Braeswood: on the Last Neighborhood in Houston an Peter D

12 Cite Winter 1986 CiteSeeing Braeswood: On the Last Neighborhood In Houston An Peter D. Waldman Architectural The neighborhood is an idea of measure: a physical, social, and mythic geography more often founded on Tour pretension rather than necessity. The Garden of Eden and the Tower of Stephen Fox Babel are both allegorical constructs l£wS that permit us to understand the idea of Braeswood was the last in a succession of elite neighborhood in Houston. Between the residential neighborhoods that developed along Towers of Work constructed in the ike axis of Main Street beginning in the middle urban precincts of downtown. Green- 1870s. It was begun in 1927 on a 456-acre tract at Main and Holcambe by a group of investors way Plaza, and the Galleria, the headed by the lawyer, banker, and public official residential gardens of this city have George F. Howard. Responsible for its design grown up in the form of the "Satiric Scene," 1618, Sebastian Serlio were the Kansas City landscape architects and neighborhoods of Shadyside, River planners. Hare <S Hare. The onset of the Great Oaks, and Braeswood. This is the story Depression frustrated the complete realization of geographical myths: the mountain to the the type in America, and particularly in Hare <£ Hare's master plan; about one-haffofit of one of these garden neighborhoods south (Del Monte), the forest in the some Houston neighborhoods, the was implemented, and this required 25 years and the Genesis of a City obsessed with center (Inwood), and the bayou to the setting, once such a precondition for and, eventually, six developers. the dream of Benign Bayou and the north (Bayou Bend). dwelling, has been reduced to the nightmare of the Bestial Bosque. hanging basket and the potted plant. As a result, Braeswood contains single-family house types characteristic of Houston's develop- Braeswood, to the south, along the ment from the 1920s through the 1960s. More Braeswood is a "conjunctive" name: an banks of Brays Bayou and at the edge Braeswood, on the other hand, is important, it contains a number of singular, invention linking the water's edge with of the new landscapes of Rice determinably pretentious, not humbly architect-designed houses, built between the mid the wilderness. Braeswood, conceived in University, is the last neighborhood folksy, as a neighborhood. Throughout 1930s and the mid 1980s, which chart the course an age of optimism (1927) and of this kind of speculative genesis. its organic landscape are houses not of of modem architecture in Houston. substantiated in a period of Depression, The genesis of these neighborhoods great size, but great reserve. Rarely Because of circumstances that affect all Houston is an example of one of a sequence of was based on a vision larger than does a porch appear to suggest social neighborhoods - demographic change, past residential landscapes in Houston. The that of house type itself. From ambiguity. Doors are deeply set within problems with the enforcement of deed focus of the Rice Design Alliance Shadyside to Braeswood, the City clearly private facades. The bungalow restrictions, encroachment within the neighborhood, and large-scale development on its Architectural Tour this fall, its impor- Beautiful era produced a vision of a was conceived for a life spent perimeter - Braeswood is not as homogeneous as tance resides not only in the diversity of garden landscape at the scale of the intentionally out-of-doors. There are no Howard and Hare & Hare must have envisioned dwelling types in that neighborhood, but city and the neighborhood. From such spatial or typological pretensions it. But its environmental and architectural on the archetypal nature of the River Oaks on the north to in Braeswood, rather, there are two characteristics have proved sufficiently strong landscape itself. Braeswood on the south, the two types of natural settings to be found and enduring to motivate residents to conserve and rehabilitate what they now fondly call "Old major bayous of the city were there. Chronologically developed, they Braeswood." While some neighborhoods have been acknowledged in contemporary are the labyrinthian area planned by characterized by a house type - the developments. Hare & Hare between Main and bungalow of Montrose; the cottage of Maroneal and the topographic area 1 6900 Main Boulevard West University Place - other neigh- Unlike the palms planted along developed in response to a California Shamrock Hotel borhoods might be identified with a Montrose boulevard, the landscape of sensibility for the horizon from Hol- Wyatt C. Hcdrick, 1949 spatial fascination with the Forest and Shadyside, Broadacres, River Oaks, and combe to Bellfontaine. The symbol of Houston in the 1950s thanks to the Bayou. Their names attest to the Braeswood is in the form of shade- Life, Holiday, Frank Lloyd Wright. Dorothy Lamour, Edna Ferber, James Clean, Elizabeth