Houston Chronicle
Larry Albert knows how to set up a punch line.
An architect, he runs the funny real estate blog Swamplot, and at Rice University, he teaches a class called "Landscape and Site Strategies for Houston."
Every year in that class, he shows graduate students slides of Baytown Nature Center, 450 acres of trees and wetlands jammed in among refineries, just across the Houston Ship Channel from the San Jacinto Monument. The park's peninsula site, Albert tells the students blandly, "has a rich history."
He shows a slide of shell midden, left by the Akokisa people, American Indians who feasted on the oysters they harvested from the three bays surrounding the peninsula. The students watch politely. Ancient history.
Then Albert clicks casually to artifacts from a different people, a different time. Remnants of two- and three-story houses. A sewer system, gas lines, paved roads, driveways. Boat docks. Swimming pools.
"Remains of a lost civilization," he says. "Suburbanites!"
It's a dark joke, and it startles the grad students. Many of them grew up in houses like these, neighborhoods such as this. The lost civilization, they realize, is our civilization.
Brownwood, the subdivision was named. Brownwood was the suburb that sank.
Swimming pools
John Mason, a towering, white-haired naturalist, has his own well-worn spiel about the Baytown Nature Center. When Mason leads ninth-graders on tours of the place, he talks to them mainly about nature - about the slow-motion battle raging around them, as plants fight each other to survive and reproduce. The suburbanites' rosebushes and mowed yards are long gone.
Brownwood, launched in the 1930s, was marketed to executives of Humble Oil (now Exxon), whose nearby refinery complex was busy becoming the largest in the world. The peninsula, surrounded by sparkling water, was a beautiful place, and on its large lots, the executives built beautiful homes.
"Swimming pools, movie stars!" Mason likes to say: a way to convey the luxury of Brownwood's roughly 400 houses. I suspect that few of the ninth-graders get his reference to "The Beverly Hillbillies," a TV show that first aired in 1962 - decades before the ninth-graders were born, and years before anyone realized why land near the Houston Ship Channel was sinking.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, between 1943 and 1973, roughly 4,700 square miles of land southeast of downtown Houston, chiefly Baytown and Pasadena, dropped by at least 6 inches. The area near the Ship Channel sank around 9 feet, and an estimated 100 acres of the San Jacinto Battleground - about a quarter of the original historic park's acreage - disappeared underwater.
What was happening? In the late '60s, hydrologist Robert Gabrysch, with the U.S. Geological Survey, began explaining to neighborhood groups, Rotary Clubs and anyone else who'd listen. Our area's gooey land, a clay-ey gumbo, lacks the firmness of bedrock or even sand. And as water-hungry industries pumped enormous quantities of groundwater out of that land, he explained, the land compacted. Subsidence, the process is called.
"It happened slowly," Mason tells me, the same as he tells the ninth-graders, as we hiked through Baytown Nature Center's tall trees. "Nobody noticed at first. But those incremental changes added up. Pretty soon people's houses started flooding - not just in hurricanes, but in regular storms, and even windy days and high tides."
Some of Brownwood's houses sank into the bay. Others, merely flood-prone, were rented to shaggy young people willing to cope with the occasional inundation. Residents kept their appliances atop concrete blocks or tables, and stowed important papers on the second or third floor. They watched the weather, and could pack and flee at a moment's notice. And they learned that when wading through floodwaters, it's best to avoid snakes and floating balls of fire ants.
"They built levees," Mason says. "They bought pumps. And look around."
Not a house survives.
"Remind you of global warming?" Mason asks.
Pink tile
Houston and its suburbs got the message and switched from groundwater to surface water. By the late '70s, Pasadena and Baytown stopped sinking. But Brownwood, surrounded by water on three sides, had already dipped too low to survive.
In 1983, after Hurricane Alicia walloped the suburb, FEMA declared it unfit for human habitation, and the federal government bought out many of the remaining property owners. For years, the land just sat there, water-logged, its houses rotting. It was a home to squatters, an illegal dump site, a place where stolen cars showed up. If you wanted to dump a body, people said, this was the place.
In the mid '90s, Larry Albert was himself a Rice architecture graduate student. He sneaked in with a camera, and eventually, wrote much of his master's thesis about Brownwood. (You can see the Web version, complete with photos, at www.rice.edu/~lda/wet/index.htm.)
"It was much creepier then," he remembers. "There were more remnants. They hadn't yet cut the channels to create the marshes. It was just this suburb that had disappeared in 1983 - not that long before. And it was just like the suburb I lived in."
In 1995, the site was cleaned up enough to reopen as the Baytown Nature Center. By then, most of the houses had long since been bulldozed, and even their foundations crushed and buried. The wooded parts of the land, says Mason, were mainly left alone. With school groups, he likes to point out how the hardy native species are quickly moving back in: huisache, yaupon, rattlebush, sea purslane. Here and there, though, the toughest of the old suburban-lawn plants still survive: palm trees, prickly pear cacti.
The marshes would reach a similar state of wildness on their own in a generation or two, Mason thinks. But the Nature Center has speeded up the process of their undevelopment, digging channels and planting cordgrasses. As we walk, he raises his binoculars to look at the birds that have quickly reclaimed the watery grasslands: cormorants, pelicans, a mixed-species crew of blackbirds. Sometimes Mason points out predator scat, probably from coyotes.
Crumbling roads
Traces of the old suburb are just as subtle. Tracey Prothro, Mason's boss at the Baytown Parks and Rec Department, joins us, and we walk along one of Brownwood's old ring roads, raised 5 feet so that it could double as a levee. The crumbling asphalt roads survive now as hiking trails. Prothro makes note of manhole covers; Brownwood's old sewer system still sleeps below the ground. Along the shore, she points out into the water, to bulkheads that once protected the edge of someone's yard.
She takes us to some of the few remaining foundations of houses - places where it is possible to see the remains of a pink tile bathroom floor, or where in-ground swimming pools now stand head-high above ground.
Next to the shore, trees grow inside one of those old pools. "Is that a cedar?" I ask Mason.
Maybe, he says. He shrugs. His mind is somewhere else.
"Nature," he says, "always wins."