The Alley, one of three Houston theaters operating the year around, is one of the premier theaters of America. Directors, actors, and writers from many countries have come to Houston to study the arena theater’s work. Directed by Nina Vance since it opened in 1947, the Alley has received substantial grants from the Ford Foundation. The Playhouse, whose arena theater was the first in America to be built for professional use, has operated under various managements since it was opened in 1951. Theatre, Inc., occupying the proscenium hall of the old Houston Little Theatre, has mostly produced musicals since it was organized in 1953. The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, directed by James Johnson Sweeney since 1961, developed into an important art center under the long direction of James Chillman. Growing from an art league organized in 1900, the museum opened in 1924; it was the first art museum in Texas. Two wings were added in 1926, the Blaffer Memorial Wing in 1953, and the beautiful Cullinan Hall—the Big Room—in 1958. The last, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, gave the museum a new entrance and made it one of the city’s architectural distinctions. The museum is strongest in paintings of the European Renaissance. Important collections have been given by Edith A. and Percy S. Straus and Samuel H. Kress, of New York, and the Robert Lee Blaffer family and Miss Ima Hogg, of Houston. The Contemporary Arts Association, organized in 1948, conducts an exhibitions museum. One of the few American museums devoted solely to the art of the twentieth century, its beneficial effects on the city’s art life have been far out of proportion to its budgets or the size of its exhibition hall, both small. A notable omission in Houston’s cultural life has always been a satisfactory natural history museum, but one is to be built at last. The Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium is to be built in Hermann Park at a cost of $2,500,000, possibly by 1964. The principal universities are Rice University, chartered in 1891 but opened for instruction in 1912; the University of Houston, established in 1934; the Baylor University College of Medicine, which opened in Dallas in 1900 but was removed to the Texas Medical Center in Houston in 1943; Texas Southern University, established in 1934 as the Houston College for Negroes; and the newer St. Thomas University, a Roman Catholic school. [Illustration: _Sweeney and Coombs Opera House, on Fannin Street opposite the Court House, which opened in 1890._] The superlative of the city’s exuberance is the Texas Medical Center. But for one hospital the area, lying just south of Hermann Park, was a forest within the city in 1946. A decade later, at a cost of more than $50,000,000, most of it paid by Houston oil and cotton philanthropies, one of the nation’s leading medical research, educational, and hospital centers was well on the way to completion. [Illustration: _The Texas Medical Center_]