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  • Culture War in Downtown Houston:Jones Hall and the Postwar Battle over Exclusive Space
  • Kyle Shelton (bio)

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Lines of Houstonians in front of City Auditorium in 1936. Because of the wide variety of concert and sporting events held within it, the auditorium offered events that appealed to Houstonians from different socio-economic backgrounds and racial groups. Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Bob Bailey Studios, City Auditorium, no. 1864-w1, December 1936, DBCAH identifier e_bb_0714, Bailey (Bob) Studios Photographic Archive.

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In June 1963, wrecking crews demolished City Auditorium in downtown Houston. Opened in 1910, the auditorium housed many of Houston's most popular leisure and recreation activities for more than fifty years. On Friday nights between 1913 and 1954, the Houston Symphony filled the hall with music. On Saturdays, as the sounds of the orchestra subsided, the grunts of wrestling matches and the cheers from basketball games echoed throughout the auditorium. A diverse collection of entertainers such as B. B. King, Marian Anderson, Enrico Caruso, and even Elvis graced the stage and performed for Houstonians of all classes and races in the hall "for all the people."1 That day in June 1963 when workers gutted the auditorium's interior to exposed beams and tore down its gothic façade, Houstonians looked on with a mix of apprehension, excitement, loss, and pride as a piece of their city's history disappeared into rubble.

Before the dust settled on the ruins of the auditorium, construction of a new building, The Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts, began. [End Page 1a] Built mostly with funds donated by businessman Jesse H. Jones and the Houston Endowment, the new Jones Hall would echo the explosive success and progress of postwar Houston, civic leaders believed. As the new permanent home for the symphony and the centerpiece of what would become a $40 million dollar civic center, Jones Hall represented Houston's postwar campaign to become the Sunbelt's epicenter of business, commerce, and culture. Still experiencing postwar economic growth and massive population increases, city boosters believed that Houston could vault into both the national and international spotlight, and they hoped to seize the moment by constructing a downtown and wider city that would solidify such a reputation. As one of the largest changes in the downtown area, Jones Hall encapsulated a significant shift in Houston. Redevelopments like the hall redrew the city physically, socially, and culturally in a push by civic authorities to "script" downtown space as an area intended for more "respectable" forms of leisure, business, and living.2 At a time when downtowns suffered significant decline due to suburban expansion and the flight of business to outlying shopping malls, Jones Hall and other new buildings offered a chance to reinvent central Houston and make it into the gleaming centerpiece of the city's image. Officials hoped that a new series of projects in the central city would allow them to fill the increasingly empty downtown streets with middle- and upper-class shoppers and leisure seekers and at the same time remove markers of decline such as rundown businesses and impoverished populations.3

The drastic demographic changes taking place in Houston after World War II left officials struggling to harness the city's growth and control the future of downtown space. Between 1940 and 1960, the population of Houston's metropolitan area jumped from 627,311 to 1.365 million.4 Over the same time period the black population rose from 103,000 to 246,000. Unlike the growth of the white population, which spread throughout the metro area, most of the growth among groups of color occurred within the central city.5 As minority groups became a larger portion [End Page 2] of the city's population and as early civil rights victories increased the voting power of minorities, city officials worried about the stability of their elected offices and about who would control the future shape of downtown. In hopes of quashing these fears, officials began to create a downtown that catered more and more to the expectations of the predominately...

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