Wednesday afternoon I went back to Hyde Park and had a short visit in the home of Kathy and Mark Schipper.
They live on California Street, at the corner of Yoakum, in a big house built in 1913. I got the vague notion that I remember that house from 1947 when I first came to Houston looking for a job.
I didn't live in Hyde Park then, but I wasn't far away, and the word among single guys in that part of Houston was that lots of pretty girls lived in Hyde Park, and this was true.
So back in the late '40s I knew those streets just west of Montrose Boulevard. Commonwealth. Waugh. Fairview. Hyde Park Boulevard. Welch. Van Buren. And a flock of streets named for states from Nevada down to California.
The district called Hyde Park now is bordered generally by West Gray on the north, Montrose on the east, Westheimer on the south and Yupon on the west.
I didn't know until I visited the Schippers that when I was among a raft of single guys chasing girls in Hyde Park, we were chasing them on historic ground.
Kathy Schipper told me that the district lies in what was once a 150-acre farm owned by Mirabeau B. Lamar, then the president of the Texas Republic.
Most Hyde Park streets are renegades when it comes to direction. That is, the streets don't run parallel to connecting streets outside the district. Apparently this was caused by the way Lamar's farm was surveyed when he acquired the land, probably in 1838 or '39.
A quick glance at a detailed Houston map will convince you that fewer than half our streets fail to run true to main compass points. Main Street comes mighty close to running flat northeast and southwest through downtown, and I've always felt South Main ought to be called Southwest Main, since it sure doesn't run south.
Even so, Hyde Park is distinctive among all our slanting, snaking arteries and byways. Look at an inside-the-Loop street map and Hyde Park leaps out at you, a tilted block of real estate just west of downtown.
Like so many of our old Houston residential areas, Hyde Park started out grand, gradually slumped into a sort of seedy phase and is now coming back. Old homes being restored. Yards and gardens blooming. Place is looking good.
If you care to see it, the Hyde Park United Civic Association is sponsoring a home tour Saturday, from noon to 5 p.m. Start at Grace Lutheran Church, 2505 Waugh. Tickets, available at the church, are $15 a person. Or you can buy an advance ticket online for $12 at www.hydeparkunited.org.
In case of a rainout, the tour will be held April 16.
I don't mind pushing an effort like this in the column because the ticket money will be used to help restore Lamar Park, in the heart of the district.
Seeing old Houston neighborhoods make a comeback is satisfying. I'd 10 times rather watch an old one get rescued than to see a new one spring up on the prairie.
Many Houston homes built around the turn of the century have seen a variety of uses, reflecting the ups and downs of their neighborhoods. The Schipper house on California was built as a private residence, later became a music school, then a sorority house, later a crack house and now a private residence again. This house is on the Saturday tour.
When I visited her house, Kathy Schipper introduced me to a Texas historical figure I have somehow missed — Obedience Smith.
She was a native North Carolinian, born in 1774. Moved toward Texas with long significant pauses in Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi. By 1835 she was a widow with 10 children, and she moved to Texas and settled down in Brazoria County.
A couple of years later, as a citizen of the Republic of Texas, she received a headright, or grant, of 4,606 acres lying south and west of the new city of Houston. That real estate is now covered by our streets and buildings.
While he was president of Texas, Lamar acquired 150 acres of that headright from Obedience Smith.
And not long after 1900, that farm became subdivided, and homes were built there, and somebody called it Hyde Park.
LEON HALEP.O. Box 4260Houston, TX 77210