Why I Am Here

The 1975, Glen Campbell gold record, The Rhinestone Cowboy, runs through my mind when I am walking downtown alone.? The refrain is I’ve been walking these streets so long, singing the same old song; I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway.? The song comes to mind because I have literally been walking the streets of downtown Houston for 45 years.? The first job that took me downtown regularly was working as a paperboy for the Houston Chronicle when I was 14 years old.? Initially my paper route, delivered by bicycle, was for 130 houses in the neighborhood I grew up in, Windsor Village, down off of South Post Oak Road.? The 1970’s in that neighborhood, one of the first suburbs in Houston to become racially integrated, and the surrounding area were marked by what seemed at the time as very tense racial strife.? I ended up on the receiving end of some hostility one day while delivering my papers.?? A group of other boys took out their rage at the other side by turning me into a bloody ball of flesh that day.? It wasn’t all bad though; I got a good number of days out of school and the Chronicle distributor, Eddy Baird, offered me a promotion of sorts.? He would pay me to throw the paper to all the homes in the neighborhood from the back of his beautiful brown 1975 Chevrolet Silverado pick-up.? He dropped off his bundled papers to me first, and then went on to the nearby neighborhoods, Westbury and Cambridge Village, to drop those bundles.? He would come back to my house at 5702 Bridlington where I had already rolled the papers and we loaded them into the bed of his truck; I climbed on the pile of papers in the back and threw the papers, every day, 7 days a week to the 400 and something houses of Windsor Village.? Interesting that then, most houses took the newspaper.? I also knocked door-to-door monthly to collect the subscription payments.? The Sunday part of the New Deal was even better for me and is why the Glen Campbell song resonates the most.? He would pay me to help him roll and throw all the houses that he distributed to if I would go downtown to the Houston Chronicle building early Sunday morning to get the newspapers hot off the presses and deliver them.? Around 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning we would drive downtown and wait.? At that time, a long line of pick-up trucks would snake down Travis and bend down Texas Avenue around the old Chronicle HQ.? Across the street was the Rice Hotel, then derelict, vacant and very dilapidated.?? Sometimes we had to pass a few hours before the line into the building, where drivers backed up to conveyor belts to receive the fresh paper bundles started to move.?? The hot sweet smell of the newspaper ink is seared into my mind.? Maybe that is why another smell has stuck with me for so long, that is the stench of the sidewalks around the historic Rice Hotel.? You see, to pass that extra time waiting, I would walk around a few blocks of downtown at that hour.? Houston’s downtown heyday it was not.? I had no idea then where my life would lead me, where God or the Universe might direct my intentions and attention. ??

My next job starting in the 9th grade of school was working for AVW Audio Visual Incorporated.? The job was to deliver and set up the meeting technology of the day in rooms across Houston.? I had an almost daily after school route, driving a cargo van, that stretched from the Hotel Sofitel on the North Beltway to the Astrodome on the South 610 Loop, and from what was then on the extremely far west side, Hyatt West, to Downtown Houston.? I spent many an evening taping down power cords to floors and connecting them to slide projectors all around downtown, from the stately Petroleum and Houston Clubs to the, even then, a bit seedy, Holiday Inn Downtown, now the abandoned and most derelict eyesore you see today downtown.? I passed countless hours baby-sitting equipment at conventions in the Albert Thomas Convention Center, the Hyatt Regency, the Astrodome, the Astroarena, and the Astro Village Hotel.

?Coming to my senses a year after graduating high school about my need to be better educated, I quit all that and enrolled at the University of Houston-Downtown.? So, I was right back downtown now beginning a legitimate formal education.? After 4 years there and earning a degree in business, I went to work in Pennzoil Place for the distinguished Houston attorney, Paul D. Clote, and later started at the UH Law Center.? After another of Houston’s most esteemed trial lawyers, John O’Quinn, offered me a job at his firm and to pay for the remainder of my law school, I realized in fact that the formal practice of law was not for me. ?I worked for the University of Houston, waited tables, worked at UPS, and sold cellular phones before there were retail stores everywhere, before spending 7 years as an insurance adjuster, rising to be a top property adjuster for Progressive Insurance, restoring an old house in the West End at the same time.? I ended up selling that small old house to an architect, the late John Bowley, who was the project manager in 1975 for the construction of Pennzoil Place for Philip Johnson, the celebrated architect that left a basket full of influential mid-century architecture in Houston.?

Eventually, I listened to that voice deep inside, who knows from where it comes, some call it the Holy Spirit, that said go study design. ?I had developed a curiosity about how cities grow, after reading The Economy of Cities, by Jane Jacobs, a seminal book that challenged conventional wisdom on urban planning.? In 2007 the University of Texas School of Architecture accepted me for a dual master’s program in professional architecture and historic preservation.?? After graduation, I accepted a position at the City of Brownsville to work in planning, specifically on downtown revitalization.? I took that position mainly because my father was born there, and I wanted to get closer to those roots.? My family has been on this land we call Texas for millennia, as my ancestry is significantly part Native American of the region that we now call South Texas and Northern Tamaulipas Mexico.? Some think that being a 5th or 6th generation Texan is a big deal; well, I have news for most of you, it is not.?

Because of the public student loan forgiveness program, I dedicated 10 years to public service (now 13).?? I became Brownsville’s Heritage Officer before being recruited to the extremely well-managed City of Denton as Historic Preservation Officer.? In 2019 I heard that Houston needed a new Historic Preservation Officer.? I came home. ?In 1981 Houston’s first woman elected at-large, Eleanor Tinsley, passed the City’s first preservation ordinance, a tax exemption for properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Houston’s preservation movement began at least as early as the 1970s and through the rest of 1980s and every decade since has been made stronger and is becoming more inclusive.? With the backing of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, now Preservation Houston, and people including Betty Chapman, Bart Truxillo, Beverly Pennington, whose husband served on Houston City Council in the 2000s, Barry Moore, Minnette Boesel and Phoebe Tudor, the effort to preserve what is left of Houston’s built legacy has endured.? Elected officials including Kathy Whitmire, Ernest McGowen, Alfred Calloway, Jim Greenwood, Frank Mancuso, along with mayors Kathy Whitmire, Bob Lanier, Annise Parker, Bill White, and on down the line, along with so many others, have understood that a city without some of its historic buildings, neighborhoods and civic structures preserved becomes a city without a sole. ?These people saved Houston from becoming the most boring city with a strong economy in the United States.? Because of them Houston is a truly special city.? The scars of its evolution and physical evidence of historical inequities have not been completely erased and that is just a part of what makes Houston special and allows us to grow to love and respect our fellow residents more.? Anyone can take an unsophisticated, primitive, and artless approach to redevelopment that disregards history.?

This all brings me back to The Rhinestone Cowboy.? I didn’t realize it at the time, but reading up on it, Glen Campbell really identified with the song, originally written, and recorded by Larry Weiss. As Stephen Erlewine of AllMusic put it “because it was about survival and an artist who was aware that he had more than paid his dues in his career and that one day he would shine like a rhinestone cowboy.”

Roman McAllen is a native Houstonian and lives in old house in the West End with his wife, Lisa and two daughters. ?He is an associate architect, he relinquished is American Planning Association certification because they refused to enforce their ethics code to his standards and is accredited by the Congress for a New Urbanism.

?