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The Last American City: Douglas Milburn's second pedestrian guidebook to Houston, written in 1979, when pedestrianism here was truly heroic.

(Part one of a planned series...)

As the Preacher says, there's nothing new under the sun, and it turns out I was not the first Houstonian to write about adventures on long walks and/or bike rides in the Bayou City.

More than 30 years prior to my first adventure (a 16-mile slog down Westheimer from West Oaks Mall to Bagby), Douglas Milburn and Eli Zal beat me to the punch with their 1975 booklet Intrepid Walker's Guide to Houston. (Tom Richmond supplied the photos; he went on to Hollywood where he was director of photography for the films Stand and Deliver and A Midnight Clear, among others.)

In truth, my work and the Intrepid guide varied somewhat in approach. Zal and Milburn, a former Rice roommate of Larry McMurtry who went on to edit Houston City magazine and run the lysergic Magellan's Log blog), set out to write a guidebook, albeit one that aspires to literature. (I still don't know what the Sole of Houston series is, exactly.)

Zal and Milburn confined themselves to Montrose, downtown, the museums, the parks along Buffalo Bayou, Rice, Broadacres and Glenwood Cemetery.

After my first trek with Geoffrey Muller, David Beebe and I spent much more time scouring Houston's more touristically neglected roadways, though not ignoring our more famed and salubrious Inner Loop hoods.

By 1979, Zal had left his native Houston, and Milburn carried the torch alone with The Last American City: An Intrepid Walker's Guide to Houston.

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Murder, tacos and Perpetual Help

​Man, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since David Beebe and I last undertook a Sole of Houston stroll in December of 2008.

For my part, there was a divorce, massive weight loss, and the ditching of pretty much all my vices. As for Beebe, the super-picky confirmed playa was madly in love with his new girlfriend, as I was with mine.

We barely recognized each other. Sure, Beebe looked the same -- he's still that same Buddy Holly look-alike, Doug Sahm sound-alike he always was -- but he now was kitted out with both an iPhone and a camera that probably cost more than the trailer he lived in for months out in Marfa. Gifts from his girlfriend, he sheepishly explained.

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Biking and no beer

​David Beebe was back in town for a short time, so we put the band back together for an epic adventure in the streets of H-Town.

We will have a full account here later in the week after Beebe uploads his pics to Flickr, but for now we'll tease with a few details...

We didn't walk this time. We rode bikes. We were able to cover over 30 miles, which is about ten miles more than we were ever able to do on foot.

We also went through some of the scariest parts of town, or at least areas generally regarded as such.

Here's a fairly accurate map of our itinerary:

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Ray Davies never sang about seeing stars on Bellaire Boulevard

​Three years ago this month, David Beebe and I trekked Bellaire Boulevard from west of Highway 6 to the Little Woodrow's on the train tracks at the West U / Bellaire border. We didn't continue any further because the prosperous stretch from that faux icehouse -- the last beer available on a street with a severe shortage of same -- to the Med Center bored us.

I summed up that adventure thusly:

So that's Bellaire Boulevard. We didn't see a single abandoned shopping cart, unlike Shepherd, which seems to use them as mile markers. There's not enough trees. (Or bars. There are virtually no places to drink a beer on this street.) The closer in you are, the more boring it is. There are almost no pedestrians. It has one of the strangest bus-riding clienteles in town.

If Westheimer is mainly about the fetishes, broken dreams and vanities of Anglo whites, and Shepherd is all about the needs of cars, Bellaire is a world market of a street, a bazaar where Mexicans, Anglos, Salvadorans, African Americans, Hondurans, stoners, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans and Thais go to shop and eat.

Earlier this month, University of Houston architecture professor Susan Rogers examined the same street with more of a scholarly bent, one that probably didn't include her drinking screw-cap wine in the median of Bellaire Boulevard near the Bellaire city bandshell.

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It's been a while since I've posted in the Sole of Houston, and truth be told, ever since David Beebe moved to Marfa and I got a bike, we've kinda hung up our walking shoes. But that's just us. A guy named Brent Zius is picking up the slack.

This Monday, Zius plans to walk an even longer stretch of Westheimer than I did back in 2006. On that hike, Geoffrey "Uncle Tick" Muller and I started at West Oaks Mall and hiked to Main. Zius is starting three miles or so -- a good hour's hike -- to the West. He plans to start at 8 A.M. and be at Saint Dane's bar at Elgin and Brazos by 5 p.m.

Here is how he explained his mission in an email earlier this week.

To answer your immediate questions - no I am not protesting something, no I am not raising money for a cause, no I do not need sponsors and no I have not gone insane (yet)! Why I am doing this is a little hard to explain but I will try.

In 2006 a writer for the Houston Press named John Lomax walked about 16 miles of Westheimer and wrote about his journey in this article. Later that year he walked a smaller portion of Westheimer again and has since walked many of Houston's thoroughfares including walking all the way from Intercontinental to Spanish Flowers restaurant.

