Learn local lingo with Houstorian
It’s easy to love Houston when you’re parked at a Mexican cantina, deep into chips and upscale queso, listening to the Houstorian brag on his hometown.
In real life, James Glassman is a mildmannered Houstonian who works as an architectural project manager at STG Design.
But online and on social media he is very much the Houstorian, a noisy, highprofile booster of Houston — in words and images.
“The Astrodome is Houston’s Eiffel Tower and carries inside it the soul of Houston,” Glassman proclaims in an essay on his website, houstorian.org.
And now he’s scrolling through his phone to show me the graphics that will appear in his new book, “The Houstorian Dictionary: An Insider’s Index to Houston.”
The images — simple but sly representations of the Loop, the Astrodome, the bayous and other landmarks — are blackand-white versions of the same popular designs Glassman has been selling on T-shirts for the past two years.
“I like them to be insider-y Houston references,” he says, perched at the patio bar of La Grange, a new Montrose
restaurant. “If you get it, you get it. It’s a wink. A secret handshake.”
In the new book — his first — Glassman goes well beyond winks and handshakes, indexing the city for natives and Newstonians. (You’ll find that word in the book.) Entries include:
The Lost Ward: The portion of the Third Ward cut off geographically and emotionally from the rest of the ward by the Gulf Freeway.
Orange Popsicle: Nickname for the Houston Astros baseball uniform with horizontal, midtorso orange stripes, lasting from 1975 to 1986.
Spillover: Term describing the increased local activity in the music scene during Austin music festivals, when bands may stop in Houston before or after.
Tent Tickets: Coveted entry to the Rodeo CookOff — the party inside the party. Sponsored tents provide free barbecue, booze and entertainment at the opening of the annual rodeo.
I ask Glassman a few times in a few different ways, What makes Houston Houston?
There’s a “misfit tinkerer” mystique to the place, he finally answers.
“Think of the Astrodome,” he says. “The Art Car Parade. Wes Anderson. The Orange Show. The Beer Can House ... ”
A few years ago, Glassman started cataloging all sorts of Houston stuff on his phone: people, places, things, slang, movies, books, cuisine. Once he started writing down definitions, he found that one entry unfolded, somewhat rapidly, into another. A sort of writer’s sprawl.
“I’m writing about the Menil Collection, which leads me to Dominique de Menil, which leads to Schlumberger, then to fracking, then to George Mitchell,” he explains.
Gradually, the idea for an index emerged.
“Originally, I imagined it as an app, but I didn’t want to crowdsource its funding and give away the idea,” Glassman says.
With his close-cropped hair and understated glasses, Glassman doesn’t fit any low-hanging stereotype of a Texan.
He’s a man who reveres the Oxford comma and mourns its absence — editors had the final word — from his upcoming book.
“It’s OK!” he says, waving it off, not entirely convincingly.
He’s a man who loves to create new, Houstoncentric words. Like “Houstorian.”
And he’s a man who collects Houston-specific jokes and puns. A close friend, originally from Pittsburgh, recently asked him: “Why don’t we just rename Elgin “Eastheimer?”
That one made the index.
Glassman is careful to defend — but never to be defensive about — Houston. Boosterism, he believes, doesn’t need defensiveness. Or sarcasm. Or irony.
Every day, he tweets nuggets of local history to more than 14,700 followers. “Today in 1986, actress and singer @SolangeKnowles is born in Houston,” said Wednesday’s tweet.
Occasionally, Glassman hears from the Houston royalty he tweets about. He showed me a direct message from Lyle Lovett, thanking him for a tweet about his birthday.
Glassman attended St. John’s School a year behind filmmaker Wes Anderson and two years ahead of novelist Katherine Center. He has a B.A. in history from Kenyon College and a master of architecture from the University of Houston, where he met Stephen Fox, a teacher and author of several local architecture books, and Barry Moore, a preservation and theater architect.
Fox’s “Houston Architectural Guide” was transforming for Glassman.
“It was so comprehensive,” he says. “But I’d open the book every few years and see fewer and fewer of these things around.”
A local newspaper story about the city’s disappearing blue and white curb tiles prompted Glassman to start collecting the 3/4-inch tiles — “urban artifacts, ruins” — whenever he found them crumbling or broken off of curbs. Once he had a decent-size pile, he crafted his own curb and spelled out the word “amnesia” with the blue and white tiles. This was an homage to Fox’s book, which argued that Houston suffers from amnesia with regard to its own past.
Do we not have a history because we tear everything down, Glassman remembers wondering, or do we tear everything down because we don’t have a history?
Glassman thinks the city turned a preservation corner under Mayor Bill White. In 2005, Houston City Council passed an ordinance allowing a potential landmark — a site that meets age requirements and holds historic and architectural significance — to be designated as a Protected Landmark. Once Protected Land- mark status is awarded, the property may be altered externally, moved or demolished only with the permission of city of Houston.
While this was a step in the right direction, it was hardly a safeguard against bulldozers and new development.
Glassman launched houstorian.org the next year.
“I wanted a tougher, louder, less genteel preservation group than the city had,” he says. “It was time to do something. To make people proud of this place. Knowing the history, the details, make you more of a defender of the city. If you’re reading about something that’s being torn down, it’s too late.”
There’s something sweet and messy and ironic about the fact that Glassman describes his hometown as “a city of newcomers, whether it’s one generation or 10 minutes,” even though he’s a fifth-generation Houstonian.
“We don’t care about how long you’ve been here,” he says. “We care about what you do when you get here.”