El Lago, Texas - A Local Area Guide
A city of astronauts and shade trees, built out fast in the 1960s and barely changed since
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El Lago is one of the smallest cities on Clear Lake, at just 0.7 square miles, tucked between Seabrook, Taylor Lake Village and the two lakes that give the town its name. What it lacks in size it makes up for in a history that connects almost every street to the American space program. This page is a plain guide to the town. For the full record, the El Lago, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A pirate hide-out before it was a suburb
Long before NASA arrived, this stretch of land along Clear Lake had another reputation: it sits on the site of one of the main hide-outs used by the French pirate and privateer Jean Lafitte. The name El Lago — Spanish for "the lake" — came much later, when the modern city took shape in the early 1960s.
Incorporated for the astronauts
The City of El Lago was incorporated in March 1961, right as NASA was consolidating its Houston-area operations and bringing in personnel from around the country. The neighborhood grew up fast around that arrival, and many of its houses were custom-built specifically for astronauts and their families. Over the years, El Lago has been home to at least 47 astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon; Buzz Aldrin; Jim Lovell of Apollo 8 and Apollo 13; Story Musgrave, veteran of six Space Shuttle flights; and Peggy Whitson, the first woman to command the International Space Station.
A town that still wears its space history
The connection shows up everywhere. The local elementary school is named for Ed White, the first American to walk in space. Neil Armstrong Park and McNair Memorial Park, the latter honoring astronaut Ronald McNair of the Challenger crew, both carry astronaut names, and a pavilion in town is named for Dr. Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut and Johnson Space Center director. El Lago's own city logo features a Space Shuttle.
Built out once, and mostly staying that way
Unlike many of its neighbors, El Lago isn't growing outward. The city's residential space is about 97 percent built out, and city planning documents describe minimal room left for new single-family homes. Most of the roughly 1,100 single-family houses standing today went up during that original 1960s building wave, and El Lago has stayed largely the same size and shape ever since.
The trees, the lakes and the water underneath
El Lago's large canopy trees are one of its defining features, shading the streets and cutting stormwater runoff across the city by as much as 17 percent. Harris County Water Control and Improvement District 50 handles the city's water and sewer service, while El Lago itself maintains the streets and surface drains that feed into Taylor Lake and Clear Lake. That water is also the city's biggest ongoing challenge — Hurricane Harvey alone dropped more than four feet of rain on El Lago in roughly 48 hours, and the city has spent years since identifying and working through its most flood-prone streets.
That is El Lago: a square-mile pocket of astronaut history and old shade trees, built almost entirely in one era and holding onto its shape ever since.