Carroll Shaddock Interview, Part 1 of 3

DT: My name's David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. Its February 29th, 2008. We're in Houston, Texas and we have the good fortune to be visiting with Carroll Shaddock,

who is a a corporate attorney here in town who has been very active over the years in trying to control billboards and in trying to have trees planted along the city's streets and roads

and generally trying to improve the scenic qualities of the city and the state and, actually, across the country. To that, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

CS: Thank you for coming.

DT: I thought we might start with learning about your childhood and finding out if there might have been some influence from your early days that would've led to what you've done for scenic virtues and values later in your life?

CS: Well, I guess I should start by saying, as a Texan naturally would, I'm a sixth generation Texan and my wife is also a sixth generation Texan and now we have seventh and eighth generation Texans, our children and and grandchildren.

And we have that special affinity for our state, formerly our nation, that people in Texas tend to have to the dis dismay of others, sometimes. But actually I think its its a good trait

and perhaps with that comes a deep feeling for the place, for the space. Sometimes the the idea is is advanced by people who are working to make Texas a more beautiful state, if they happen to come from other places,

that it's something of an importation of an idea, a beautiful, orderly environment is a must be an idea that's being brought here by people. And I think that those of us who are from families who have been here a while and we don't think that that makes us any better than anybody else,

but we definitely have a deep feeling for the land and a deep feeling for the state, a deep sense of place, a clear idea of who we are and I and we know that we didn't our our our forefathers did not come here to mess this place up.

And so we ch although when you look in the past in any society, you find a lot that's good and a lot that's bad, but I guess I've always had a feeling that I was trying to advance those things that I found to be good

in in the in the traditions of my family and my place. I was born in Beaumont, Texas and raised in Orange, on the Louisiana border near the Gulf of Mexico, and I went to Rice here in Houston, which I'll touch on.

I think with respect to some of these topics, I went off to law school at Yale; otherwise I've been in southeast Texas all my life. I think there are two topics that you've indicated you want to

talk about, things I've spent large amount of my time on, planting trees and trying to do something about the ugliness caused by the proliferation of billboards. And there I do remember things from my childhood that that that bear on that.

One, I grew up in a house that was built in about 1900 in Old, what's now called Old Orange, which I try sometimes to imagine what it was like in the twenties or thirties. It was very Southern compared to the way our culture is today.

It's changed greatly over my lifetime. But Old Orange was a had an area of about ten blocks by sixteen blocks with curb streets, sidewalks, it was really well laid out in an old fashioned kind of a way. And across the street from us

was a a two story house, a a not overly imposing, but a nice two story frame house. Almost everything in Orange is built of wood because it's in the it's in the forest in a a big sawmill town. And a dentist lived there, I didn't really know

and I can remember when I was in junior high school, going out and looking down the side. Well, first, there were street trees in the in in our area of Orange,

by which I mean trees planted in what I'm going to refer to as the parkway or the tree lawn, being the area between the sidewalk and the curb along the streets.

And street trees, I what by that, I mean trees that are planted between the sidewalk and the curb in the tree lawn at regular intervals and of a coordinated species.

As it happened at our house and our neighbors' houses, the trees were live oak trees planted in at a regular spacing. So I guess I grew up with that kind of order around me.

But across the street, down the side of the dentist's house was a row of perhaps four high arching Willow oak trees. I think that's Quercus phellos is the botanical name of that, I believe,

and I can remember how beautiful they would be in the spring and and in the fall. And I I think some something something was lodged in my mind there, which we can come to this later, was certainly then solidified and amplified when I went to Rice,

which has a a remarkably beautiful campus which is a a a a a perfect example of anything that that that any of us might've tried to do in this area over the years. With respect to billboards, I only remember one thing.

I don't think we really had billboards back then to speak of. It's true that in the country when Lady Bird in 1965 got LBJ to get the Highway Beautification Act passed,

there was a lot of concern that we had billboards and yet, when you look back, the billboards that they were talking about then were just a just a hint of signs compared to what we face today.

But I remember in in high school, we would read something called the Junior Scholastic, which was kind of a magazine, probor a newspaper. Probably everybody my age remembers the Junior Scholastic.

And I remember one time reading an article which I didn't think about afterward, but later on, I remembered it, in which it said that Dwight Eisenhower, the President of the United States,

had announced that he wished to have the new interstate highway system, which was just being built at the time, be free of billboards and that he was sponsoring he was going to cause legislation to this effect to be introduced.

And that it then reported that some people were opposed to that I I know without asking who they were. Yeah, they're people who all worked for the billboard industry

because it tends not to have any friends except for the people who make their livelihood either working for it working for it, I should say, either whether their jobs are in the industry

itself or in government where they are are generously fed by the by this very active lobby and source of political funding. But I guess that just registered in my mind.

