​Over the weekend I took my son out to Brazos Bend State Park. That's him in the foreground of the photo after the jump, sitting on an embankment about ten feet away -- and four feet above -- an alligator that looked to be about ten feet long.

Brazos Bend is a surreal place. The horseshoe lakes, palmetto frond-dotted sloughs, stalking ibises and herons, and lazy-moving creeks and big Brazos itself take you back to what feels like dinosaur times, and that's before you even come across your first gator. 

We saw about half a dozen along a heavily-traveled trail near one of the lakes. These ranged in size from about two feet to a fairly large one that was lurking underneath one of the observation decks that jutted out over the lake. Hikers and gators coexist casually -- most people are transfixed by their first couple of gators, but it gets fairly humdrum after you take in three or four. (Except when you stray from the trails and venture along the banks of Big Creek and come across a big one mano a mano, as my son and I did. Not that we condone that action, of course.)

After all, these aren't usually the most dynamic animals in the world. If you were to make a pie chart of a gator's life, the slice that denoted "laying around with eyes half closed barely breathing" would be by far the largest.

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Photo via Shorpy

​This is what 1900 Franklin looked like in 1943. Which, to be sure, seems a lot like what 1900 Franklin would have looked like in 1870 or so.

A horse-drawn carriage in 1943? Weren't people driving boxy Ford trucks by that time?

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​The recent Polish air catastrophe that claimed the life of President Lech Kaczynski and his wife and almost 100 other members of that country's political elite has opened a window on to Houston's Polish community. Who knew it was still thriving enough to support its own church?

Well, it is. Yesterday there was a memorial Mass at Our Lady of Czestochowa, a 25-year-old Polish-language church in Spring Branch. The Branch is something like Houston's unofficial Polish 'hood, or at least the area in which many of the post-World War II/Cold War-era émigrés congregate. Polonia Restaurant and its mouthwatering golabki, kielbasa, and pierogi is not far from the church.

Virtually all other Polish stuff in today's Houston can be found through Forum Polonia. On May 1 and 2, Our Lady will be the site of Houston's fourth annual Polish Festival.

As with Mexican immigration, Polish immigration to Houston has come in waves, albeit much smaller ones, over many decades. Some say that Houston's recent Polish immigrants are less blue-collar than those that have gone to places like Chicago. The ones that came here tend to be doctors, engineers and artists, and that Forum Polonia link, which comes complete with links to local Polish-American poets, classical pianists, and art gallery owners would seem to bear out that stereotype.

The older wave was more rural and blue collar.

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​Unlike, say, the Big Apple or the Eternal City, Houston has never quite settled on one definitive nickname. A Canadian newspaper has just announced that we have a new one, but more on that in a second...

Beginning in the 1870s, locals were calling Houston the Magnolia City, in honor of the fragrant native magnolia groves that were even then being fast devoured by urban development. Today, that name and association lives on pretty much only in the Magnolia Brewery building on Franklin downtown, and the Brewery Tap bar is about all that remains of Magnolia Beer, the city's most prominent locally-owned and brewed brew prior to the recent advent of St. Arnold's.

In the early 1900s, some local African-American journalists called the city Heavenly Houston for its relatively enlightened (by contemporary Deep South standards) racial climate and bustling economy. Today, that name lives on only in the NFSW Web Site of this (history-minded?) local escort.

Baghdad on the Bayou is another old one, but recent events on both the world and Gulf Coast stage have rendered it rather obsolete. In the nickname's mid-20th Century heyday, it was meant to connote merely a sprawling, sweltering city on a sluggish waterway. Since then, Saddam and Gulf Wars I and II changed the way Americans thought of the Iraqi capital. And in the aftermath of Katrina, some reporters saw lawless, post-storm New Orleans as a closer approximation of modern-day Baghdad.

The blander Bayou City came along at about the same time as Baghdad on the Bayou and has fared better. It has the advantage of being accurate and the disadvantage of being utterly boring.

Since 1967, Space City has been Houston's official nickname, but hardly anybody uses it anymore. NASA's campus is barely in the City of Houston, the moon landing was a long time ago, and sad to say, the shuttle disasters have been the most noteworthy events in space travel since then.

In keeping with the death of poetry in sports nicknaming, in which yesteryear's Sultan of Swat or Splendid Splinter is today's A-Rod or Bags, there's H-Town. Meh. The same goes for our other sports-related moniker: Clutch City. The Dream and Rudy T have left the Summit, folks. Hell, the Summit has left the Summit.

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​The Texas Presidential Election of 1838 was likely unique in the history of democracy, if for no other reason than its body count.

At the time, there were two political parties in Texas -- Houstonites, and anti-Houstonites. The former favored annexation to the United States, relatively gentle treatment of the Indians, and keeping the capital in Houston. (The party's namesake was term-limited.)

The anti-Houstonites favored Texas independence and expansion to the Pacific, total eradication or expulsion of the Indians, and the removal of the capital farther west.

Houston's rival Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar emerged as the flag-bearer for the anti-Houstonites; planter, poet and Texas attorney general Peter Grayson and lawyer, jurist and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence James Collinsworth, both protégés of the Big Drunk, were the leading Houstonite candidates.

