How generous of them; how kind! I am so eternally grateful for this opportunity, O Great City. Allow me to prostrate myself in an unbridled display of appreciation, a la Wayne and Garth: “I’m not worthy!”

Pfft. That wasn’t incredibly patronizing of them or anything…

Dynamo Village

Really the only way to go here is to focus on Dowling Street, which was a node in the Texas country blues network stretching from Deep Ellum down here through the cotton towns of East Texas. It was fertile in plenty of ways; a young George Harrison, long before following the Maharishi, was bent on a factory job in Houston so that he could sit at the feet of his Texan blues guru Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins of Dowling Street.

Searching allmusic.com for song names turns up a half dozen about the street. There’s even a recorded blues song called Holman and Dowling, an intersection farther down in the Third Ward a few blocks from where its fabric was gutted by 59 hitting 288, a couple of the freeways whose erection plunged the nationally prominent neighborhood into the decay from which PR firms are now being hired to elevate it.

Now whether or not anybody favors this, do yourself a favor and enjoy getting to know our place better with some local history reading:

http://www.houstonculture.org/cr/lightnin.html

http://www.campstreetcafe.com/HoustonChronicle.htm

http://www.campstreetcafe.com/.....ghtnin.htm

http://www.tshaonline.org/hand...../xbb1.html

Dowling Street District is a little stiff, as are the other Dowling Street [blah]’s. Dowling Downs doesn’t make topographic sense, since Downs means dunes or rises.
If it’s not going to be Downtown, though, it could be Dowlingtown, which is just labyrinthine enough to make you smile once you decide it’s not a stupid name; or, if we must go for brandable flash, Lightnin’[/g/’s] Town or [the] Lightning District. The legacy in the links above hardly belongs to him, but for the sake of the rest of the Houstonians and Texans whose lives were bound up in so much, it would be a great thing to make this naming an opportunity to begin to spread what it all meant.

-N.A.S.