DT: You've given us a little flavor of growing up in Orange and having these deep Texas roots, coming to Rice and Houston and starting to appreciate how nicely both Orange was laid out

and the Rice campus and starting to get some sort of context of what was going on in the country at large. I mean, the passage of the Highway Beautification Act,

and, earlier, Eisenhower's interest in having control of billboards along the interstate highway system. What was the next sort of encounter with these tree issues or billboard issues in your life?

CS: Well, let's let's let's take the tree route first and let me talk about Rice. It that made such a powerful impression on me. I I went to Rice for four years and I lived on campus and

for those, including Houstonians who've never gone behind the hedges that that surround the Rice campus and looked around, it's a thing to do. It's a place of great beauty.

We live not far from there and have the occasion often to walk our dog there and I always feel like I'm in Europe. Maybe I'm in the in the in the court of the Niedersachsen Court in in Hanover or something like that,

beautifully laid out gardens and formal spaces. But the when the campus was laid out, and it has to be remembered for those people who know Houston

that everything south of Buffalo Bayou was in the coastal plain, there were very few trees at all. There were Water oak trees, primarily, and and some Willow oak trees growing in the in the in the beds of the bayous and other water places where water gathered.

But otherwise, this was a treeless, barren plain. And the people who laid Rice out, Rice was started in 19 opened for classes in 1912, so the construction of the campus occurred in 1905 to 1912, probably.

And when it was laid out, it was laid out with streets and sidewalks and every street at Rice and every sidewalk at Rice had tr street trees planted in geometrical patterns of different species of trees. One would be elm, another would water oak, another would be live oak.

So there are thousands of trees that were planted there according to a grand scheme along the streets and and walks. When I went by the time I had gone to Rice, just a few years before I matriculated there in 1958,

a plan had been undertaken to get the cars out of the heart of the campus and move them to perimeter parking lots and many of these streets had been taken up.

And yet you can see where every one is because of the rows of trees. You can read the way the streets used to be at Rice. And by and large at Rice, in contrast to other places,

those patterns were maintained when those trees died because trees, everybody seems to want to see to save trees and not understand that, just as with our population,

the only way you preserve trees or the human race is to reproduce or to plant new trees and and a excessive amount of time worry worrying about trying to prolong the lives of old trees is not, in my judgment, a a good use of energy.

And at Rice, they they continued to replenish the trees. As a result of that, there're rabbits many rabbits on the Rice campus, which our dog, Henry, loves to chase.

It's quite something to see him in pursuit of a cottontail rabbit as they go scurrying across the campus and you hope the campus police don't see him on the loose. And squirrels.

Walking around, living in that environment had a powerful effect on me and I could comment about the surrounding areas because when these areas were laid out by developers for example, the neighborhood, Southampton,

which lies to the north of the Rice campus, the developers who laid them out laid out street tree patterns. The main arterial streets, heavily traffic streets were always planted in live oak.

The interior streets were planted in other trees so that one street, Albans and I can't tell you which tree goes with which street anymore, but I can remember forty years ago when you could still see the pattern.

Elm trees on Albans, water oaks on Bolsover, et cetera. And there was a fall over there. Houston doesn't really have fall color, but it actually it has a lot of fall color, especially if it's cultivated.

And you knew it was fall in Southampton on the deciduous the tree the streets that had the deciduous trees. And so it was all around the Rice part of town that had been laid out in the teens, the twenties and the thirties, that these formal street tree patterns were everywhere.

However, even by 1970, I went off to law school and and when I came back and have lived in this neighborhood, this part of town since 1965, except for service in the military

when you go to Rome and you see the Coliseum and the other buildings, the the the vendors sell little books that show you a scene of what you see when you look at the Forum today and a plastic overlay that you can push over, I'm sure

everybody who's been there remembers this well, that shows what the buildings must've been like two thousand years ago. So you can start to read

and even some people in other cultures have tried when they design buildings to think about what they will look like in a ruined state.

But you start to read what was there. And I started in the seventies to start to read what had been in this part of Houston years ago because what happened is over the years, trees would be lost for one reason or another.

And then as the trees started to to end their natural lives, their essentially all of those trees are now gone, monoculture of trees all planted at the same time, dying at the same time,

you could read what was here and what was gone because while kind of a central authority of developers who had developed the neighborhoods had laid out the trees. Not cooperative efforts among neighbors,

but but by people who were planning whole neighborhoods and and building them and somewhat in the backdrop of the so-called City Beautiful movement, which of course, had been many, many years earlier.

As the trees though died, they would be cut down and the the homeowner then would become the person who would deal with what was in the tree lawn. And it might be nothing; it might be a rose bush.

It might be that the homeowner had an affinity for a pistache tree or a Chinese elm or whatever, but the idea of the pattern and the formal planting had totally been lost. And I was very aware of that when I we moved into Southampton in 1971 for the first our first first time.