The campaign quickly turned vicious.

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​With the recent verdict against Eugene Etheridge and the permanent closure of his infamous Gaslight Video on Bellaire Boulevard in the West University area, an era has drawn to a close. No longer can the 3500 block of Bellaire be accurately described as the Red Light District of West University Place.

Gaslight was all that remained of a once, briefly rollicking Sodom and Gomorrah on Poor Farm Ditch, as the drainage waterway that bisects Bellaire there is known. And if an anonymous poster Hair Balls dug up last year on the leave-little-to-the-imaginationly-named hook-up Web site Squirt.org was to be believed, Gaslight was already a little bit past its sell-by date when the law came calling, that is, if you were put off your glory-hole game by talk of birdies on the 17th hole at Wildcat and how many strike-outs Junior racked up in his Little League game last night:

Holy oxygen masks, Batman! Went at lunch time today, and it was pretty creepy. Everyone there was at least seventy, and they all knew each other. Not only that, but they kept talking about their plans for the weekend, people who died, what was going on in their 'stories' and other intimate details of their private lives. It was like Shipley's Do-Nuts in the mornings.

But back in 1987, it was not the only pleasure palace in the 3500 block of Bellaire. Directly across the street, Houston detectives literally lucked into uncovering a high-class bordello.

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​Of all the columnists in the history of Houston journalism, Sigman Byrd was easily the darkest and the most literary. From the late 1940s to the early '60s, Byrd wrote a column called The Stroller for the old daily Houston Press and later, briefly for the Chronicle. He always much favored the city's dark shadows, scruffy neighborhoods, and forgotten, often wrecked people over the big affairs of the day and Houston's high and mighty.

As David Theis put it in his 1994 remembrance :

Byrd ranged for copy far and wide in the Houston of his day. He listened to the alcohol-treated stories of the merchant sailors in the bars on 75th Street, near the Ship Channel. He ate chicharrones and drank Jax beer with Don Antonio and the Laredo Bar regulars (who knew him as Don Segismundo) just off Navigation. He hung with the Fifth Ward's assorted cats. But it was downtown and its environs that Byrd had a particularly strong feeling for. It was possible to make a human connection with downtown then. The way Sig Byrd wrote it, at least, it was impossible not to, not if you had any feeling for raw, unadulterated humanity.

Byrd's was the pre-Interstate Houston, a Houston of strongly distinct neighborhoods and districts with poetic names like Catfish Reef (the 400 block of lower Milam), Pearl Harbor (the corner of Hill and Lyons), Vinegar Hill (the eastern terminus of Washington Avenue) and the corner of Six-Bit Street (75th) and Canine Street, as one local wag designated Canal, because it was "dog-eat-dog."

Here, from his long out-of-print Viking Press collection Sig Byrd's Houston, is Byrd's report of the action in Catfish Reef, written in typically Byrd-ish noir style:

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Courtesy Harris County Medical Examiner

Rederings of the last two unidentified Corll victims. The boy on the left will be buried Thursday.

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Just a couple of weeks ago we went on a Houston 101 nostalgia trip about Houston's most notorious mass murderer, Dean Corll.

Today in our e-mail-box comes word that one of Corll's victims will be buried Thursday.

Harris County announced today that one of the unidentified victims left over from Corll's sad list of 27 dead young boys will be buried in the county's potter's field. He is one of only two bodies left unidentified from the 1973 event.

Who is he? Says the county:

The victim being buried is described as a white male, 15-20 years of age at the time of his death. He had dark brown hair about 7 inches in length. Personal effects believed to be his are being included with the remains in burial. They include a brightly striped swimming suit, cowboy boots, corduroy slacks, and a rope bracelet. This body was retrieved from the infamous boatshed in southeast Houston.

A longhaired teen runaway who for whatever reason couldn't stay home and instead found hell, like all of Corll's victims.

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​The late summer of 1973 was a strange, strange time in Houston. The handiwork of a sadistic mass murderer had been discovered, and as more and more bodies were found, the city and the local media couldn't get enough.

Says one former Houstonian who was there:
 

When this thing broke, in early August of '73, the US mass murder record was 25, I think, by Juan Corona of California, who would hire illegal farm workers and then kill and bury them when they asked to get paid.

Well, when the Houston case broke, the radio stations would report it gleefully every time HPD pulled another body out of the ground.

I mean, it was literally, "We're only four bodies away from the record!" And people all over the city had their ears to their radios to keep up with the body count as it rose over the days.

Eventually 27 bodies of young boys were dug up, and lots of people believe there were more to be found if the police would just keep looking.

But by that point the murderer, Dean Corll, known as "The Candy Man," was dead.

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​While Beyonce and Billy Gibbons (not to mention five or ten rappers) have undoubtedly sold more records, we're betting that neither of them have written anything that will endure as long as Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," "To Live's to Fly," or "If I Needed You," or any one of a dozen or so others. Nor are either known as much for their songs as they are for their singing and dancing and/or bandleading and guitar playing.

By those standards -- immortality and fame as a pure composer of music -- Van Zandt is easily Houston's most prominent songwriter.

What remains of the musical environment Van Zandt emerged from back in the '60s and '70s? The power of Google tells us more than we might want to know...

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