Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net HOUSTON: THE FEAST YEARS [Illustration: Sculpture] BY GEORGE FUERMANN _Houston: The Feast Years_ (1962) _Reluctant Empire_ (1957) _Houston: Land of the Big Rich_ (1951) HOUSTON The Feast Years An Illustrated Essay By George Fuermann With Woodcuts by Lowell Collins Modern Photographs by Owen Johnson Historic Photographs and Sketches by Various Hands _The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city._ Euripides _If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city._ C. C. Colton _Urbes constituit: hora dissolvit._ Seneca 1962 [Illustration: _Press of Premier_] Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-20819 Copyright © 1962 by George Fuermann Woodcuts Copyright © 1962 by Lowell Collins All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America PREMIER PRINTING COMPANY First Printing 1 [Illustration: Tower] Houston, the reporter for the London _Daily Mail_ wrote, “has caused me to lift my ban on the word fabulous.” The next year, 1956, the London _Times_ speculated that America might “eventually be based on a quadrilateral of great cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston.” That year, too, the New York _Times_ quoted Lloyd’s of London: “Within 100 years Houston will be the largest city in the world.” Houston: one of “The 12 Most Exciting Cities of North America,” said _Holiday_ in 1953—one of the dozen, from Quebec in the north to Mexico City in the south, possessing “that rare combination of qualities which has always spelled greatness.” _Few Houstonians see their city in such remarkable terms. Few understand why their city provokes such estimates by others._ [Illustration: _The first known sketch of Houston was made by a British artist, who never saw the place, to illustrate a book written by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, an Englishwoman who did see Houston in the early 1840s. The artist apparently took her description of Buffalo Bayou’s big banks to mean hills._]