Was very aware that you could see something had been here that had been gone and I must say during the seventies, I thought I might be the only person alive who was thinking about this.

DT: You had mentioned something that may be a root of this orderly landscape in many cities, certainly in Kansas City and maybe Dallas, I think that there is some touch of it in Houston. George Kessler, City Beautiful movement, can you talk about some of those origins for this kind of planning?

CS: Yes, if you allow me wide swath for errors and oh, for misstatements and and incorrect generalizations. You know, the story of the Chicago Worlds Fair, which I guess was around 1900, was it not, is is a very, very interesting story.

The building of all the great all the great, the monumental buildings that comprised that that fair and it I'm confused as to whether that had been preceded or followed by the St. by Worlds Fair in St. Louis.

But the view of urban life you had around the turn of the century was of squalor, dirty, unhealthy, unpleasant places. Chicago certainly had that image, I think self image, and had that image elsewhere,

where the teeming populations were coming, people who were more affluent and able to do so were moving to higher ground, so to speak, perhaps quite literally in some cases, where the beginning of the garden suburban neighborhoods were were were getting started.

So a part of this was simply trying to make cities safe, healthy, decent places for people to live. The late the last half of the nineteenth century had seen industrialization, people moving from the countryside,

retaining their idyllic memories of pastoral settings and values in the city, but living in squalor and and times that are not remembered with a lot of favor other than we could see that was maybe a necessary

step in the industrialization of the country and the creation of a of an economy that provides more goods and is a basis for the kind of standard of living we have today.

So there was a lot of just, I think maybe somewhat related to that also might even be cleaning up politics and the political machines and such. But one aspect of that then was the City Beautiful movement, which

I think really refers to the period from 1890 to 2 1890 to 1905. That would be in and you you you by the way, I see this everywhere I go. In Germany, used to call Ugansteel, the architecture.

In Buenos Aires, when you look at the really beautiful buildings and the Belle Artes and I don't speak French so I say those words wrongly, the layouts of the beautiful things, so often they come from this era,

1890 even till World War I, which must've been a a really fabulous time, all of which it seems our civilization collectively squandered when we had the Great War of 1970 17 and the society kind of committed suicide.

That's a whole 'nother story. But during this time, these these ideas of the of the City Beautiful movement arose. Perhaps someone listening to this may have seen pictures of Main Street in Houston, which was called Main Boulevard.

When I first saw an institution on Main Street putting its address as being 52-0-9 Main Boulevard, I thought it was another example of word inflation, which we which leads us to have streets in Houston called Mountain View, things like that in the flattest place in the world.

But then I learned that in fact it was a boulevard, as was Montrose a boulevard. Those aren't just fanciful names. And there were beautiful street trees, right into the downtown area of Houston.

So and I I suppose, come to think of it, that's when Orange was laid out and these things were done in Orange. But in 1970, these were forgotten values, forgotten ideas.

But just like walking around Rome, you could walk around a place like Houston and you could see or I use the word read, what had been here. And increasingly, I felt a desire, a need, I would say, not a desire, to try to recapture that and I started doing it at my church.

An expression is always used, think globally, act locally, and I started you can't just go and change the world, but you can maybe change your block or your neighborhood and I started spending a lot of time doing that.

DT: You mentioned that some of the trees that were laid out and planted and cared for for many years eventually died and then they were cut down and not replaced, or at least not replaced with the same kind of tree.

It seems that I recall that there were some trees along Montrose, as you've mentioned, that were down the the esplanade. They wereand

CS: Palm trees.

DT: Palm trees and they were removed and there were also very large live oaks that were on Rice Boulevard, right smack dab in the middle of the street and they were removed with some celebrity. Was this something that influenced your interest in trying to take care of trees and plant more trees?

CS: I'm not quite that old. The trees on Montrose, I the palm trees, I have no memory of that so it's before my time. Perhaps they were there when I was at Rice, but in those days, you tended to stay inside the hedges

and really didn't much know what was outside the hedges. Might've been there then. The tree though to which you refer, which is on what's called Sunset Boulevard, although it is the street that then becomes Rice as it goes west,

just about two blocks off of Main Street is a is a pretty important tree in Houston history in some ways. If you drive there, that's just outside Brown College, the entrance to Brown College.

And when you drive down Sunset, although one would think of that as being called Rice Boulevard there, you you notice that to the left and the right,

the street bows out and and the reason is because there used to be a tree right in the middle of the of the street. Apparently, it had been a large prominent tree that when the street was laid out,

people, and you see this still in Columbus, Texas, east of here, where there are just these huge trees right in the middle of the street and they just leave a little plot of land around them. A son of a family, I do not know who it is who it was, excuse me and

and I think it was a prominent family, I guess I don't actually know that, but in any case was driving, I don't know whether in a prudent or impr manner or manner more appropriate to teenagers, down that street one night, hit that tree and was killed.