prerequisites of shade and edge in a giving oaks. Where palms suggest an In // Secondo Libro Di Prospettiva by Taylor, Conrad N. Hilton - and Glenn H. limitless, sun-baked land where the imagery of sunlit singularity, the Serlio (1618) there are projected three McCarthy, who built iL In the original Braeswood horizon is endless and the surveyor's southern live oak is characterized by its stage sets as conjunctive models for master plan this 15-acre site was reserved for a grid is the rule. conjunctive capacity to make darkness. urban theater. The tragic setting is community shopping center, a vision that Braeswood is a neighborhood born, McCarthy and Hedrick hoped to carry out with rational, systematic, and hierarchic; the the building of McCarthy Center. Only the hotel, The first garden neighborhood was then, from a remarkable vision of an Comic setting is circumstantial, idiosyn- the parking garage, and the legendary pool were Houston Heights (1891), a fabrica- archetypical garden rather than from a cratic, and chaotic; the third setting is realized, however. Now, even their continued tion in a landscape no higher than prototypical house. It is "the last the Satiric, dominated by a society half- existence is in doubt. downtown. Conceived as a new town neighborhood" in a parable of this city man, half-beast, a forest wilderness, the that commenced with the fabrication of 2 7200 Block Main Boulevard for industrial development and blue- place of quarries and fallen trees, the Hare & Hare. 1928 collar bungalows, it focused its urban Houston Heights, the cultivation of place of huts along labyrinthian paths The stretch of Main between Holcombe and space on an introverted Heights Shadyside, the mapping of Houston and dominated by expansive woods and Brays Bayou was paved, esplanaded, and planted Boulevard rather than exploiting the along the north-south axes, and that walkways and small hills, Braeswood with ranks of live oak trees by the Braeswood banks of the White Oak Bayou as terminated with the opening of the city follows the tradition of Shadyside, Corporation in 1928. The year before, the the interface with Houston's place of to the west at the crossroads of Sunset. Broadacres, and River Oaks in the corporation's president, George F. Howard, had retained the Kansas City landscape architects origin. Hermann Park, to the east of Sunset, is satirical nature of its urban Hare & Hare to work with Houston civil engineer Houston's original Bestial Garden condition. The urban condition of William G. Famngton in preparing a master plan The second garden neighborhood was which brings the axis of memorable Houston, as well as much of contempo- for the 456-acre tract, which had been acquired Shadyside (1916), which was the first to growth to a stop at the Palace of the rary America, is a condition of the from John H. Kirby. At the time Houston Primates. The perception of this city as stopped at the Rice University campus; not until exploit Houston's obsession with the Tragic and the Comic. It is in the 1937 in fact was Braeswood annexed by the City Bestial Bosque, though it remains extending beyond the loop, at the scale exploitation of this Satiric dimension of Houston. introverted behind its paradisiacal walls. of the automobile, has destroyed this that an American urbanism can be Main Street, from Mecom Fountain myth of a city between two bayous and established at the scale of the city and 3 21 IS Glenn Haven Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard, is an allegory of having one significant crossroad. the scale of the neighborhood. Harry D. Payne, 1929 the genesis of Houston's growth from the banks of the northern (Buffalo) Braeswood is also the last neighborhood It is only fitting that the last great house bayou to the banks of the southern because it is conceived as a labyrinth, in Braeswood would be the Shamrock; a (Brays), and the dramatic reorientation not an extension of the Cartesian grid. house at the scale of a hotel, a house set of Sunset as a portal to its open western Unlike Houston Heights, River Oaks, or in a garden which recounts the genesis a frontier. North-South boulevards, Braeswood of Houston. With the world's largest (like Shadyside) is more the world of hotel swimming pool, and perhaps the Broadacres (1923) affirmed the geo- Serlio's satiric labyrinth, where nature is tallest diving tower, surrounded by graphical imperative of this new cosmic dimensionally greater than the objects banana trees and sago palms, this landscape with the magnetic naming of found within. It is a sylvan setting, a landscape of "the poolside garden," the North-South boulevards. If Houston has wilderness or jungle much akin to the exploitation of the conjunction of forest a quintessential neighborhood it is not original setting in which the Indian edge and water's edge, permits the final the modest bungalows of Montrose, or Bungalow developed.

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