Houston

Houston, mostly in Harris County, Texas, grew as an inland alternative to Galveston, the gulf port that was devastated by a hurricane in 1900; a navigation channel that includes a turn-around space extends from Galveston Bay¹ into Houston. In the 20th century the city became the principal oil refining and petrochemical center in the United States of America. It has a metropolitan population (including Galveston) of 5.988 million² of which 2.196 million live in the city itself.³ Both cities are tourist attractions⁴ and both are important grain ports.⁵ Houston's George Bush International Airport is one the nation's busiest.⁶

The tallest building is the JPMorgan Chase Tower (1002 feet, 1982), the tallest five-sided building in the world. Other buildings include the Wells Fargo Plaza (992 feet, 1983), whose footprint forms 'an abstracted shape of a dollar sign;' the Williams Tower (901 feet, 1983) with its large sculptural fountain, the 'Waterfall;' the Bank of America Center (780 feet, 1983), which encases a pre-existing two-story building; Heritage Plaza (762 feet, 1987), whose steppe pyramid top was inspired by its architectect's vacation to the Yucatán Peninsula of México; 712 Main (once the Gulf Building, 428 feet), the city's tallest from 1929 to 1963; the Niels Esperson Building (410 feet, 1927), capped with a monument containing 'terra cotta urns, bronze elevator doors, arabesque obelisks, and extensive use of imported Roman marble;' and the Astrodome, a domed sports complex that housed refugees from New Orleans, when that city was innundated by hurricane surge. A famous monument is the equestrian statue of Sam Houston (1925).⁷

Map

Williams Tower seen through an arch of the Hines Water Park, Houston, Texas, United States of America

Footnotes

1. An extension of the Gulf of Mexico, which is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean.
2. 2012 metropolitan figure from world-gazetteer.com, accessed February 6, 2013. Another similar 2012 figure of 5.641 million is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_statistical_areas, accessed May 15, 2018.
3. 2013 figure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Texas#100_largest_cities_in_Texas_by_population, accessed May 15, 2018. Galveston has a population of 50 thousand.
4. http://www.touropia.com/best-places-to-visit-in-texas/, accessed May 15, 2018.
5. The Times Atlas of the Oceans (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983), "commodity loading ports" map.
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_in_the_United_States. First table. My criteria for inclusion did not exclude any in TX (> 10M passengers, 2017). Accessed May 15, 2018.
7. Information about buildings comes from emporis.com, accessed June 12, 2018.