That tree was cut down because of that, the island removed and there was then installed in the collective memory of the city attorneys office, who had defended the city

and had to pay a large judgment that it had been negligence on the part of the city, as I understand it this is all just stories I've heard, had been negligent to have that tree in the middle of the street,

probably to this day, the vestiges remain in the city attorneys office of Houston that trees are dangerous creatures which represent a threat to the health and safety and welfare of the people.

And probably if you took all the total amount of energy that has gone into planting street trees in Houston in my lifetime, I think that it's been blunted at least by fifty percent by the city attorneys office in Houston,

especially staff members there whose tenures succeeded through different administrations, of trying to prevent planting trees anywhere where an automobile an errant automobile might ever go.

DT: Well, we've talked about trees being taken down. Maybe we talk a little bit about trees being put in and your efforts to help start a group called Trees for Houston in 1980.

CS: I lived in Southampton in the seventies and I there's a Southampton Civic Club that exists there and I went to the board. I guess I I was born in 1940, so I must've been in my early thirties.

And I talked about the fact that the street tree pattern was being lost and what the value of a the street tree was and again, I have to say at the time, I thought I was the only person in the world who had any it was it was a very strange interest to have.

But I found people were enthusiastic. People certainly were enthusiastic about trees, planting trees, saving trees and then sitting down and talking about trees and I guess I a phrase I use, perhaps

not a very adequate one, is using trees as an as an element of urban architecture. Not just planting trees because they're nice, which they are, or because they make the air clean, which they do,

or shield us from the sunshine, which they do and and and and and preserve against global warming, which we didn't know anything about at that time and all of these other things, but

my fundamental interest has always been the visual aesthetic and the use of the trees as an organizing principle for the formation of what, in my view, is an orderly and beautiful environment, I guess would be a a decent word to use for that.

And I talked about that and and I guess it's still the case. When I do, I'll be in a room of people and it's sort of like most people have not really thought about it,

but when they think about it, certain number of people quickly think, yeah, that's a good idea. So we started a project of planting, going back and replanting street trees in Southampton. I just dubbed that Trees for Southampton, I don't know where that came from.

I remember and I did this with my own money, I remember with our oldest boys, Christian and Peter Eric, were two years apart and they were like maybe four and six at the time or something like that and I remember taking my block of Bolsover in the next block and going

block to block and saying I would like to plant trees in front of your house if you'll let me. And people would say yes and then I would say I certainly offer you the opportunity to help me financially with this,

but I don't expect it and most people did not. And I was not a a a wealthy person, so my my efforts were somewhat limited. But every year, I planted four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten trees, marching down the street

and if you go over to look at the blocks of Bolsover where where we lived back there in the seventies, you would think those trees were planted in the 1870's because they're now huge, beautiful beautiful trees.

And some people would decline permission, wouldn't let me do it. They didn't want they didn't want trees. But it was funny, I can remember that one house, the man was very vehement that I couldn't plant trees in front of his house.

And when I got through planting his neighbors, and he was the only trit was like a a missing front tooth, he came to me and was feigned anger that I had overlooked his house and not planted trees. And I had to go back and I had to go and back and do it.

So people catch on to it when they see what you're doing. And yet, let me just say parenthetically, in the medical center on Main Street, on Main Street, the trees go for eighty city blocks, planted live oak trees on centers between the sidewalk and the curb.

And there is, I don't know whose project it is across from Texas Children's Hospital, it's a new building where they just cut down all the street trees that had been planted there.

On the I guess that's the west side of the street, they've just gone in and planted all their required trees under the city ordinance and they plant them on the landowners side of the sidewalk. And I can't understand that.

I mean, just go out there looking. How how is it people can't catch what's going on here? And yet I find if I take the time to go find whoever's entitlin in charge of that project and walk them out front

and say look this way and look that way, could you please do your part here, they a light bulb goes off and often they'll say well, of course. But it doesn't register naturally if it's not if it's not suggested.

Similarly, my wife and I were always have been very active at Christ the King Lutheran Church in the village, which is across the street from Rice. So I organized a project that I called Trees for the Village.

And I went into the first, there were no street trees around the church. There were really no street trees in the village. So I went and tr and there's a lot of cement in the village,

not a whole lot of places you can plant street trees, and I went and found all the places and put them on a little map where I thought I could could plant a street tree.

Maybe the cost was a hundred dollars a tree, let's say that, something like that, and put a chart up at the church and members of the church sponsored street trees.

And we went in and planted fifty or sixty street trees in the village and every tree in the village is a tree planted by Christ the King Lutheran Church in about 1972.

