Allen’s Landing Walking Tour

Walk this way

Comments (0) By JOHN SEABORN GRAY Thursday, Aug 5 2010

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It’s appropriate that the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance will be giving its Allen’s Landing Walking Tour at the spot where Augustus and John Kirby Allen founded the city of Houston in 1836, during the hot month of August. It will add to the realism when participants, who will no doubt be sweltering in the summer heat, start asking, “Now, why exactly did the Allen brothers pick this swampy spot as the place to start Houston?” During the walk, tour members will be regaled with stories from the city’s illustrious and unsavory past. The locale the Allen brothers chose to launch their upstart town would go on to become Houston’s first port — and point of entry for African slaves. Today it hosts a commemorative park on a refurbished and particularly gorgeous stretch of Buffalo Bayou, with no mention of slave ships or Civil War prisoner camps that were constructed nearby. The tour will cover the Art Deco Merchants and Manufacturers Building and the century-old Willow Street Pump Station, which was the foundation of Houston’s first sewer system and is now being used as a convention center for the University of Houston-Downtown. 6 p.m. 1001 Commerce. For information, call 713-216-5000 or visit www.ghpa.org/tours. $7 to $10.
Sun., Aug. 8, 2010