I have collected a series of before and after images of Houston spanning from 1940- 2024 that started while watching my mother shoot (with cameras) and print (in the darkroom) everything including the kitchen sink, but I loved her “Mom and Pop” series, so I stole her idea in the 1980’s.
Chick-fil-A and Whataburger are so fun and yummy, but independently owned establishments are more appealing to me. They have a culture, what my dad called “folksy,” with life- long employees and “regulars,” so I document my favorites within a 3-mile radius of my house. The process has become an obsessive ritual, and I can’t stop doing it.
While gathering photos, I found myself conjuring up non existent images to match my memories with questions in my head for my mom like “Why didn’t you shoot the uniformed white guy who pumped the gas at the service station on Sunset Blvd.?” or “I wish you had a photo of the old waitresses wearing 100% polyester uniforms at Alfred’s Deli.” (Wait, maybe they weren’t that old.) So for a minute, I considered including third party images, but that got too complicated.
I decided to keep the photographers in the family, limited to myself, my mom , my grandmother, who shot shot these images, this one from my Aunt Johnna Lee’s collection, and my nephew, Micky Braeger, who shot the after pic of the River Oaks Country Club because I didn’t want to.
Driving around to revisit her photos was a favorite pasttime, but I walk through downtown, which makes me feel like I am a tourist in my own city. Just the other day, I watched two young European guys ahead of me looking for coffee shops, wearing flip flops, taking pictures, and I felt like them. Walking to revist her photos slows me down, I get my steps in, allows me to see how we have matured with age, maybe even gracefully.
The Old
The oldest images represent a 100-year-old city full of 300,000 people who weren’t afraid to throw themselves out there, and the newer images show how we evolved but stayed on a similar path with young lives and a refined new urbanism.
· We lived in a city where a boy scout and his troop brought newspapers to the owner of a recycle center every Saturday morning.
· A time and a place where the eldest sister of six fell in love with a big historical home, and convinced her husband to buy it for $15,000 so she could throw all the parties in the family.
· A neighborhood where apartments became a grocery store and right across the street, a grocery store that became apartments.
· A place where we all drank water from the tap, and didn’t need a membership to a country club.
· A city where the owner of a restaurant was the daily manager, and the owner of the liquor store took a note and a check from underage kids to deliver their parents smokes and booze.
The New
The newer images show remnants of the past, but a few stay static throughout this 80-year period which is comforting to document, and an excuse to think I am still sort of young, or maybe just not that old. I watch myself and Houston age and grow. The growth is stimulating, but I have been in denial about the aging for at least twenty years.
· My favorites are houses, like the house my father grew up in is still here, but the house I grew up in looks like this.
· Today, I work in my dad’s favorite restaurant from 1998 until the day he died, while I stare out the same window of the liquor store where my mom bought her booze in the 1970’s.
· For two years, I lived in a high-rise that used to be a recycle center. Now I live in an eight-plex where my landlord, Forest, prefers to live on property, expects a physical check for rent, and greets me in the morning while he feeds the neighborhood cats, but Forest doesn’t live here anymore.
· Today, I pump my own gas in a car that drives itself to HEB, I recycle, drink from the tap, and I am older than those waitresses at Alfred’s Deli.
This is a hybrid series, so download your favorites, see them in real life at my favorite Vietnamese drive through, or buy me lunch and we can swap stories about it all. I recommend the Vegan Egg Rolls, and Chargrilled Pork Vermicelli.
It’s good therapy to look out the window, acknowledge where we came from, and where we are now, so take the long way home because we may never pass this way again.