And I remember those were days of Vatican Two and ecumenism and I remember with great with great satisfaction, one guy who planted a bunch of those trees in honor of Pope John the Second and others in honor of the children or memory of their grandparents.

And so that was Trees for the Village. Then I went we moved to a an old, old neighborhood in Houston called Westmoreland. Bought a 1906 house and restored it, was quite close to downtown and there I organized the project, Trees for Westmoreland.

And got the neighborhood pretty interested in it and we pretty well planted street trees around that area and called that Trees for Westmoreland. I had other projects. Trees for Other Things, but it was just a thing that I just did personally.

Find a civic club that would help me, if I wanted to I have to say sometimes when I've moved on to another neighborhood, the projects have gone on and sometimes that's the last.

I mean, whatever enthusiasm you might find for it and help and certainly I didn't do these things myself. I did on Bolsover Street, but after that, I developed my a little bit of a technique of how to get a neighborhood and neighbors to get together to do this.

DT: Well, why don't you talk about the two aspects of this? How you organized the people, organized the fundraising and then the dirt and tree aspect of how you actually dig the hole, maintain the tree once it's planted, what kind of species you used and so on?

CS: Well, let me do that but if I could bridge my way there by talking about the founding of Trees for Houston and then talk about how we did the tr the project Trees for Boulevard Oaks. I'm about to sneeze. I sneeze once a day whether I need to or not.

Usually it's eight to twelve sneezes. Well, might might have passed. I, oh, this is yes, this is this was a something I spent quite a bit of time on. I became concerned about the fact that there were no trees downtown.

Now, I'm a downtown guy. I live in I work downtown. I live not too far from downtown. I think if my law firm had ever moved to a suburban location, I'd have moved back to Orange because I I like small towns and I like being downtown.

I guess I'm a very old fashioned person, maybe maybe that's the underlying theme there. The chamber what was then called the Houston Chamber of Commerce, which is today called the Greater Houston Partnership.

I might make reference to the Partnership later. I'm all that is in Houston, the name by which the Chamber of Commerce now goes. The the Chamber of Commerce had a downtown committee.

I I practice law, I should say, in a in a mainline, business, banking, conservative law firm. Still do, I've been there now over forty years. And I so that I can't underscore how important that is.

All my law firm has let me do these things and I shouldn't talk about any of these things without expressing gratitude for that. But also being a partner in a established, well known law firm makes it possible to get things done

that you couldn't get done otherwise in two ways. The first thing is it puts you in an environment for people who are the the people who really are the engines of society and our economy.

And I guess you could say they're people who have power, but they're people who get things done and know how to get things done and you're in that environment, watching that. Unless you're brain dead, you learn something about how to do things.

Secondly, you get taken seriously when you're a partner in a law firm. You're you and your contacts are are are widespread and an avocation of mine, to which I referred earlier, is church music.

And I'm a, let's say, an amateur musician, put it that way, with a great love for the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque, especially the works of composers named Heinrich Schutz and J.S. Bach.

In some ways, I've been able to do so many things to advance those aspects of human culture in our sin our Houston society that I could never have done being a musician. And so it is with being, in relating to the trees, being in this kind of position is so enabling.

Well, I got onto that because I wanted to say I then became our law firm's representative to the downtown committee of the Houston Chamber of Commerce.

And I'm sure anybody who knows me would say with a a little bit of an unpleasant expression on their face that I talk too much and I and I do. But I think I started talking street trees in the downtown community.

I was probably surrounded in that environment by people my age or a little older who were not yet at the top of their firms, whether they were law firms or business corporations or development companies or whatever, but it rubbed off.

And over a period of four or five years on that committee, people started talking and thinking we needed street trees downtown. So we then advanced the project to the point

where the committee then adopted and the Chamber of Commerce executive committee dir adopted a a policy that there should be street trees in downtown Houston. And it was then my job with every new building that was being built,

and a lot of new buildings were being built, to go to the developers of those buildings and tell them what the downtown Houston community expected of them in this area. And the result was that the the projects in downtown all started having street trees.

Now I don't fancy that it's just because I went and asked them. It was all the also the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Trees you can go to a I took a business trip to Calgary and they were planting street trees in Calgary downtown.

They planted street trees in Dallas and other place I had nothing to do with that. So it's a it's a much much bigger movement than just my wandering around downtown, talking to people, but that's what happened in Houston.

And then the next thing that happened was when the next generation of buildings started being built. The younger Turks, the people who'd been on that committee who had all become somewhat the and people start seeing things.

When we talk about billboards, this is very important and that, I don't want to use this expression, you plant the seed. But but you do and and people start thinking about str about street trees and start noticing when they travel to other cities,

they say, "I like this but why is it I like it?" And people don't always initially make the connection between, in fact, there was a magazine called Houston Magazine that made a presentation, the ten most beautiful cities streets in Houston.