John's walks really got me thinking about Westheimer, what it means to me and to this city, all the good, the bad and the ugly it has to offer. There is no other street in town like it, it is the artery that gives life to the entire West side and beyond. I have a thousand memories on that street from being a kid, through my teenage years to adulthood and on. I have driven it 10,000 times plus but have never walked it for more than a block. Why would I, no one in Houston walks anywhere, right? So . . . .

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Photos by Jay Lee

I just can't get enough of Houston's East End/Second Ward/Ship Channel area, so that is where the latest installment of the Sole of Houston took us. I don't think I can recreate the route with anything more than about 90 percent accuracy, but my best guess is that it looked something like this.

David Beebe couldn't make this one, so I took a couple of Sole rookies along. Jay Lee, the high-tech renaissance man and Flying Fish Sailor was invited along for both his conversation and his downright frightening photography skills. (His most humdrum shots are better than the best I have ever taken on these walks.) Chris Henderson, a former Nightfly contributor, had wanted me to reserve him a spot on the next one a while back.
    
That Beebe was unable to come also explains the route somewhat. I didn't want my brave companion of some 200 miles of asphalt marches to be cheated of virgin territory elsewhere, so this one was selected to very nearly, but not quite, follow in the footsteps of our hikes on East Side thoroughfares like Leeland/Telephone, Navigation, and Harrisburg. The plan was to just sort of meander out to 75th Street and then head north to Canal and thence back to town.
   
The trek began a little before ten in the Press parking lot and carried us up Travis. After a short-cut through the very quiet Houston Pavilions, we emerged near the Convention Center, where a knot of African cabbies were squabbling as two of Houston's Finest tried to sort them out. Good luck with that -- I'll bet that feud had its roots in the Eritrean Revolution or something like that.
   


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With another Sole stroll nigh, we thought now was as good a time as any for a look back at what we've accomplished already. Here is the Google map of our past adventures.



View Larger Map

Looks like we're gonna need to tackle Fifth Ward / Kashmere Gardens, the Heights, Sunnyside, Acres Homes, Memorial Villages, the Northside barrio and Pasadena / South Houston before we can consider this project close to done.

And here is the final installment of David Beebe and John Lomax's 20-plus mile hike from Intercontinental Airport to Spanish Flowers restaurant. Part one is here and part two is here.

David Beebe's accounts of the same hike are here and here.


Airline's furthest reaches are lined by sprawling and run-down '70s apartment complexes. And yet there's a weirdly rural feel in patches. The 281 area code hangs on for a longer time than you would expect, and there are plenty of fireworks stands, as a swath of unincorporated Harris County extends far toward town. The few houses we saw looked like they had once been out in the middle of fields.

The entire area is also pretty much 100 percent Mexican, with a couple of Salvadoran businesses for variety, and one gringo barbecue -- the Hungry Farmer -- holding out.

 




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The longest walk in the history of the Sole of Houston requires the longest piece. This being a blog and all, we have decided to break it up into three installments.

This is part two. Yesterday's is here, and we'll wrap it up tomorrow.

In this installment, we venture west down Aldine-Bender from Aldine Westfield to Airline Drive.

Aldine Bender is cockfighters and 8-liners deluxe, an intensification of the sparse version of same way up north.

One of the prime attractions, for us, anyway, of its eastern stretches is one of the most foreboding strip malls in the city.

In one corner lurks a closed down bar called Sassy's. The doors of this place were open even though it was abandoned. Someone had pulled much of the furniture out of it and left it on the sidewalk out front.

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The longest walk in the history of the Sole of Houston requires the longest piece. This being a blog and all, we have decided to break it up into three installments. Coming today, tomorrow and Thursday in this tale of 22-plus miles of concrete, mud, and fairly cold weather: The fending off a potential psycho killer and the drunkest crack dealer who ever lived, the most sinister strip mall in all of Greater Houston, a sprawling, festive Mexican mercado, a drink in a historic off-the-radar nightspot, a shot of fine tequila amid murals of Mexican TV stars in a bar called Recuerdos, and more wildlife than we've ever seen before. And before it was all over, one of us would be caked in the puke of a total stranger. Come with us as we hike from the land of 8-Liners and cockfighters to the northern edge of hipster Houston...




The latest installment of the Sole of Houston takes David Beebe and me way up north.

The plan was to go downtown and catch Metro's new Airport Direct express bus, turn around at IAH and make our way to Aldine Bender, where we would hang a right and slog over to Airline Drive. We would then walk the length of Airline to North Main. From there, Warren's would be just a short triumphant march away.

Sadly, owing to an epic clusterfail, we didn't quite make it to Warren's on foot. (Lesson learned: always carry a street map.) We did make it as far as Spanish Village, though.


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