Where houses used to be
August 16, 2011 (Tuesday)
It’s hard for me to believe that I retired from the pastorate over 15 years ago. In the years since retirement I have been a supply preacher from time to time in various churches, and I have been an interim pastor– twice at First Baptist Refugio, twice at Bethel Baptist in Ingleside, and once at First Baptist Rockport. In addition I actually became pastor again at Timbergrove Baptist in Houston, twice for a total of about five years. During those years in Houston, I had opportunity to observe the freeway system, and could not help but notice how the freeways had impacted some of the places where I grew up.
When I was in grades one through three at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, my family and I lived on the 500 block of Caplin Street. Today, the North Loop of 610 runs just two blocks south of the block where we lived, and the school lies very close to the humongous interchange with North Freeway. Before that, we lived on Jarrell Street just off of Liberty Road, and the Eastex Freeway now lies directly over that old street and our old duplex. Later we lived in Denver-Harbor Addition. When we moved there, houses were sparse, with lots of vacant lots. Today, I 10 East runs just a few blocks from our old house on Brownwood. Our house on Ruth Street between Almeda Road and Dowling Street was in a quiet neighborhood, but today at the end of our block a busy Highway 288 is a thoroughfare for cars and trucks, now one of Houston’s busy freeways.
Southwest Freeway looms over the campus of my old high school. If a driver is brave enough to look, its towers greet him/her. For a while, we lived on Shearn Street just west of downtown, and today I10 and I45 converge near the apartment house where we lived. During World War 2, we lived on Maury Street, where construction of Hardy Toll Road extension is now taking place.
Meanwhile, here in Rockport, there is a bypass that looks and functions very much like a freeway (maybe it is one), and construction has begun on a much bigger causeway. Even with the changes that have taken place during the 47 years we have lived here, much is still recognizable, looking a lot like it did years ago. Oh, there have been a lot of changes. If you have not been here for a while, you will say the place has changed. But not like Houston, where most of my landmarks have been replaced with racetracks they call freeways. And the houses? Well, as our babies were fond of saying, “Gone gone.”