of other things you buy from across the Pacific.

The Port of Long Beach is starting to assert itself, though. As detailed in this article from the Times, California is placing new regulations on the shippers and truckers who converge on LA to move Asian products to American store shelves.

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster said, “We’re not going to have kids in Long Beach contract asthma so someone in Kansas can get a cheaper television set.”

Actually, Mayor, that's been our arrangement for decades now. But best of luck to you, from a well-wisher in the vigorous North.

Stagnant Air: Don't Piss in the Bath

Mainers and the tourist hordes may have heard a cryptic warning of "stagnant air advisory" on the radio this morning. And indeed, the National Weather Service has colored the coast of Maine a dark shade of gray on this morning's weather map (right).

The simple explanation is that low wind speeds and high levels of UV radiation will force us to stew in our own juices for the duration of the day. The ozone will be particularly bad: as of 8 AM, ozone levels at Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth were already twice as high as they were among the oil refineries of Texas City near Houston, an area that typically leads the nation in ozone pollution. And this was before the morning commute, when Maine motorists will send thousands of tons of volatile organic compounds out of their exhaust pipes to bake in the hot summer sun.

If you were planning on breathing today, you'll be more likely to suffer from the various effects of ozone pollution: coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, headaches, general listlessness, aggravated pulmonary conditions, etcetera, etcetera. The Maine economy will probably lose a couple of million dollars to lost productivity today, and our lungs will age a little faster.

Since they're warning us not to exert ourselves outdoors, it seems like a good day to sit inside and think about air pollution instead.

Air pollution has always been a difficult cause for environmentalism. For one thing, you can't really see it. By most objective standards, cleaner air is more important than preserving a wilderness area in Alaska. But the Nature Conservancy can print glossy photography of unbroken forests to open philanthropists' wallets, while the American Lung Association is left behind quoting dry statistics on childhood asthma.

The other problem with air pollution as an environmental cause is the fact that our atmosphere is so big. You wouldn't want to piss in your own bathtub, but it doesn't seem as revolting when a cruise ship dumps tons of raw sewage at sea. Similarly, there aren't many non-addicts who would willingly spend time in a small, cramped smoker's lounge, but there's nothing especially disgusting about spewing a few hundred pounds of VOCs out from the tailpipe every day. Because we share the atmosphere with the entire world, we discount the marginal effects of our own behavior.

But today is different. Stagnant air means that we kind of are our pissing in our own bathtub when we burn our fossil fuels. It may get better tomorrow, when the winds return, but that just means that all this crap will be blowing someplace else. The atmosphere may be really, really big, but so is our capacity to foul it.

What New York can learn from Houston

For most of last year, I lived in Houston, Texas, a city famous for instructive examples of what not to do in the realms of urban planning and conservation.

But Houston, which has endured a comeuppance of regular floods for decades, is finally doing something innovative to improve the water quality of its bayous, reduce the risk of flooding, and provide new parks and trails for its residents - all in one project.

Project Brays is a venture of the Harris County Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers. Brays Bayou traverses the southern edge of central Houston, from the Third Ward to Tom Delay's hometown of Sugar Land. For much of its length, the bayou is paved under concrete, (a la the Los Angeles River), because the Corps of Engineers once believed that the best way to deal with floodwaters was to carry them as quickly as possible to the ocean.

Unfortunately, paved surfaces are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. Before Houston overwhelmed them, the prairies and riparian forests that once thrived in the bayou's watershed absorbed and slowly released stormwaters into the waterway. But paved surfaces sent rainwater straight to the bayou, which overflowed more and more frequently as the city grew. When the bayou itself was paved, the watershed lost its last vestiges of natural vegetation and absorption capacity. Needless to say, the Corps has been forced to acknowledge and correct its mistakes.

Now, Harris County and the Corps are taking a more holistic view of flood control. Project Brays is acquiring the most flood-prone private property and linking together a string of new green spaces along the bayou that will double as cachement basins during storms. A vegetation management program will re-introduce riparian plants and trees to intercept and absorb stormwater, mitigate Houston's intense heat island, and provide new wildlife habitat. And the new retention basins will double as parks with recreational facilities for surrounding neighborhoods.

These projects will also improve water quality in the region's waterways, since the stormwaters will have more chances to filter through the ground before they drain into the bayou and Galveston Bay.

New York's watersheds and stormwater systems (see my previous post) are very different from Houston's. But there are plenty of similarities, too, and the elegant solution of Project Brays is certainly worth admiring.

New York's regimented bureaucracy seems often to obstruct interdisciplinary problem-solving like this, but maybe the shame of being showed up by Houston (and Dallas, and Los Angeles, and others) will spur this city to action.

Other watershed restoration and flood control projects:

• Los Angeles River Project
  
• Willamette River (Portland, OR) Renaissance
  
• Trinity River (Dallas) Corridor Project