One price of the project’s material benefits was the loss of one of the area’s chief natural beauties, a beauty remarked by many travelers in the nineteenth century. “... this most enchanting little stream,” Clopper wrote in 1828. Edward King foresaw in 1873 what was to happen to the lovely bayou. “The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston ... is overhung by lofty and graceful magnolias; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for miles along the channel with the heavy, passionate fragrance of the queen flower drifting about him,” he wrote nearly a century ago. And then: “This bayou Houston hopes one day to widen and dredge all the way to Galveston; but its prettiness and romance will then be gone.” So it goes. [Illustration: _Airships at aviation meet in Houston, January, 1911. The meet was held at what is now the corner of Main Street and Holcombe Boulevard._ _From family papers of Lenore Bland Pfeiffer_] 5 [Illustration: _The Kellum-Noble House_] With a median age of 27.5 years, Houston’s population is the youngest of America’s big cities. The city itself seems younger than it is, for since the 1920s Houston has given the impression of being always new. Few structures stand long enough to become old. When the lovely patina of age does get a chance to form, it is scrubbed away as though it were an embarrassment, or so it was removed in 1962 from the bronze of Sam Houston’s equestrian statue in Hermann Park. Houstonians have shown little compassion for their city’s past. No structure has been preserved from Houston’s early days except a two-story brick trading post, built in 1848, on Congress Avenue; the Kellum-Noble house, the main part of which was built in 1847; and the Rice-Cherry house, which may date from 1850. The two houses now stand behind the City Hall in the small Sam Houston Park. “What one misses most in Houston are old things,” a Swiss journalist wrote after visiting Houston in 1951. “After a few days one sings the praise of the past.” Some old things, obscure trifles, evoke a period when Houston was a Main Street town. A city slogan of the early 1900s—“Where the Mock Bird has no sorrow in his song, no winter in his year”—suggests municipal aspirations inconceivable in the Houston of half a century later. Now it is “Space Center, USA.” And some old things evoke a period when tenacious civic pride fed on delusions that were privately understood but never confessed. Judge an extravagant sentenceful of wishful thinking in the Houston edition of _The Standard Blue Book of Texas_ for 1907: “Nowhere are the flowers fairer, the skies bluer or the trees greener than in the beautiful residence environs of this city, and nowhere in this great and powerful Southland is a more gracious and unbounded hospitality dispensed by more attractive and winsome chatelaines than adorn the handsome homes of Houston.”