When Westheimer Was for Cruising

WHEN WESTHEIMER WAS FOR CRUISING John Nova Lomax reminisces: “This was Oil Bust Houston, and it looked then like Montrose might become a full-on slum. There were no condos along ‘Theimer (as it was often called by the mullet set) and few fancy restaurants. From Montrose Boulevard all the way to what is now called Midtown, Westheimer was lined with little more than one “modeling studio” after another, and it seems like there were even more tattoo shops than there are now. The denizens and visitors to these businesses (not to mention the street hustlers, drag queens, punks and Guardian Angels that still lurk in the area) provided plenty for the hordes of suburbanites — getting their first taste of freedom and big city life — to gawk at from the safety of their Blazers and Cutlasses. . . . on weekend nights, Westheimer would be bumper-to-bumper from Bagby to well past Buffalo Speedway, and sometimes all the way out to the Galleria, a phantasmagoria of teenage hormones and sound-collisions: car-horns, engines revving, and squealing girls, the hiss-and-almost-subsonic bass rumble of ‘Paul Revere’ booming from a Jeep Cherokee interlocking with a Honda CRX chirping out that inane ‘Two of Hearts’ pop ditty or the root canal Teutonic skronk of that ‘Warm Leatherette’ monstrosity.” [Hair Balls]

4 Comment

  • Well, if it hadn’t been for the 1980s oil bust, my hubby couldn’t have bought our duplex in Montrose. Of course, he still had a house in Sugarland and I had one in Katy, both worth about half what we owed on them.

    Eventually,after renting them to losers for over ten years, we sold them losing only about $6,000.

    But, if you really wanted freedom, you should have been on “Theimer” in the late 1960s. Good times. I lost my virginity 2 blocks from the house I now own.

  • Hey, leave Warm Leatherette alone!

  • Wow! Wow! Well written!

  • Remember Sin Alley?