Fifth Ward Houston

Shotgun Row

A man with oversized jeans and no shirt came out his home to greet me as I took pictures of the shotgun homes on his block. He told me these two particular homes had been in the neighborhood as long as he had been here - all his life - and that they had been built in the 1930s (evident in the tin roofs). This local resident said the homes had been abandoned for a long time. The city keeps posting signs indicating that the buildings violate the housing code, yet nothing has been done to remove the structures.  These buildings are truly abandoned in that, as indicated by the neighbor, homeless people do not live in them and they are not a popular location for underage drinking. When I pointed out how beautiful the blue bonnets bursting all around the front yards of the homes were, he quickly dismissed my assertion, interjecting with vehemence: "They're just weeds! They're just weeds! They need to go." 

Ivy 1 & 2: Welcome Home

Check out the following exhibit at the Menil Collection, Houston. The exhibit explores the roll the de Menil's played in restoring the Deluxe Theatre - an abandoned theatre on Lyons Avenue - in the 1970s.

Dear John & Dominique: Letters ans Drawing from the Menil Archives 

God, Glam, Fried 

Blind Man With House

High School Hangout 

Gulf Coast Engulfed 

'Is that a house in there?' a friend asked me when I showed him this photograph for the first time. 

Into the Wild.

Thus begins the series of photographs I will be uploading of Houston's Fifth Ward for the final project of my Kinder Institute Catherine Bracken Fellowship. One of six other historic political wards, the Fifth Ward was founded by working class freemen and former slaves in late nineteenth century. Before desegregation, the neighborhood housed African Americans of all income levels. In the 1970s, however, higher income urban residents migrated to the suburbs, boding poorly for Fifth Ward economically. This blog will capture the abandoned houses of Houston many of which were built immediately after the Great Fire of Houston in 1912 on into the 1950s, but which appear to have been abandoned for years. Because of its central location and historic value, my guess is that the Fifth Ward is only a couple years away from undergoing gentrification, which will of course mean the destruction of many of the historic homes and essential identity of the neighborhood. My goal is to emphasize the strange beauty and utter repugnance of these long abandoned homes, which have been utterly consumed by plants, trees, and ivy.

This collection seeks to capture the history of the neighborhood, highlighting the continuity of depression in the areas as evinced by the abandoned homes. Besides just attempting to capturing the neighborhood, this series will challenge values regarding homeownership and community preservation/development, as well as the notion that abandoned houses are inherently ugly, unsafe, to be hidden away. Most residents I have spoken with in the neighborhood deplore the abandoned homes for obvious reasons - homeless people inhabit them, high school students hold parties in them, and investors shy away from neighborhoods with as many abandoned homes are the Fifth Ward has. For residents, the vines that ensnarl wooden trimmings, the trees whose branches sneak in through the windows, and the blue bonnets that burst out of the untended yards of these homes are only overgrown plants, weeds - in essence, a nuisance.

This project is dear to my heart, and has allowed me to discover the neighborhood in a way that would not be not possible from my desk at the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation. The Fifth Ward CRC is a community development organization doing amazing work the Fifth Ward including a mass rehabilitation project on Lyons Avenue, Lyons Avenue Renaissance, in early October 2012. Check out http://www.fifthwardcrc.org/ for more information.