And they picked them from the east, the north, the south, the west, all over town, trying to be balanced and not just say well, that this is where the gentry live and this here or there. And what did all ten of those streets have? Street trees.

Even if you're you talk about Polk Street, east of downtown. There's a section of three blocks that has old live oak trees that are still there. Guess what? That was one of the ten streets and so forth.

And so when this next generation of buildings started being constructed, the the people who had become interested in this way of thinking were now decision makers.

And so downtown downtown Houston today and there's a lot more story to that, and Jim Rylander, who is now dead, is such a hero with that. There's so many heroes in in this in this is a in this whole story.

But downtown Houston is now a very green downtown. It's remarkably different. Well, they established a street tree subcommittee of the downtown committee of the Chamber of Commerce

and we then commenced with the idea of having a a project called Trees for Main Street, picking up on the idea, of course Main Street has beautiful street trees from the location of the former Warwick Hotel south,

through the Rice campus to the Medical Center, where there were no trees, really, at that time. The boulevard that Bob Hope said when asked on the Phil Donahue Show, "Bob, you travel a lot and have been over the all over the world.

What's the most beautiful place you've been?" And he said, "Well, I think it's standing at the Warwick Hotel, looking at the fountain and looking at the trees down Main Street in Houston, Texas."

And the audience gasped as did Phil Donahue, who said a word that sounded something like this. Quizzical and disbelieving. "Houston?" Well, all in all indeed he was talking about was the vision of people in 1915

or 1920 when all those beautiful trees were laid out on Main Street. That's always been a powerful story to tell in Houston and some people have videos of that and it get's included in presentations in trying to plant.

But if you if Bob Hope turns around and looks the other way, he's looking down a street that used to look that way that didn't have a tree on it. It was an urban wasteland.

So we arrived at the idea of having a project called Trees for Main Street and, at that time, the first of Houston's regional business development entity, something called the South Main Center Association was being established.

Candice Rylander was the executive director and I went and talked to her and she thought that was a great thing for them to do to try to establish some some image of who they were and what they were doing.

She also had to come to have a great appreciation for street trees. So we started with the a project of the Houston Chamber of Commerce and the South Main Center Association,

the planting of live oak of planting of trees from the two thousand block of Main Street, which is where the Pierce elevated goes over, north of which you're in a very strong urban, downtown cement environment.

But from from that point south to Rice, which is about or to the Beacon Fountain, about forty blocks, generally speaking, there is a tree lawn between the sidewalk and the curb. You spend more money removing cement to plant a tree than it cost to plant five or ten trees.

I I don't know the exact number. So you you make a lot more progress where you don't have to cut cement. And that project was decided upon, that project was implemented. It was later extended in the Medical Center by by the Texas Medical Center.

The street trees in this neighborhood where we are, Braeswood, continue on Main Street and when TXDOT [Texas Department of Transportation], about ten years ago renovated Main Street from approximately where we are at Braeswood to six-ten and beyond,

under the the Houston way of thinking about street trees and particularly the urging of the South Main Center Association, beautiful street trees were planted all the way to six-ten.

So you have that you have that tree lawn and beautiful street trees now for the entirety of Main Street, notwithstanding which Texas Children's Hospital just goes out.

And by the way, they did it in the middle of the night and cuts down forty of those trees. Notwithstanding that across the street, whoever's developing the land plants their does their plant required planting as I mentioned earlier and doesn't conform to it.

So it's this is not without it's frustrations. And at that time, a fellow named George Greanias, who was a young lawyer at our law firm and also a playwright, had a was on the committee and he was he then ran for public office, subsequently became the comptroller of Houston.

But any rate, he was one of two or three fellows. Another, Hugh Rice Kelly, who became the general counsel and senior vice-president of what was then Houston Lighting and Power,

today is one of the with Dick Weekley, people who are responsible for tort reform in the state of Texas. Wonderful, wonderful man who is a is a knows more about trees than I do for sure.

And so thinking about the future, I drew up, this was around 1980, with and George and George was a doca document for the formation of something called Trees for Houston.

The idea that this would become a group that would carry out these kinds of projects, mean Trees for This, Trees for That, as I was describing. And we drew up but did not file articles of incorporation with the state to start such a group.

We were on the cusp of doing so. Just at this time, I got a telephone call from a guy named Bill Coats. Bill's a very distinguished lawyer, he's a trial lawyer, his field is construction law, he's a national and internationally recognized expert in the field.

He and I are both share that were poor golfers and we tend to have a weekly golf game and a lot of tree stuff has come out of those conversations. I didn't know Bill at that time, I knew him only very vaguely. He was in my lived in my neighborhood.

And he called me and said I'd like to take you to lunch and talk about trees. Bill had been involved, I might say, in something called Citizens for Good Schools, CGS.

