![]() (“Montrose Lives!” was that article’s defiant headline, suggesting that, even then, some were declaring the neighborhood something other than alive.) Punks might tell you it died when their underground paper, Public News, went under in 1998. There have almost always been laments about rising rents: In 1973, Montrose was featured in Texas Monthly’s third-ever issue, with folk singer Don Sanders fretting about a mass exodus of creative types brought on when area leases topped a whopping $100. Hippies might tell you it died around the time Space City! went under in 1972. I’ve heard generations of these death-by-gentrification declarations. Westheimer Street Festival in Montrose in 1982. “My old ’hood has been gentrified beyond the point which I feel welcome in it anymore.” ![]() Martin told me in 2003, on the occasion of its closing. “You certainly aren’t going to find that old Montrose spirit in Montrose anymore,” Earthwire proprietor M. Or maybe I’d find myself at venerable Texas folk mother church Anderson Fair, an incubator for the careers of legends like Van Zandt, Clark, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, and Lyle Lovett.Īnd then there was, an internet radio station that grew out of the old Montrose pirate radio movement and was based in a long-since-demolished garage-like structure, where blues greats like Little Joe Washington mingled with punks, noise artists with Rastas, rock-en-Español madmen with neo-honky-tonkers, all fueled by an endless supply of Busch tall boys and fragrant fumes. I spent most of the 2000s as music editor of the Houston Press, and my duties frequently took me to Montrose, to venues like Rudyard’s, 1980s revival house Numbers, and Avant Garden, a freewheeling, Old World–style coffeehouse where you were as likely to hear erotic poetry or gypsy jazz as backpacker hip-hop. I spent much of my youth and adulthood just across the Southwest Freeway, in what is now known as the Museum District.īefore they moved to Nashville in 1974, both of my parents were deeply involved with the Montrose underground, at Pacifica radio station KPFT and the hippie newspaper Space City! They ran with the wild folk music crowd of that era: Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, and Richard Dobson among them. I was conceived in Montrose by hippie parents, in a house on the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama, during the crazy run-up to the moon landing. If the Montrose as it is now was wiped out by high rises and commercialization, the city would become sterile and materialistic to the point where culturally stimulating people would move out, and everyone would lose in the long run. It provides a humanistic element at its core, like the Left Bank in Paris. Way back in 1973, the late Montrose architect and professor John Zemanek called Montrose “essential to the city of Houston”: Pretty much everyone agrees that Houston needs Montrose. Over the last forty or so years, the roughly seven square miles southwest of downtown Houston (bounded by South Shepherd on the west, Bagby on the east, West Gray on the north, and the Southwest Freeway to the south) has been declared dead more often than Blues Clues host Steve Burns. Hippies, punks, and LGBT folks alike will all tell you, a wistful look in their eyes, “You should have been here when …” Followed, of course, by the declaration that Montrose is dead. ![]() Founding Texas Monthly editor William Broyles claims Montrose, and not Austin, as the true birthplace of Texas counterculture.Īnd just as in Austin, Montrose old-timers love to let you know that you are a few years too late for the real party. Indeed, when Austin was still a relatively straitlaced Southern college town, Montrose had already unfurled its freak flag. As Austin is to Texas, so Montrose has long been to Houston: a liberal, weird oasis in a sea of red, a refuge for musicians, artists, bohemians of every stripe, and the nexus of the city’s LGBT community.
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