Culture
According to the Neartown Association, the area's character is often likened to the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, New York City.
Adjacent to the community is the River Oaks Shopping Center, Houston's first shopping center, located in the Neartown community, east of River Oaks. Constructed in 1927 and designed by architect Hugh Prather, the center, originally known as River Oaks Community Center, was one of the nation's first automobile-oriented retail centers. Its design, with arcs of retail space on either side of West Gray Avenue, was considered a model for future development. Portions of the historic shopping center were demolished in September 2007 to redevelop the site for bookstore and a parking garage. As of 2008, Landmark Theatres operates the River Oaks Theatre, an "arthouse" theater, located in the center. The theater is the last historic movie theater in Houston that is still being used as it was originally designed.
Read more about this topic: Neartown Houston
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers—and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)