Houston had a explicitly segregationist city council as late as, I'm going to say in the 1960's, and a group of public spirited people, Eleanor Tinsley was one, she'll figure in this story, in all of these stories, as a city councilwoman. Wonderful people.

It actually won a majority of the school board and commenced integrating the schools and also implementing more advanced ideas of education. I would characterize them, if I could say it laughingly and with affection, as a bunch of liberals.

And they took over the school district and then they had their problems. And then someone else took over the school district and they had their problems and so it goes.

Wonderful people, but Bill had been, I think, a little bit bloodied by by his very active public spirited work with Citizens for Good Schools. He took me to lunch and he said I'm tired of beating my head against the wall.

I, by the way, is probably is becoming clear, I'm kind of a kind of a conservative old guy and always have been. So we were definitely political opposites except we're very much alike and I hope that were both open-minded and people of good will.

He said, "I just want to do something that people want to do." I want to plant trees and he showed me he had filed articles of incorporation for something called the Live Oak Association

and he outlined that he just wanted to plant street trees. And that he had asked people to whom he had gone around town saying, to whom should I speak? Are there any other people who would be interested in doing this?

And he said people had said you need to call Carroll Shaddock. And I think actually George Greanias was the person who most most notably said that. So he so we quickly realized that we were exactly at the same point in our thinking about this topic.

And so we we trashed our articles of incorporation for Trees for Houston and the articles of incorporation for the Live Oak Society were amended to reflect the name Trees for Houston and that's how Trees for Houston was born.

I don't want to forget to say when we get to the question of monoculture and and oak wilt, which was a thing I I know that you would want to ask about, that in the project of Trees for Houston,

under the tutelage of Charles Tapley, a wonderful Houston architect who was also he's a fellow of the AIA and also the fellow American Institute of Landscape Architects. Charles, as I understand, had a stroke this year. I've not really seen him this year.

I was the building committee chairman at Christ the King Lutheran Church and Charles was always the architect, so he and I had a long and I I I think fruitful collaboration in the in the beautiful buildings that he designed that had been built at that location.

He was engaged by somebody to help plan the the Trees for Main Street and even though it had been a live oak allee, he thought that it was necessary to break that allee so that disease would be avoided that could could come through and wipe all the live oak trees out,

which he did by interspersing sections at intervals, not a bad idea of what at the moment was the tree du jour of the of the species diversification advocates in Houston, the Augustan Ascending Elm.

Well, when Market Square was renovated downtown, they, on the advice of the professionals, planted Augustan Ascending Elms instead of live oak trees, and I mean there hasn't been one of those left for now for at least twenty years.

And I just happened to observe two weeks ago the last of the Augustan Ascending Elms on Main Street being cut down because it had died, just outside the South Main Baptist Church. Meanwhile, every live oak tree we planted on that street is there.

So well talk more about that later, but I just wanted to make that little note of of anecdotal evidence about this issue, which I recognize is an issue,

but with respect to which we get more challenging questioning, I think then then the facts warrant. So we started our association, shall I carry Trees for Houston forward?

DT: Please do.

CS: Or you want to take channel me another way? (misc.)

CS: I'm sure that I there are many things I forget. I'm sure that that's good. Trees for Houston then began its activities as a group of lawyers, young, I would say, but you know, by now, were come to think of it, were about forty years old, maybe not that young,

who would have lunch once a month at Bill Coat's office and he would provide the lunch. And they were mostly people Bill knew and recruited, some of them I knew and recruited but we ended up

with, I'm going to say, ten to twelve lawyers who would meet every month and we would talk about planting street trees. And then we would then go do our projects. So for example, I'm doing Trees for Boulevard Oaks,

which is the project I really want to talk about at some point here, to talk about how a project works, as you were asking. Jim Rylander said, "I think we need to plant trees downtown,"

and so he started the project, Trees for Downtown. Jim died of cancer maybe five years ago, at an untimely early age, which is probably redundant.

Jim was a real estate partner at Vincent Elkins and he always said, "shh, don't tell them," because he said he didn't practice law for a year. He just went around raising money and he found somebody,

he found a person who had money and know-how who shared his passion for greening downtown and planting trees, Ken Lay. And he was the fund, he was in charge of fundraising and they raised like

a couple of million dollars and planted thousands of street trees, some of which, by the way, have been arrogantly cut down by developers, including a bunch just within the last six months downtown

and which, I might add, are are a aided and abetted by our mayors office, I'm told, in gaining permissions to do that. I always say if if Jim were still alive, none of those trees would be being cut down.

And that's a frustration, I I'm so I should pause and say it's very frustrating to see to see trees cut down that had been planted. In any case, Jim did the downtown project.

Bill did another project. Hugh Rice Kelly started planting trees in Southampton. I had been gone from that neighborhood for several years and others did other projects.

