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Houston was founded on August 30, 1836, four months after San Jacinto, when two real-estate-speculator brothers from upstate New York — Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen — bought 6,642 acres along Buffalo Bayou, laid out a town grid, and named it for the general. Incorporated on June 5, 1837, Houston served as the capital of the Republic of Texas until President Mirabeau Lamar moved the government inland to Austin in 1839, and the Allen brothers’ bayou-side bet was on its own. Cotton came first, then railroads — early Houstonians liked to say the city sat “where seventeen railroads meet the sea,” an aspiration more than a fact, but the direction was right. The Karankawa and Atakapa peoples had lived along these bayous and the Gulf Coast for centuries before European contact; their descendants remain.
The Astrodome opened on April 9, 1965, as the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned multi-purpose stadium ever built. Engineers could not keep natural grass alive without sunlight, so they replaced the grass with an artificial playing surface — the first of its kind in major sports. The Astrodome sat 54,000, hosted rodeo, baseball, and football, and was promptly nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World — a phrase Houstonians apply with some pride and no shortage of irony. Houston has no zoning code, making it the only major American city where a refinery can sit next to a townhouse by right. That absence of zoning produced the sprawling, layered, improvised city that Houston is: some 670 square miles, the fourth-largest city in the United States, a port handling more foreign tonnage than any other in the country.
Why People Visit Houston Texas
Houston offers space heritage, Texas Revolution history, world-class museums, bayou parks, and one of the most diverse food scenes in the country. Visitors come for Mission Control and the San Jacinto battleground, the museum district and the bayou trails, the rodeo in March, and the simple scale of a city that runs from downtown skyline to ship channel to Gulf Coast. It is sprawling, layered, and unlike anywhere else in America.
