August 2016 culture houston photos historical August 2016 culture houston photos historical August 2016 culture houston photos historical August 2016 culture houston photos historical August 2016 culture houston photos historical August 2016 culture houston photos historical

In ‘Houston on the Move,’ the Bayou City Wakes Up

A pictorial history of Houston as it transformed, over and over again, between the 1930s and the 1990s.

by

A version of this story ran in the August 2016 issue.

August 2016 culture houston photos historical
In October 1938, children and their dogs paraded down Houston’s Main Street in the aptly named “Mutt Parade.”  Bob Bailey Studios

More than 200 images by Houston’s Bob Bailey Studios, collected in Houston on the Move: A Photographic History (excerpted here), cover its growth from a sleepy town to an oil-and-space industry colossus — a place always imagining its future. A commercial photographer often hired by Houston businesses and industries, Bailey photographed the city from a startlingly white point of view; few of his images reflect the town’s diversity, an absence that seems, in and of itself, a 20th century relic.

August 2016 culture houston photos historical
These children are inspecting early Mercury Program rocket and space capsule models at a NASA location in Houston in August 1962, prior to the completion of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Clear Lake, 25 miles southeast of Houston, in September 1963. In very little time, Houston came to be identified with the future and with spaceflight in the minds of many Americans, who heard American astronauts communicating with their Houston headquarters during televised spaceflights, beginning with the mission of Gemini IV in June 1964.  Bob Bailey Studios

But the studio’s work, archived at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, spans such a vast period of time — from the 1930s to 1991 — that the images create a pictorial history of Houston as it transformed over and over again. Captured in the book are multiple iterations of Houston — as an infant city with a handful of skyscrapers, in ruins after the 1947 Texas City Disaster, resplendent with Madison Avenue-like storefront displays, gritty and streamlined in the ’80s. Until this book, its introduction points out, many Houstonians “thought that their memories were the only record left of demolished buildings and city landmarks.”

August 2016 culture houston photos historical
August 2016 culture houston photos historical
August 2016 culture houston photos historical
August 2016 culture houston photos historical
August 2016 culture houston photos historical
August 2016 culture houston photos historical