And so for a year or two, we planted a lot of street trees just, I think every one of us was a lawyer, as I recall, doing our little projects. And one day on the golf course, Bill said me, "Carroll," he said, "It's time we hired somebody to run this thing."

He said, "Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we had a staff person?" So a woman named Donna Chambers was hired as the first Executive Director. Trees for Houston now has its third Executive Director. He's just begun 'and its true, once we did that,

the organization started growing into a real organization and the efforts of many people were corralled and the energy increased and plantings on a wide scale begun. And in some ways, the organization had some effectivenesses before that that it didn't have after that.

It's it's all a mixed bag, but certainly its been a a a a growth project and, again, the really the first big project we did as Trees for Houston was a project that I sort of worked on, Trees for Kirby.

The idea was to connect the trees on Allen Parkway, to Kirby from Allen Parkway, which is Buffalo Bayou, to Brays Bayou near where we sit and to make that an allee of trees through River Oaks,

through the, what's now called the Upper Kirby District, through the Village and on south by the Astrodome. Kathy Whitmire was the mayor of Houston and this project captured her fancy

and only as we were preparing to give our little speeches at the ribbon cutting for the opening of the project at the River Oaks Elementary School did Steven Fox step forward, as Steven can always do, and tell us what what we should know.

And that is that Kirby Drive had originally been laid out by Will Hogg as to be as a part of this parkway and formal plantings back in the twenties, the kind of things we were emulating and attempting to revive.

But that had been intended to be the tree lined boulevard that would link Buffalo Bayou with Brays Bayou. And let me say parenthetically, Will Hogg had something called the Forum of Civics.

That's what the building at the corner of Westheimer and Kirby is. I don't think many people know what that was all about but he actually published a magazine in the twenties

and there's no good idea that that anybody has thought of, Bill Coats, Carroll Shaddock or anybody else, having to do with trees or really anything else good for the city that wasn't already proposed in Houston in the 1920's or even in the Parks Plan of 1917,

which I think Kessler Architects to whom Landscape Architects to whom you referred in St. Louis, did the first 1917 study which identified that Houston's natural resource was its bayous.

That the bayous should become, the floodplains associated with the bayous should become Houston's parklands, that parkways should be built along them and then other parkways should be built connecting them and a whole master plan laid out in 1917.

And I'll tell you, it's 2008 and people will wake up one day and say you know what we ought to do and they'll say just exactly that. It's an idea that keeps coming up. Zoning is another thing and, by the way, I spent two years of my life trying to help zone Houston.

A huge project which was unsuccessful. All of these all of these ideas, it's a thing, really, your project might try to look at further is is Will Hogg and the Forum of Civics and all the ideas of the twenties.

They if people think Houston is the Wild West, no planning, no zoning, no no one cares and so forth, in fact, it had the most visionary civic leadership in the twenties that any city could hope for.

But it that became a matter of city political conflict, even, and that vision of Houston lost. That symbolized, if you want me to tell you briefly about it, by the construction of our pr present City Hall.

That Will Hogg asked the question, well, there's a fellow named Ed McMahon on the billboard front, who was executive director of Scenic, not the Ed McMahon that people know on television, a law professor at Georgetown who was the head of Scenic America.

And he's great at coining phrases and memorable ways of saying things. In another life, he should work for an ad agency. And he talks about character of place and always says,

"You know, you could take me and blindfold me and drop me anywhere in America, and I wouldn't know whether I was in Florida, Maine, Minnesota or Georgia. Everyplace has become the Pizza Huts look the same everywhere and we need to have character of place."

Will Hogg and people in Houston in the twenties thought about that and they asked the question, what would be the ideal form of architecture for this place? Now, maybe this is a little too planned but they came up with an answer.

And that is by virtue of the climate and topography that we should emulate a Tuscan, Romanesque architectural style. And and so it was then then many projects began which attempted to do that.

I could tick off just a few, the some of which have been torn down recently and a lot of attention paid to that. But I guess the example that's probably the best one is the Julia Ideson Library you got downtown.

This, by the way, relates to the buildings at Rice for William Ward At,Watkin, in in laying out the Rice campus, he's an architect out of Boston, observed the similarity of the Houston area to to Venice and the and and Florence and that area of Italy,

so that I think Houstonians or especially people who went for Rice are forever walking around in that part of Italy and seeing the buildings after which the buildings at Rice were modeled and see the same architectural vocabulary being used.

Julia Ideson Public Library downtown, the Star Engraving Building on Allen Parkway, which was torn down to a lot of controversy. The First Evangelical Lutheran Church in midtown, Palmer Episcopal Church, Saint Matthews Lutheran Church on Main Street.

If you think about those buildings, you you you realize that they all share the same architectural style, which was this Tuscan, Romanesque style. And the masterpiece, the centerpiece of all of this was to [End of Reel 2425]