[Illustration: _Main Street, 1866; the east side of the street between Congress and Preston Avenues. What may have been the city’s first three-story building, on the left in the row of five, was built by William Van Alstyne. J. R. Morris soon built the city’s first four-story building, the one in the center, which was the first iron-front building in Houston._] [Illustration: _Main Street, 1878; looking north from Texas Avenue._] [Illustration: _Main Street, 1885; looking north from Preston Avenue. Though the street was still unpaved, the piles of what seem to be rubble are the paving blocks with which it was at last covered._] [Illustration: _Main Street, 1900; looking south from Congress Avenue. Only buggies and a streetcar are seen, but three years earlier a horseless carriage appeared on the street for the first time._] [Illustration: _Main Street, 1912; looking north from Capitol Avenue. The steel skeleton rising on the left is the first two wings of the Rice Hotel; construction of the third wing was begun in 1926. The owner was a young man who would eventually own more of Main Street than anyone else—Jesse H. Jones._] [Illustration: _Main Street, c. 1920; looking north from McKinney Avenue._] In Houston, the U.S. Department of Labor disclosed in 1961, a retired couple could live more cheaply than in any other of twenty big cities. Other years, other distinctions: Houston won two municipal championships in the early 1950s, when it led American cities in murders in 1951 and was chosen the cleanest city in the United States in 1953. It was to learn later that it had held another distinction for decades, being second to none in using the word “chocolate” to name things. “The Houston list is far beyond anything possessed by any other place in the world,” a college professor wrote to Mayor Lewis Cutrer. Small wonder: Chocolate Bay, Chocolate Bayou, Old Chocolate Road, and Chocolate Springs, to list four of ten such names he found. And in Houston, surely _only_ in Houston, the city garbage dump came to smell like a rose—to the city treasurer. Eleven oil wells drilled at the dump in the 1950s paid the city more than $250,000 in royalties before they were shut down. Houston, where it is against the law to make “Goo Goo Eyes,” to give the title of the ordinance, or for women to wear slacks, though the courts have refused to uphold the last. Where enough coffee comes into the port annually to give every American more than forty-three cupfuls. And where Roman Catholic nuns ride the city buses free, a tradition believed to date from the nuns’ heroic work during a yellow fever epidemic in the nineteenth century. [Illustration: _Vick’s Park, around 1900, an area now covered by the cloverleaf at Waugh and Memorial Drives and the Allen Parkway._]