Montrose, Houston - A Local Area Guide
How Montrose began as a streetcar suburb, its counterculture years, and its historic districts today
More about this in Montrose
Montrose is a 7.5-square-mile neighborhood in west-central Houston, sometimes called Neartown, sitting roughly between Interstate 69/US 59, Allen Parkway, South Shepherd Drive and downtown's western edge. It's one of the oldest planned neighborhoods in the city and, by reputation, one of the most distinctive — called the "Heart of Houston" by some and the "strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos" by others. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand the neighborhood before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Montrose, Houston page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
A streetcar suburb before River Oaks existed
Montrose began as a plan, not an accident. Developer J. W. Link and his Houston Land Corporation platted the neighborhood in 1911, years before River Oaks was developed, envisioning what Link's own sales brochure called a "great residential addition" served by wide boulevards and a streetcar line running straight through it. Link wrote, "Houston has to grow. Montrose is going to lead the procession," and built his own home there — the Link-Lee Mansion, now part of the University of St. Thomas campus. In 1926, the Plaza Apartment Hotel opened on Montrose Boulevard, modeled after New York's Ritz-Carlton at a cost of over a million dollars, and became home to some of Houston's early civic leaders.
When the deed restrictions lapsed
Montrose's early character depended on deed restrictions that kept commercial uses out of much of the neighborhood. Those restrictions lapsed before 1936, and commercial development picked up quickly afterward — which is why, along Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer Road today, few of the original homes remain, most converted long ago into businesses and restaurants.
The counterculture years
Montrose's modern identity took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, when the neighborhood became a center of the counterculture movement — street musicians, hippie communes, head shops, and regular demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the corner of Montrose and Westheimer. KPFT, a listener-sponsored radio station, began broadcasting from the neighborhood in 1970 and was joined by other underground FM stations along what became known as Montrose's "radio row." KPFT's transmitter was bombed twice by a local Ku Klux Klan group, an act that made it the only radio station in United States history to be knocked off the air entirely.
The center of LGBT Houston
Around the same period, Montrose became the center of Houston's gay and lesbian community, after gay men were drawn to the neighborhood through a 24-hour restaurant called Art Wren and began gentrifying its older houses. By 1985, at least 19% of Montrose residents were gay or lesbian, and the neighborhood supported dozens of gay bars and several activist organizations. The community weathered the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the 1991 murder of Paul Broussard, an event that reshaped the relationship between the neighborhood and the Houston Police Department. Montrose remains the epicenter of LGBT culture in Houston today.
Museums, chapels and historic districts
Montrose is also home to serious cultural institutions: the Menil Collection, a free museum designed by architect Renzo Piano to house the art collection of John and Dominique de Menil, and the nearby Rothko Chapel, featuring fourteen paintings by Mark Rothko. By June 2010, the neighborhood held six of Houston's nineteen officially designated Historic Districts — Audubon Place, Avondale East, Avondale West, Courtland Place, Westmoreland, and First Montrose Commons — a concentration of protected architecture unusual for a neighborhood this close to downtown.
Schools that grew up with the neighborhood
Montrose's public schools trace almost the same timeline as its houses. Montrose Elementary opened in 1906, years before the neighborhood was even formally platted as Link's streetcar suburb. Wilson Elementary followed in 1925, Lanier in 1926, and Wharton in 1929 — a run of schools built during Montrose's first great wave of residential growth.
That is Montrose: a planned streetcar suburb that became a counterculture landmark, the center of LGBT life in Houston, and a neighborhood that has held onto more of its original architecture, through six historic districts, than almost anywhere else this close to downtown.