From the distance downtown Houston may have the most futuristic looking skyline of any American city, although not largest. It is probably the U.S. city that looks most like Metropolis in the Superman movies. From a closer view, though, many of buildings look a little dated. Houston's biggest boom was during the 1970s and early 1980s, an era of high interest rates that corresponded with cheaper building techniques and a low degree of ornamentation. The buildings from three decades ago are now mostly somewhat plain looking compared to the newer generation of even glassier and more futuristic looking skyscrapers that dominates Chinese cities and is starting to get a greater presence here in America. A few notable exceptions to that in Houston include the Philip Johnson designed Republic Bank Tower, now Bank of America since wave of financial mergers, the skyscraper that has a roof that looks like it was historically inspired by gabled Dutch Renaissance buildings.

Downtown Houston fell on hard times after oil boom of the early 1980s collapsed, so it’s somewhat surprising there are new buildings being built again, some of them residential in a place that had a reputation for being a dead downtown after work hours . The regional economy nowadays is more diversified, but both here and in Dallas most of new office development is now in distant suburbs where most conservative Texans want to live while downtown office vacancy rates in both cities have been high for a long time.

Downtown is not all office buildings, though, at least not anymore. The large Hbby Center for the Performing Arts and newish Wortham Theater are both downtown. And office workers, of course, need places to eat, so there is even a stretch of historic old buildings along Main Street that have been transformed into a nice commercial street similar to Larimer Square in downtown Denver. Houston even had the foresight to preserve a couple of its attractive old buildings like the old Harris County Courthouse, but I suspect 90% of the downtown buildings from a century ago have been bulldozed to make way for parking garages and surface lots.

One of the things you notice in Houston is that there are not many people walking on the streets even though the weather was absolutely perfect to be outdoors on the sunny November day I was there . It’s normally too hot to go outside for much of the year in Houston, so most buildings are connected by underground walkways below street level, similar to passages between buildings at 2^nd or 3^rd floors in very cold Midwestern cities.

Minute Maid Park/Stadium is where the Houston Astros now play. Of all the silly corporate names for stadiums the one named after a brand of orange juice must be close to the top. Earlier I drove past the obsolete Astrodome on the south side, the world’s original air-conditioned stadium that was the home to the Oilers as well as the Astros for much of Houston’s sports history but is now destined to be torn down. There’s no way you can preserve or repurpose something that big as a historical landmark despite it being a first.

I noticed a light rail system downtown, the system’s new single line that goes south from downtown to Hermann Park and Texas Medical Center. It struck me as pretty useless since Houston is such a giant Metro area and it’s such a short stretch that runs between two employment centers but isn’t practical for getting people from where they live to where they work. It turns out, though, that the short stretch of several miles is only the first little piece in a much larger planned system. But isn’t mass transit un-American to people in these parts, or at least un-Texan? In the decades since the oil bust Houston’s economy has diversified a lot to include technology and other industries besides oil, so probably the general outlook isn’t as narrowly conservative as it once was when reactionary oil men called all the shots .

However, I had an experience that makes me unsure about the rate of that change. Towards the end of the day as I was walking towards my car I took a picture of the skyline while waiting to cross the street. A very clean cut young man in a suit and slickly greased hair said to me, "You can’t take a picture of that. That’s private property!" I was a stunned. Where in the world other than North Korea does anyone nowadays think you can’t take a picture of a group of tall buildings? “This is still a free country, man. I can take a picture of whatever I want!” I was tempted to ass, “Asshole!” Old attitudes of young corporate security types die hard.

None of the skyscrapers in Houston have a rooftop observation deck, maybe because Houston just isn’t a tourist center along the lines of New York or Chicago. I did discover the Chase Tower has an “observation deck” open to the public on one of its higher floors. The view, however, is not completely panoramic. You can only see out one side of the building towards the south and east, so you don’t get to look west in the direction of the Galleria and Houston’s second big office center on the wealthy west side of the city. Overall it was worthwhile to spend most of a day in the center of the city that oil built, but in terms of big American cities Houston’s downtown doesn’t offer all that much in terms of significant attractions or great beauty or history.